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Trolling and social bots have been proven as powerful tactics formanipulating the public opinion and sowing discord among Twitter users. Thiseffort requires substantial content fabrication and account coordination toevade Twitter's detection of nefarious platform use. In this paper we explorean alternative tactic for covert social media interference by inducingmisperceptions about genuine, non-trolling content from verified users. Thistactic uses a malware that covertly manipulates targeted words, hashtags, andTwitter metrics before the genuine content is presented to a targeted user in acovert man-in-the-middle fashion. Early tests of the malware found that it iscapable of achieving a similar goal as trolls and social bots, that is,silencing or provoking social media users to express their opinion in polarizeddebates on social media. Following this, we conducted experimental tests incontrolled settings (N=315) where the malware covertly manipulated theperception in a Twitter debate on the risk of vaccines causing autism. Theempirical results demonstrate that inducing misperception is an effectivetactic to silence users on Twitter when debating polarizing issues likevaccines. We used the findings to propose a solution for countering the effectof the malware-induced misperception that could also be used against trolls andsocial bots on Twitter.

To Tweet or Not to Tweet: Covertly Manipulating a Twitter Debate on Vaccines Using Malware-Induced Misperceptions