Building a Personalized Model for Social Media Textual Content Censorship

Abstract

Social media users often suffer from the problem of content over-disclosure. Most existing studies attempt to solve this problem by recommending proper audiences for users when sharing content. However, the audience management strategy cannot filter out sensitive information from the post and narrow the scope of content permeation. On the contrary, this paper conducts research from the content perspective and aims to design a content censorship model to help users evaluate the publicity of a post and find the sensitive information from it. The user can revise the content accordingly to achieve goals of sensitive information protection and broader content permeation. For this intention, we first built a dataset to explore the factors related to the public level of a post and the sensitive information. Based on the findings, a novel personalized multi-task content censorship model was built using several state-of-the-art deep learning techniques such as Seq2Seq and Co-training. We also implemented a prototype, i.e. a Browser plugin-based content censorship tool, by utilizing Weibo as a research site. Our model and its prototype were evaluated through automatic and human evaluations. The automatic evaluation suggests that our model outperforms the baseline methods on several metrics including precision, recall, and F1-score. The human evaluation also reveals that our model and prototype play an important role in helping users identify sensitive information. Based on these results, we proposed several insights for the future design of the social media content censorship system.