Related papers: Censorship is Futile
The many decisions people make about what to pay attention to online shape the spread of information in online social networks. Due to the constraints of available time and cognitive resources, the ease of discovery strongly impacts how…
Massive amounts of contributed content -- including traditional literature, blogs, music, videos, reviews and tweets -- are available on the Internet today, with authors numbering in many millions. Textual information, such as product or…
In this paper, we present a resource allocation mechanism for the problem of incentivizing filtering among a finite number of strategic social media platforms. We consider the presence of a strategic government and private knowledge of how…
Online discourse takes place in corporate-controlled spaces thought by users to be public realms. These platforms in name enable free speech but in practice implement varying degrees of censorship either by government edict or by uneven and…
Censorship in social media has been well studied and provides insight into how governments stifle freedom of expression online. Comparatively less (or no) attention has been paid to detecting (self) censorship in traditional media (e.g.,…
The growing trend of sharing news/contents, through social media platforms and the World Wide Web has been seen to impact our perception of the truth, altering our views about politics, economics, relationships, needs and wants. This is…
Internet censorship continues to impact billions of people worldwide, and measurement of it remains an important focus of research. However, most Internet censorship measurements have focused solely on the IPv4 Internet infrastructure. Yet,…
Online social networks are the perfect test bed to better understand large-scale human behavior in interacting contexts. Although they are broadly used and studied, little is known about how their terms of service and posting rules affect…
Search engines have become key media for our scientific, economic, and social activities by enabling people to access information on the Web in spite of its size and complexity. On the down side, search engines bias the traffic of users…
Our goal is to empirically discover how censors react to the introduction of new proxy servers that can be used to circumvent their information controls. We examine a specific case, that of obfuscated Tor bridges, and conduct experiments…
The pervasive use of social media has grown to over two billion users to date, and is commonly utilized as a means to share information and shape world events. Evidence suggests that passive social media usage (i.e., viewing without taking…
The tragedy of the digital commons does not prevent the copious voluntary production of content that one witnesses in the web. We show through an analysis of a massive data set from \texttt{YouTube} that the productivity exhibited in…
Social media have been seen to accelerate the spread of negative content such as disinformation and hate speech, often unleashing reckless herd mentality within networks, further aggravated by malicious entities using bots for…
In the new digital age, information is available in large quantities. Since information consumes primarily the attention of its recipients, the scarcity of attention is becoming the main limiting factor. In this study, we investigate the…
We argue that governments should mandate a three-tier anonymity framework on social-media platforms as a reactionary measure prompted by the ease-of-production of deepfakes and large-language-model-driven misinformation. The tiers are…
Online platforms face pressure to keep their communities civil and respectful. Thus, the bannings of problematic online communities from mainstream platforms like Reddit and Facebook are often met with enthusiastic public reactions.…
In mid-2025, Iran experienced a novel, stealthy Internet shutdown that preserved global routing presence while isolating domestic users through deep packet inspection, aggressive throttling, and selective protocol blocking. This paper…
To curb the spread of fake news on social media platforms, recent studies have considered an online crowdsourcing fact-checking approach as one possible intervention method to reduce misinformation. However, it remains unclear under what…
Previous studies have offered a variety of explanations on the relationship between democracy and the internet. However, most of these studies concentrate on regions, specific states or authoritarian regimes. No study has investigated the…
The imposition of government mandates upon Internet search engine operation is a growing area of interest for both computer science and public policy. Users of these search engines often observe evidence of censorship, but the government…