ConTheModel: Can We Modify Tweets to Confuse Classifier Models?

News on social media can significantly influence users, manipulating them for political or economic reasons. Adversarial manipulations in the text have proven to create vulnerabilities in classifiers, and the current research is towards finding classifier models that are not susceptible to such manipulations. In this paper, we present a novel technique called ConTheModel, which slightly modifies social media news to confuse machine learning (ML)-based classifiers under the black-box setting. ConTheModel replaces a word in the original tweet with its synonym or antonym to generate tweets that confuse classifiers. We evaluate our technique on three different scenarios of the dataset and perform a comparison between five well-known machine learning algorithms, which includes Support Vector Machine (SVM), Naive Bayes (NB), Random Forest (RF), eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) to demonstrate the performance of classifiers on the modifications done by ConTheModel. Our results show that the classifiers are confused after modification with the utmost drop of 16.36%. We additionally conducted a human study with 25 participants to validate the effectiveness of ConTheModel and found that the majority of participants (65%) found it challenging to classify the tweets correctly. We hope our work will help in finding robust ML models against adversarial examples.