Reinforcement-Learning Based Covert Social Influence Operations

How might reinforcement-learning based covert social influence operations (CSIOs) be run, given that the CSIO agent wants to maximize influence and minimize discoverability of malicious accounts? And how successful can they be, given that both social platform bot detectors and humans might report them to the social platform? To answer these questions, we propose RL_CSIO, a methodology based on reinforcement learning (RL) for running CSIOs. We ran 4 CSIOs with IRB-approval over a period of 5 days using a panel of 225 human subjects. We explore 8 research questions based on the data collected. The results show that RL_CSIO agents successfully trade off influence and discoverability - but in ways that are nuanced and unexpected.