A General Black-box Adversarial Attack on Graph-based Fake News Detectors

A General Black-box Adversarial Attack on Graph-based Fake News Detectors

Peican Zhu, Zechen Pan, Yang Liu, Jiwei Tian, Keke Tang, Zhen Wang

Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 568-576. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2024/63

Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based fake news detectors apply various methods to construct graphs, aiming to learn distinctive news embeddings for classification. Since the construction details are unknown for attackers in a black-box scenario, it is unrealistic to conduct the classical adversarial attacks that require a specific adjacency matrix. In this paper, we propose the first general black-box adversarial attack framework, i.e., General Attack via Fake Social Interaction (GAFSI), against detectors based on different graph structures. Specifically, as sharing is an important social interaction for GNN-based fake news detectors to construct the graph, we simulate sharing behaviors to fool the detectors. Firstly, we propose a fraudster selection module to select engaged users leveraging local and global information. In addition, a post injection module guides the selected users to create shared relations by sending posts. The sharing records will be added to the social context, leading to a general attack against different detectors. Experimental results on empirical datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of GAFSI.
Keywords:
AI Ethics, Trust, Fairness: ETF: Safety and robustness
Data Mining: DM: Mining graphs
Machine Learning: ML: Robustness
Machine Learning: ML: Sequence and graph learning