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Research seminar organized by the Birkbeck institute for Data Analytics

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Venue: Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street

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Text Watermarking in Social Media

Danilo Montesi, Bologna University

As massive digital contents are daily generated and shared online through blogs, social media and digital archives, authorship verification and copyright protection have become an imperative task.
Out of all, watermarking is the most suited method for combining information sharing and authorship preservation activities.
However, in comparison to other media watermarking techniques, text watermarking is a more challenging task.
The changes in text would strongly affect the visual form and the meaning, text might be very short (eg. social media posts), and it might not be possible to convert it into an image.
In this talk we propose a novel text watermarking method for authorship verification based on Unicode "confusable" substitution.
The proposed method substitutes latin symbols with homoglyph characters.
We conducted an extended evaluation on eighteen different Social Media platforms by using 6,000 posts from six public figures’ profiles.
Our results show how our watermark approach is robust to copy and paste and invisible to the human observer, by comparing the original texts with the watermarked texts using an image similarity metric.

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