Push-Based Information Distribution System for Efficient Cyber Patrolling

Social networking services (SNSs) are major communication tools in today's society. The upside of SNSs is that people can communicate easily anytime and anywhere, whereas its downside is many harmful posts offering to illegally buy and sell bankbooks, cellular phones, etc., soliciting child prostitution, and so on. Cyber patrolling is an activity of finding harmful posts and reporting them to SNS providers or police organizations. Our university students have been participating in this activity as civilian volunteers. To make the activity more efficient, we have proposed a push-based information distribution system. This system searches for and retrieves potentially harmful posts from SNSs and then pushes the retrieved posts to volunteer members. Members can only focus on judging whether each post should be reported. The push-based approach is also effective in encouraging members to active participation. In this article, we present the system design and implementation. Three-month demonstration experiment results show the system's effectiveness by an increase in the number of reported posts.