Related papers: Quantifying Public Response towards Islam on Twitt…
We study how emojis are used to express solidarity in social media in the context of two major crisis events - a natural disaster, Hurricane Irma in 2017 and terrorist attacks that occurred on November 2015 in Paris. Using annotated…
Social media provides a critical communication platform for political figures, but also makes them easy targets for harassment. In this paper, we characterize users who adversarially interact with political figures on Twitter using…
It is a widely accepted fact that state-sponsored Twitter accounts operated during the 2016 US presidential election, spreading millions of tweets with misinformation and inflammatory political content. Whether these social media campaigns…
Between February 14, 2019 and March 4, 2019, a terrorist attack in Pulwama, Kashmir followed by retaliatory airstrikes led to rising tensions between India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed countries. In this work, we examine polarizing…
This study investigates the dynamics of extreme opinions on social media during the 2023 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, utilising a comprehensive dataset of over 450,000 posts from four Reddit subreddits (r/Palestine, r/Judaism,…
Radical right influencers routinely use social media to spread highly divisive, disruptive and anti-democratic messages. Assessing and countering the challenge that such content poses is crucial for ensuring that online spaces remain open,…
Despite the growing body of research tackling offensive language in social media, this research is predominantly reactive, determining if content already posted in social media is abusive. There is a gap in predictive approaches, which we…
With more than 500 million daily tweets from over 330 million active users, Twitter constantly attracts malicious users aiming to carry out phishing and malware-related attacks against its user base. It therefore becomes of paramount…
Breaking cybersecurity events are shared across a range of websites, including security blogs (FireEye, Kaspersky, etc.), in addition to social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. In this paper, we investigate methods to analyze…
Online government petitions represent a new data-rich mode of political participation. This work examines the thus far understudied dynamics of sharing petitions on social media in order to garner signatures and, ultimately, a government…
Social media platforms play a pivotal role in shaping public opinion and amplifying political discourse, particularly during elections. However, the same dynamics that foster democratic engagement can also exacerbate polarization. To better…
We present results of empirical studies on positive speech on Twitter. By positive speech we understand speech that works for the betterment of a given situation, in this case relations between different communities in a conflict-prone…
Identifying and characterizing disinformation in political discourse on social media is critical to ensure the integrity of elections and democratic processes around the world. Persistent manipulation of social media has resulted in…
Political polarization in online social platforms is a rapidly growing phenomenon worldwide. Despite their relevance to modern-day politics, the structure and dynamics of polarized states in digital spaces are still poorly understood. We…
Social media platforms have been exploited to conduct election interference in recent years. In particular, the Russian-backed Internet Research Agency (IRA) has been identified as a key source of misinformation spread on Twitter prior to…
Current research on users` perspectives of cyber security and privacy related to traditional and smart devices at home is very active, but the focus is often more on specific modern devices such as mobile and smart IoT devices in a home…
Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a decentralized social movement protesting violence against Black individuals and communities, with a focus on police brutality. The movement gained significant attention following the killings of Ahmaud Arbery,…
In October 2017, there happened the uprising of an unprecedented online movement on social media by women across the world who started publicly sharing their untold stories of being sexually harassed along with the hashtag #MeToo (or some…
While exposure to diverse viewpoints may reduce polarization, it can also have a backfire effect and exacerbate polarization when the discussion is adversarial. Here, we examine the question whether intergroup interactions around important…
The rapid spread of radical ideologies in recent years has led to a worldwide string of terrorist attacks. Understanding how extremist tendencies germinate, develop, and drive individuals to action is important from a cultural standpoint,…