Blurring Political Leanings of Messages on Social Networks Using Deniable Steganography

Abstract

While social network services have become popular platforms where large amounts of user-generated content are published, individuals, election campaigns, and political organizations leverage the services to publish, promote, and exchange political messages. However, sometimes, political discussions resulted in heated debates, doxing, and even cyberbullying. These conflicts may decrease the engagement of users and prevent them from publishing articles with apparent political orientation. To help users to post political opinion among the Internet freely, in this paper, we employ the concept of deniable encryption to generate neutral-like articles composed of two critics toward both sides of the discussion, while one of the critics is the actual message from the author to particular recipients. For receivers who know the credential information (e.g., key and codebook), they can communicate with each other by extracting the real information from the neutral-like articles. For people with the opposite stand, they cannot claim the message that is supporting specific political entity, as it contains disapproval to both stands; besides, they cannot prove that which part of the message is the plaintext even if they intercept the messages. We provide a generalized process of our proposal and present a practical scenario using transcripts, Facebook posts of Donald Trump, and posts of Hillary Clinton to demonstrate the usability of our scheme.