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Coordinated disinformation campaigns are used to influence social media users, potentially leading to offline violence. In this study, we introduce a general methodology to uncover coordinated messaging through analysis of user parleys on…
The U.S. Supreme Court's 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization marked a turning point in the national debate over reproductive rights. While the ideological divide over abortion is well documented, less is known about…
With the growth of online news over the past decade, empirical studies on political discourse and news consumption have focused on the phenomenon of filter bubbles and echo chambers. Yet recently, scholars have revealed limited evidence…
Suicide remains a pressing global public health concern. While social media platforms offer opportunities for early risk detection through online conversation trees, existing approaches face two major limitations: (1) They rely on…
Recent progress in genomics is bringing genetic testing to the masses. Participatory public initiatives are underway to sequence the genome of millions of volunteers, and a new market is booming with a number of companies like 23andMe and…
How do news sources tackle controversial issues? In this work, we take a data-driven approach to understand how controversy interplays with emotional expression and biased language in the news. We begin by introducing a new dataset of…
In Twitter, there is a rising trend in abusive behavior which often leads to incivility. This trend is affecting users mentally and as a result they tend to leave Twitter and other such social networking sites thus depleting the active user…
Hate content in social media is ever-increasing. While Facebook, Twitter, Google have attempted to take several steps to tackle the hateful content, they have mostly been unsuccessful. Counterspeech is seen as an effective way of tackling…
Over the past two decades, school shootings within the United States have repeatedly devastated communities and shaken public opinion. Many of these attacks appear to be `lone wolf' ones driven by specific individual motivations, and the…
Contrary to expectations that the increased connectivity offered by the internet and particularly Online Social Networks (OSNs) would result in broad consensus on contentious issues, we instead frequently observe the formation of polarised…
There appears to be a dilemma between the freedom of expression and protection from the adverse effects of uncivil political expression online. While previous studies have revealed various factors that affect attitudes toward freedom of…
Harmful content detection models tend to have higher false positive rates for content from marginalized groups. In the context of marginal abuse modeling on Twitter, such disproportionate penalization poses the risk of reduced visibility,…
The rise of social media has been argued to intensify uncivil and hostile online political discourse. Yet, to date, there is a lack of clarity on what incivility means in the political sphere. In this work, we utilize a multidimensional…
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…
Understanding how people argue across ideological divides online is important for studying political polarization, misinformation, and content moderation. Existing datasets capture only part of this problem: some preserve text but ignore…
The spread of COVID-19 has sparked racism and hate on social media targeted towards Asian communities. However, little is known about how racial hate spreads during a pandemic and the role of counterspeech in mitigating this spread. In this…
In addition to posting news and status updates, many Twitter users post questions that seek various types of subjective and objective information. These questions are often labeled with "Q&A" hashtags, such as #lazyweb or #twoogle. We…
We study malicious online content via a specific type of hate speech: race, ethnicity and national-origin based discrimination in social media, alongside hate crimes motivated by those characteristics, in 100 cities across the United…
Anti-social behaviors in social media can happen both at user and community levels. While a great deal of attention is on the individual as an 'aggressor,' the banning of entire Reddit subcommunities (i.e., subreddits) demonstrates that…
The acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk has spurred controversy and uncertainty among Twitter users. The move raised as many praises as concerns, particularly regarding Musk's views on free speech. As a result, a large number of Twitter…