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Algorithms are widely applied to detect hate speech and abusive language in social media. We investigated whether the human-annotated data used to train these algorithms are biased. We utilized a publicly available annotated Twitter dataset…

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,…

Social media has emerged to be a popular platform for people to express their viewpoints on political protests like the Arab Spring. Millions of people use social media to communicate and mobilize their viewpoints on protests. Hence, it is…

The phenomenal growth on the internet has helped in empowering individual's expressions, but the misuse of freedom of expression has also led to the increase of various cyber crimes and anti-social activities. Hate speech is one such issue…

Social media platforms such as Twitter (now known as X) have revolutionized how the public engage with important societal and political topics. Recently, climate change discussions on social media became a catalyst for political…

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…

Othering, the act of portraying outgroups as fundamentally different from the ingroup, often escalates into framing them as existential threats--fueling intergroup conflict and justifying exclusion and violence. These dynamics are…

We develop a novel visual model which can recognize protesters, describe their activities by visual attributes and estimate the level of perceived violence in an image. Studies of social media and protests use natural language processing to…

Twitter uses machine learning to crop images, where crops are centered around the part predicted to be the most salient. In fall 2020, Twitter users raised concerns that the automated image cropping system on Twitter favored light-skinned…

The rise of misinformation and fake news in online political discourse poses significant challenges to democratic processes and public engagement. While debunking efforts aim to counteract misinformation and foster fact-based dialogue,…

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of public policy measures have been developed to curb the spread of the virus. However, little is known about the attitudes towards stay-at-home orders expressed on social media despite the…

In recent years, offensive, abusive and hateful language, sexism, racism and other types of aggressive and cyberbullying behavior have been manifesting with increased frequency, and in many online social media platforms. In fact, past…

During broadcast events such as the Superbowl, the U.S. Presidential and Primary debates, etc., Twitter has become the de facto platform for crowds to share perspectives and commentaries about them. Given an event and an associated…

Online social media platforms have made the world more connected than ever before, thereby making it easier for everyone to spread their content across a wide variety of audiences. Twitter is one such popular platform where people publish…

"Media events" such as political debates generate conditions of shared attention as many users simultaneously tune in with the dual screens of broadcast and social media to view and participate. Are collective patterns of user behavior…

Hate speech has grown significantly on social media, causing serious consequences for victims of all demographics. Despite much attention being paid to characterize and detect discriminatory speech, most work has focused on explicit or…

Technologies for abusive language detection are being developed and applied with little consideration of their potential biases. We examine racial bias in five different sets of Twitter data annotated for hate speech and abusive language.…

We believe that "all men are created equal". With the rise of the police shootings reported by media, more people in the U.S. think that police use excessive force during law enforcement, especially to a specific group of people. We want to…

Social media is widely used to share information globally and it also aids to gain attention from the world. When socially sensitive incidents like rape, human rights march, corruption, political controversy, chemical attacks occur, they…

Social media platforms have a vital role in the modern world, serving as conduits for communication, the exchange of ideas, and the establishment of networks. However, the misuse of these platforms through toxic comments, which can range…