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All societies have been much more bipolar over the past few years, particularly after the emergence of online social networks and media. In fact, the gap between the two ends of social spectrum is going to be even deeper after the spread of…
With the rise of social media, people can now form relationships and communities easily regardless of location, race, ethnicity, or gender. However, the power of social media simultaneously enables harmful online behavior such as harassment…
Humanity for centuries has perfected skills of interpersonal interactions and evolved patterns that enable people to detect lies and deceiving behavior of others in face-to-face settings. Unprecedented growth of people's access to mobile…
Recent research brought awareness of the issue of bots on social media and the significant risks of mass manipulation of public opinion in the context of political discussion. In this work, we leverage Twitter to study the discourse during…
Recently, the emergence of the #MeToo trend on social media has empowered thousands of people to share their own sexual harassment experiences. This viral trend, in conjunction with the massive personal information and content available on…
Multiple studies have demonstrated that behavior on internet-based social media platforms can be indicative of an individual's mental health status. The widespread availability of such data has spurred interest in mental health research…
Polarized topics often spark discussion and debate on social media. Recent studies have shown that polarized debates have a specific clustered structure in the endorsement net- work, which indicates that users direct their endorsements…
The prevalence of online hate and abuse is a pressing global concern. While tackling such societal harms is a priority for research across the social sciences, it is a difficult task, in part because of the magnitude of the problem. User…
Democrats and Republicans have seemed to grow apart in the past three decades. Since the United States as we know it today is undeniably bipartisan, this phenomenon would not appear as a surprise to most. However, there are triggers which…
Social media platforms provide users the freedom of expression and a medium to exchange information and express diverse opinions. Unfortunately, this has also resulted in the growth of abusive content with the purpose of discriminating…
Recent studies suggest social media activity can function as a proxy for measures of state-level public health, detectable through natural language processing. We present results of our efforts to apply this approach to estimate…
Metaphor, discussing one concept in terms of another, is abundant in politics and can shape how people understand important issues. We develop a computational approach to measure metaphorical language, focusing on immigration discourse on…
Hate speech and misinformation, spread over social networking services (SNS) such as Facebook and Twitter, have inflamed ethnic and political violence in countries across the globe. We argue that there is limited research on this problem…
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…
Framing has significant but subtle effects on public opinion and policy. We propose an NLP framework to measure entity-centric frames. We use it to understand media coverage on police violence in the United States in a new Police Violence…
With the high prevalence of offensive language against minorities in social media, counter-hate speeches (CHS) generation is considered an automatic way of tackling this challenge. The CHS is supposed to appear as a third voice to educate…
On June 24, 2022, the United States Supreme Court overturned landmark rulings made in its 1973 verdict in Roe v. Wade. The justices by way of a majority vote in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, decided that abortion wasn't a…
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains one of the most polarizing geopolitical issues, with the October 2023 escalation intensifying online debate. Social media platforms, particularly Telegram, have become central to real-time news…
This thesis develops a continuous scale measurement of similarity to disinformation narratives that can serve to detect disinformation and capture the nuanced, partial truths that are characteristic of it. To do so, two tools are developed…
Racism and intolerance on social media contribute to a toxic online environment which may spill offline to foster hatred, and eventually lead to physical violence. That is the case with online antisemitism, the specific category of hatred…