Related papers: BotOrNot: A System to Evaluate Social Bots
The diffusion of opinions in Social Networks is a relevant process for adopting positions and attracting potential voters in political campaigns. Opinion polarization, bias, targeted diffusion, and the radicalization of postures are key…
The impact of online social media on societal events and institutions is profound; and with the rapid increases in user uptake, we are just starting to understand its ramifications. Social scientists and practitioners who model online…
Chatbots, the common moniker for collaborative assistants, are Artificial Intelligence (AI) software that enables people to naturally interact with them to get tasks done. Although chatbots have been studied since the dawn of AI, they have…
Including diverse voices in political decision-making strengthens our democratic institutions. Within the Canadian political system, there is gender inequality across all levels of elected government. Online abuse, such as hateful tweets,…
Research on social bots aims at advancing knowledge and providing solutions to one of the most debated forms of online manipulation. Yet, social bot research is plagued by widespread biases, hyped results, and misconceptions that set the…
Malicious actors create inauthentic social media accounts controlled in part by algorithms, known as social bots, to disseminate misinformation and agitate online discussion. While researchers have developed sophisticated methods to detect…
Misbehavior in online social networks (OSN) is an ever-growing phenomenon. The research to date tends to focus on the deployment of machine learning to identify and classify types of misbehavior such as bullying, aggression, and racism to…
From fake social media accounts and generative artificial intelligence chatbots to trading algorithms and self-driving vehicles, robots, bots and algorithms are proliferating and permeating our communication channels, social interactions,…
Russian Internet Trolls use fake personas to spread disinformation through multiple social media streams. Given the increased frequency of this threat across social media platforms, understanding those operations is paramount in combating…
Sybil accounts are fake identities created to unfairly increase the power or resources of a single malicious user. Researchers have long known about the existence of Sybil accounts in online communities such as file-sharing systems, but…
This paper reviews the Sybil attack in social networks, which has the potential to compromise the whole distributed network. In the Sybil attack, the malicious user claims multiple identities to compromise the network. Sybil attacks can be…
Social media platforms are a key ground of information consumption and dissemination. Key figures like politicians, celebrities and activists have leveraged on its wide user base for strategic communication. Strategic communications, or…
The boom of online social media and microblogging platforms has rapidly alter the way we consume news and exchange opinions. Even though considerable efforts try to recommend various contents to users, loss of information diversity and the…
As of today, abuse is a pressing issue to participants and administrators of Online Social Networks (OSN). Abuse in Twitter can spawn from arguments generated for influencing outcomes of a political election, the use of bots to…
Social networking and micro-blogging services, such as Twitter, play an important role in sharing digital information. Despite the popularity and usefulness of social media, there have been many instances where corrupted users found ways to…
The issue of quantifying and characterizing various forms of social media manipulation and abuse has been at the forefront of the computational social science research community for over a decade. In this paper, I provide a…
Social media platforms offer unprecedented opportunities for connectivity and exchange of ideas; however, they also serve as fertile grounds for the dissemination of disinformation. Over the years, there has been a rise in state-sponsored…
In an era where social media platforms are central to political communication, the activity of bots raises pressing concerns about amplification, manipulation, and misinformation. Drawing on more than 315 million tweets posted from August…
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…
Bots have been in the spotlight for many social media studies, for they have been observed to be participating in the manipulation of information and opinions on social media. These studies analyzed the activity and influence of bots in a…