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Social media has played an important role in shaping political discourse over the last decade. At the same time, it is often perceived to have increased political polarization, thanks to the scale of discussions and their public nature. In…
The rate of terror attacks has surged over the past decade, resulting in the tragic and senseless loss or alteration of numerous lives. Offenders behind mass shootings, bombings, or other domestic terrorism incidents have historically…
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…
Understanding the dynamics of language toxicity on social media is important for us to investigate the propagation of misinformation and the development of echo chambers for political scenarios such as U.S. presidential elections. Recent…
The pervasiveness of mobile devices, which is increasing daily, is generating a vast amount of geo-located data allowing us to gain further insights into human behaviors. In particular, this new technology enables users to communicate…
In recent years, social media has been criticized for yielding polarization. Identifying emerging disagreements and growing polarization is important for journalists to create alerts and provide more balanced coverage. While recent studies…
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…
Social media such as tweets are emerging as platforms contributing to situational awareness during disasters. Information shared on Twitter by both affected population (e.g., requesting assistance, warning) and those outside the impact zone…
The rise in popularity of Twitter has led to a debate on its impact on public opinions. The optimists foresee an increase in online participation and democratization due to social media's personal and interactive nature. Cyber-pessimists,…
Adversarial interactions against politicians on social media such as Twitter have significant impact on society. In particular they disrupt substantive political discussions online, and may discourage people from seeking public office. In…
I present a unified discussion of several recently published results concerning the escalation, timing and severity of violent events in human conflicts and global terrorism, and set them in the wider context of real-world and cyber-based…
The damaging effects of hate speech on social media are evident during the last few years, and several organizations, researchers and social media platforms tried to harness them in various ways. Despite these efforts, social media users…
Toxic sentiment analysis on Twitter (X) often focuses on specific topics and events such as politics and elections. Datasets of toxic users in such research are typically gathered through lexicon-based techniques, providing only a…
On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. In the days that followed, reports kept flooding in from layman to news anchors of a conflict quickly escalating into war. Russia faced immediate backlash and condemnation from the world at…
Twitter is one of the most popular online micro-blogging and social networking platforms. This platform allows individuals to freely express opinions and interact with others regardless of geographic barriers. However, with the good that…
We have developed a system that automatically detects online jihadist hate speech with over 80% accuracy, by using techniques from Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. The system is trained on a corpus of 45,000 subversive…
Concerns have reached the mainstream about how social media are affecting political outcomes. One trajectory for this is the exposure of politicians to online abuse. In this paper we use 1.4 million tweets from the months before the 2015…
As of 2018, YouTube, the major online video sharing website, hosts multiple channels promoting right-wing content. In this paper, we observe issues related to hate, violence and discriminatory bias in a dataset containing more than 7,000…
Terror attacks have been linked in part to online extremist content. Although tens of thousands of Islamist extremism supporters consume such content, they are a small fraction relative to peaceful Muslims. The efforts to contain the…
Social media provide a fertile ground where conspiracy theories and radical ideas can flourish, reach broad audiences, and sometimes lead to hate or violence beyond the online world itself. QAnon represents a notable example of a political…