Related papers: Censorship is Futile
This paper explains why, despite a marked increase in available political information on cable television and the Internet, citizens' levels of political knowledge have, at best, remained stagnant (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996). Since the…
The dominant understanding of Internet censorship posits that blocking access to foreign-based websites creates isolated communities of Internet users. We question this discourse for its assumption that if given access people would use all…
Fake news is today a major threat to free and democratic making of public opinion. To curb their spread, all efforts by institutions and policy makers rely mainly on imposing restriction, prohibition and fact checking sites, which end up to…
Political expression through social media has already taken root as a form of political participation. Meanwhile, democracy seems to be facing an epidemic of incivility on social media platforms. With this background, online political…
The treatment of Internet traffic is increasingly affected by national policies that require the ISPs in a country to adopt common protocols or practices. Examples include government enforced censorship, wiretapping, and protocol deployment…
Social media platforms have evolved rapidly in modernity without strong regulation. One clear obstacle faced by current users is that of toxicity. Toxicity on social media manifests through a number of forms, including harassment,…
"Fake news" is a recent phenomenon, but misinformation and propaganda are not. Our new communication technologies make it easy for us to be exposed to high volumes of true, false, irrelevant, and unprovable information. Future AI is…
Social media is an area where users often experience censorship through a variety of means such as the restriction of search terms or active and retroactive deletion of messages. In this paper we examine the feasibility of automatically…
In the context of Turkey's upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections ("se\c{c}im" in Turkish), social media is playing an important role in shaping public debate. The increasing engagement of citizens on social media platforms has…
Our study investigates the interplay between young women's empowerment and Pakistan's economic growth, focusing on how social media use enhances their businesses and drives economic advancement. We utilize a mixed-methods research design,…
Websites employ third-party ads and tracking services leveraging cookies and JavaScript code, to deliver ads and track users' behavior, causing privacy concerns. To limit online tracking and block advertisements, several ad-blocking (black)…
YouTube plays an ever more important role as a political medium. Yet, the implications are to-date not well understood and difficult to analyse, since access to YouTube's statistics is limited. To address this gap, we surveyed 124 people…
False information can be created and spread easily through the web and social media platforms, resulting in widespread real-world impact. Characterizing how false information proliferates on social platforms and why it succeeds in deceiving…
The computer science research community has became increasingly interested in the study of social media due to their pervasiveness in the everyday life of millions of individuals. Methodological questions and technical challenges abound as…
As the rate of content production grows, we must make a staggering number of daily decisions about what information is worth acting on. For any flourishing online social media system, users can barely keep up with the new content shared by…
Social media has brought a revolution on how people are consuming news. Beyond the undoubtedly large number of advantages brought by social-media platforms, a point of criticism has been the creation of echo chambers and filter bubbles,…
The proliferation of harmful content shared online poses a threat to online information integrity and the integrity of discussion across platforms. Despite various moderation interventions adopted by social media platforms, researchers and…
Online social media represent an oftentimes unique source of information, and having access to reliable and unbiased content is crucial, especially during crises and contentious events. We study the spread of propaganda and misinformation…
Social media platforms have become key tools for coordinated influence operations, enabling state actors to manipulate public opinion through strategic, collective actions. While previous research has suggested collaboration between states,…
We study the outcomes of information aggregation in online social networks. Our main result is that networks with certain realistic structural properties avoid information cascades and enable a population to effectively aggregate…