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So-called 'social bots' have garnered a lot of attention lately. Previous research showed that they attempted to influence political events such as the Brexit referendum and the US presidential elections. It remains, however, somewhat…
While social networks can provide an ideal platform for up-to-date information from individuals across the world, it has also proved to be a place where rumours fester and accidental or deliberate misinformation often emerges. In this…
We address a challenging problem of identifying main sources of hate speech on Twitter. On one hand, we carefully annotate a large set of tweets for hate speech, and deploy advanced deep learning to produce high quality hate speech…
Computational propaganda deploys social or political bots to try to shape, steer and manipulate online public discussions and influence decisions. Collective behaviour of populations of social bots has not been yet widely studied, though…
Recent advancements in generative artificial intelligence (AI) have raised concerns about their potential to create convincing fake social media accounts, but empirical evidence is lacking. In this paper, we present a systematic analysis of…
Social engineering through social media channels targeting organizational employees is emerging as one of the most challenging information security threats. Social engineering defies traditional security efforts due to the method of attack…
Inspired by the simple, yet effective, method of tweeting gibberish to attract automated social agents (bots), we attempt to create localised honeypots in the South African political context. We produce a series of defined techniques and…
The communication revolution has perpetually reshaped the means through which people send and receive information. Social media is an important pillar of this revolution and has brought profound changes to various aspects of our lives.…
Online social media is integral to human life, facilitating messaging, information sharing, and confidential communication while preserving privacy. Platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook exemplify this phenomenon. However, users…
Crisis situations are characterised by their sudden occurrence and an unclear information situation. In that context, social media platforms have become a highly utilised resource for collective information gathering to fill these gaps.…
This paper investigates the interplay between different types of user interactions on Twitter, with respect to predicting missing or unseen interactions. For example, given a set of retweet interactions between Twitter users, how accurately…
Social networks offer a ready channel for fake and misleading news to spread and exert influence. This paper examines the performance of different reputation algorithms when applied to a large and statistically significant portion of the…
Influential users have great potential for accelerating information dissemination and acquisition on Twitter. How to measure the influence of Twitter users has attracted significant academic and industrial attention. Existing influential…
Twitter is a popular microblogging platform. When users send out messages, other users have the ability to forward these messages to their own subgraph. Most research focuses on increasing retweetability from a node's perspective. Here, we…
We report the first, to the best of our knowledge, hand-in-hand collaboration between human rights activists and machine learners, leveraging crowd-sourcing to study online abuse against women on Twitter. On a technical front, we carefully…
Until recently, social media were seen to promote democratic discourse on social and political issues. However, this powerful communication ecosystem has come under scrutiny for allowing hostile actors to exploit online discussions in an…
We present an intelligent, crowd-powered information collection system that automatically identifies and asks target-ed strangers on Twitter for desired information (e.g., cur-rent wait time at a nightclub). Our work includes three parts.…
Complex networks underlie an enormous variety of social, biological, physical, and virtual systems. A profound complication for the science of complex networks is that in most cases, observing all nodes and all network interactions is…
Social media platforms contain a great wealth of information which provides opportunities for us to explore hidden patterns or unknown correlations, and understand people's satisfaction with what they are discussing. As one showcase, in…
Twitter has become one of the main sources of news for many people. As real-world events and emergencies unfold, Twitter is abuzz with hundreds of thousands of stories about the events. Some of these stories are harmless, while others could…