Information Influence on the Virtual Community: Implementation Features and Method of Detection in Social Internet Services

The article examines the concept of the convergence of the physical and digital worlds, which leads to the formation of virtual social communities. This convergence contributes to the stratification of society according to various characteristics and influences the formation of public opinion. The role of influencers in virtual communities and their transformation into agents of information influence is studied. Analysis of the current state of the problem includes consideration of the relevance of identifying destructive informational influences in virtual communities, including the use of bot technologies. Particular attention is paid to the specifics of the destructive influence on the YouTube media platform and the shortcomings in the regulation of content and users of this platform. The article proposes a method of detecting informational artificial influence on the virtual community in a social Internet service based on the detection of abnormal patterns of user behavior. The article contains the results of an experiment, the results of which prove the effectiveness of the proposed method.