Related papers: Finding Online Extremists in Social Networks

Increasing evidence suggests that a growing amount of social media content is generated by autonomous entities known as social bots. In this work we present a framework to detect such entities on Twitter. We leverage more than a thousand…

User-generated content online is shaped by many factors, including endogenous elements such as platform affordances and norms, as well as exogenous elements, in particular significant events. These impact what users say, how they say it,…

We live in a virtual world where actual lifestyles are replicated. The growing reliance on the use of social media networks worldwide has resulted in great concern for information security. One of the factors popularizing the social media…

Social networks are quickly becoming the primary medium for discussing what is happening around real-world events. The information that is generated on social platforms like Twitter can produce rich data streams for immediate insights into…

Cyberbullying is a growing problem affecting more than half of all American teens. The main goal of this paper is to investigate fundamentally new approaches to understand and automatically detect and predict incidents of cyberbullying in…

Once an email problem, spam has nowadays branched into new territories with disruptive effects. In particular, spam has established itself over the recent years as a ubiquitous, annoying, and sometimes threatening aspect of online social…

Abuse on the Internet is an important societal problem of our time. Millions of Internet users face harassment, racism, personal attacks, and other types of abuse across various platforms. The psychological effects of abuse on individuals…

The structure and the properties of complex networks essentially depend on the way how nodes get connected to each other. We assume here that each node has a feature which attracts the others. We model the situation by assigning two numbers…

Offensive or antagonistic language targeted at individuals and social groups based on their personal characteristics (also known as cyber hate speech or cyberhate) has been frequently posted and widely circulated viathe World Wide Web. This…

The serious privacy and security problems related to online social networks (OSNs) are what fueled two complementary studies as part of this thesis. In the first study, we developed a general algorithm for the mining of data of targeted…

Hate and extremism cannot be controlled globally without understanding how they operate at scale. Both have escalated dramatically during the Israel-Hamas and Ukraine-Russia wars. Here we show how the online hate-extremism system is now…

The United States have some of the highest rates of gun violence among developed countries. Yet, there is a disagreement about the extent to which firearms should be regulated. In this study, we employ social media signals to examine the…

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…

Data extracted from social networks like Twitter are increasingly being used to build applications and services that mine and summarize public reactions to events, such as traffic monitoring platforms, identification of epidemic outbreaks,…

Social networks have the surprising property of being "searchable": Ordinary people are capable of directing messages through their network of acquaintances to reach a specific but distant target person in only a few steps. We present a…

Online social networks provide a platform for sharing information and free expression. However, these networks are also used for malicious purposes, such as distributing misinformation and hate speech, selling illegal drugs, and…

Hate speech is ubiquitous on the Web. Recently, the offline causes that contribute to online hate speech have received increasing attention. A recurring question is whether the occurrence of extreme events offline systematically triggers…

This paper addresses the important problem of discerning hateful content in social media. We propose a detection scheme that is an ensemble of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) classifiers, and it incorporates various features associated with…

Social engineering through social media channels targeting organizational employees is emerging as one of the most challenging information security threats. Social engineering defies traditional security efforts due to the method of attack…

Social-media platforms have created new ways for citizens to stay informed and participate in public debates. However, to enable a healthy environment for information sharing, social deliberation, and opinion formation, citizens need to be…