Related papers: A case study of conspiracy theories about Charlie …
We study the response to the Charlie Hebdo shootings of January 7, 2015 on Twitter across the globe. We ask whether the stances on the issue of freedom of speech can be modeled using established sociological theories, including Huntington's…
The Paris terrorist attacks occurred on November 13, 2015 prompted a massive response on social media including Twitter, with millions of posted tweets in the first few hours after the attacks. Most of the tweets were condemning the attacks…
The Web has become the main source for news acquisition. At the same time, news discussion has become more social: users can post comments on news articles or discuss news articles on other platforms like Reddit. These features empower and…
The recent astonishing wide adhesion of french people to the rumor claiming `No plane did crash on the Pentagon on September the 11", is given a generic explanation in terms of a model of minority opinion spreading. Using a majority rule…
This paper investigates bias in coverage between Western and Arab media on Twitter after the November 2015 Beirut and Paris terror attacks. Using two Twitter datasets covering each attack, we investigate how Western and Arab media differed…
Terrorist attacks not only harm citizens but also shift their attention, which has long-lasting impacts on public opinion and government policies. Yet measuring the changes in public attention beyond media coverage has been methodologically…
Despite the enthusiastic rhetoric about the so called \emph{collective intelligence}, conspiracy theories -- e.g. global warming induced by chemtrails or the link between vaccines and autism -- find on the Web a natural medium for their…
Do we live in a "Golden Age of Conspiracy Theories?" In the last few decades, conspiracy theories have proliferated on the Internet with some having dangerous real-world consequences. A large contingent of those who participated in the…
Citation cascades in blog networks are often considered as traces of information spreading on this social medium. In this work, we question this point of view using both a structural and semantic analysis of five months activity of the most…
With public information becoming widely accessible and shared on today's web, greater insights are possible into crowd actions by citizens and non-state actors such as large protests and cyber activism. We present efforts to predict the…
Is demand for conspiracy theories online linked to real-world hate crimes? By analyzing online search trends for 36 racially and politically-charged conspiracy theories in Michigan (2015-2019), we employ a one-dimensional convolutional…
Online Social Networks explode with activity whenever a crisis event takes place. Most content generated as part of this activity is a mixture of text and images, and is particularly useful for first responders to identify popular topics of…
This thesis addresses two paradoxes: (1) why empirical studies find that fake news represent only a small share of the information consulted and shared on social media despite the absence of editorial control or journalistic norms, and (2)…
In today's digital landscape, the proliferation of conspiracy theories within the disinformation ecosystem of online platforms represents a growing concern. This paper delves into the complexities of this phenomenon. We conducted a…
The aftermath of the 2020 US Presidential Election witnessed an unprecedented attack on the democratic values of the country through the violent insurrection at Capitol Hill on January 6th, 2021. The attack was fueled by the proliferation…
On July 13, 2024, at the Trump rally in Pennsylvania, someone attempted to assassinate Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump. This attempt sparked a large-scale discussion on social media. We collected posts from X (formerly known…
This study provides a large-scale mapping of the French media space using digital methods to estimate political polarization and to study information circuits. We collect data about the production and circulation of online news stories in…
The Paris attacks prompted a massive response on social media including Twitter. This paper explores the immediate response of English speakers on Twitter towards Middle Eastern refugees in Europe. We show that antagonism towards refugees…
The large availability of user provided contents on online social media facilitates people aggregation around common interests, worldviews and narratives. However, in spite of the enthusiastic rhetoric about the so called {\em wisdom of…
Recently a simple military exercise on the Internet was perceived as the beginning of a new civil war in the US. Social media aggregate people around common interests eliciting a collective framing of narratives and worldviews. However, the…