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Misbehavior and Account Suspension in an Online Financial Communication Platform

Authors:

Alejandro Cuevas,

Thomas Magelinski,

Nicolas ChristinAuthors Info & Claims

WWW '23: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023

Pages 2686 - 2697

https://doi.org/10.1145/3543507.3583385

Published: 30 April 2023 Publication History

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Abstract

The expanding accessibility and appeal of investing have attracted millions of new retail investors. As such, investment discussion boards became the de facto communities where traders create, disseminate, and discuss investing ideas. These communities, which can provide useful information to support investors, have anecdotally also attracted a wide range of misbehavior – toxicity, spam/fraud, and reputation manipulation. This paper is the first comprehensive analysis of online misbehavior in the context of investment communities. We study TradingView, the largest online communication platform for financial trading. We collect 2.76M user profiles with their corresponding social graphs, 4.2M historical article posts, and 5.3M comments, including information on nearly 4 000 suspended accounts and 17 000 removed comments. Price fluctuations seem to drive abuse across the platform and certain types of assets, such as “meme” stocks, attract disproportionate misbehavior. Suspended user accounts tend to form more closely-knit communities than those formed by non-suspended accounts; and paying accounts are less likely to be suspended than free accounts even when posting similar levels of content violating platform policies. We conclude by offering guidelines on how to adapt content moderation efforts to fit the particularities of online investment communities.

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Cited By

Bouma-Sims EHassan HNisenoff ACranor LChristin NKelley PKapadia A(2024)"It was honestly just gambling"Proceedings of the Twentieth USENIX Conference on Usable Privacy and Security10.5555/3696899.3696917(333-352)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3696899.3696917
Tsuchiya TCuevas AChristin NChua TNgo CKa-Wei Lee RKumar RLauw H(2024)Identifying Risky Vendors in Cryptocurrency P2P MarketplacesProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3645475(99-110)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3589334.3645475
Klein MMajdoubi N(2024)The medium is the message: toxicity declines in structured vs unstructured online deliberationsWorld Wide Web10.1007/s11280-024-01269-027:3Online publication date: 8-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11280-024-01269-0

Index Terms

Misbehavior and Account Suspension in an Online Financial Communication Platform
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
    1. Measurement
2. Security and privacy
  1. Human and societal aspects of security and privacy
    1. Social aspects of security and privacy

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

WWW '23: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023

April 2023

4293 pages

ISBN:9781450394161

DOI:10.1145/3543507

Copyright © 2023 Owner/Author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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SIGWEB: ACM Special Interest Group on Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Web

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Published: 30 April 2023

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WWW '23: The ACM Web Conference 2023

April 30 - May 4, 2023

TX, Austin, USA

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Cited By

Bouma-Sims EHassan HNisenoff ACranor LChristin NKelley PKapadia A(2024)"It was honestly just gambling"Proceedings of the Twentieth USENIX Conference on Usable Privacy and Security10.5555/3696899.3696917(333-352)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3696899.3696917
Tsuchiya TCuevas AChristin NChua TNgo CKa-Wei Lee RKumar RLauw H(2024)Identifying Risky Vendors in Cryptocurrency P2P MarketplacesProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3645475(99-110)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3589334.3645475
Klein MMajdoubi N(2024)The medium is the message: toxicity declines in structured vs unstructured online deliberationsWorld Wide Web10.1007/s11280-024-01269-027:3Online publication date: 8-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11280-024-01269-0

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