Related papers: Censorship is Futile
Unlike the more observable phenomenon of group opinion reinforcement, self-censorship online has received comparatively less attention. Our goal in this work is to dissect the phenomena of self-censorship and to examine the implications of…
Information passing through internet is generally unrestricted and uncontrollable and a good web content filter acts very much like a sieve. This paper looks at how citizens internet viewing can be controlled using content filters to…
Social media are massive marketplaces where ideas and news compete for our attention. Previous studies have shown that quality is not a necessary condition for online virality and that knowledge about peer choices can distort the…
Social media influence online activity by recommending to users content strongly correlated with what they have preferred in the past. In this way they constrain users within filter bubbles that strongly limit their exposure to new or…
Quantifying how individuals react to social influence is crucial for tackling collective political behavior online. While many studies of opinion in public forums focus on social feedback, they often overlook the potential for human…
Social media platforms like Facebook and Reddit host thousands of user-governed online communities. These platforms sanction communities that frequently violate platform policies; however, public perceptions of such sanctions remain…
Many governments impose traditional censorship methods on social media platforms. Instead of removing it completely, many social media companies, including Twitter, only withhold the content from the requesting country. This makes such…
Internet censorship limits the access of nodes residing within a specific network environment to the public Internet, and vice versa. During the last decade, techniques for conducting Internet censorship have been developed further.…
Australia's social media ban is now in force. It requires platforms to take reasonable steps to stop users under 16 from holding accounts. Drawing on five focus groups with fifteen young people aged 12--16, this paper examines how children…
The emergence of social media has largely eased the way people receive information and participate in public discussions. However, in countries with strict regulations on discussions in the public space, social media is no exception. To…
From a liberal perspective, pluralism and viewpoint diversity are seen as a necessary condition for a well-functioning democracy. Recently, there have been claims that viewpoint diversity is diminishing in online social networks, putting…
TikTok has seen exponential growth as a platform, fuelled by the success of its proprietary recommender algorithm which serves tailored content to every user - though not without controversy. Users complain of their content being unfairly…
The ever-increasing amount of information flowing through Social Media forces the members of these networks to compete for attention and influence by relying on other people to spread their message. A large study of information propagation…
A new era of Information Warfare has arrived. Various actors, including state-sponsored ones, are weaponizing information on Online Social Networks to run false information campaigns with targeted manipulation of public opinion on specific…
The original design of the Internet was a resilient, distributed system, that maybe able to route around (and therefore recover from) massive disruption --- up to and including nuclear war. However, network routing effects and business…
Misinformation poses a growing global threat to institutional trust, democratic stability, and public decision-making. While prior research has often portrayed social media as a channel for spreading falsehoods, less is known about the…
With the evolution of the online advertisement and tracking ecosystem, content-filtering has become the reference tool for improving the security, privacy and browsing experience when surfing the Internet. It is also commonly believed that…
Social media has a misinformation problem, and counterspeech -- fighting bad speech with more speech -- has been an ineffective solution. Here, we argue that bridging-based ranking -- an algorithmic approach to promoting content favored by…
Internet censorship is typically enforced by authorities to achieve information control for a certain group of Internet users. So far existing censorship studies have primarily focused on country-level characterization because (1) in many…
Social media have quickly become a prevalent channel to access information, spread ideas, and influence opinions. However, it has been suggested that social and algorithmic filtering may cause exposure to less diverse points of view, and…