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Since 2016, the amount of academic research with the keyword "misinformation" has more than doubled [2]. This research often focuses on article headlines shown in artificial testing environments, yet misinformation largely spreads through…
In the global move toward urbanization, making sure the people remaining in rural areas are not left behind in terms of development and policy considerations is a priority for governments worldwide. However, it is increasingly challenging…
Popular Internet services in recent years have shown that remarkable things can be achieved by harnessing the power of the masses using crowd-sourcing systems. However, crowd-sourcing systems can also pose a real challenge to existing…
When a new product enters a market already dominated by an existing product, will it survive along with this dominant product? Most of the existing works have shown the coexistence of two competing products spreading/being adopted on…
The idea of social advertising (or social promotion) is to select a group of influential individuals (a.k.a \emph{seeds}) to help promote some products or ideas through an online social networks. There are two major players in the social…
We present a model of digital advertising with three key features: (i) advertisers can reach consumers on and off a platform, (ii) additional data enhances the value of advertiser-consumer matches, and (iii) bidding follows auction-like…
To what extent are users surveilled on the web, by what technologies, and by whom? We answer these questions by combining passively observed, anonymized browsing data of a large, representative sample of Americans with domain-level data on…
Social media has brought a revolution on how people are consuming news. Beyond the undoubtedly large number of advantages brought by social-media platforms, a point of criticism has been the creation of echo chambers and filter bubbles,…
Over the past decade, advertising has emerged as the primary source of revenue for many web sites and apps. In this paper we report a first-of-its-kind study that seeks to broadly understand the features, mechanisms and dynamics of display…
Online platforms, including social media and search platforms, have routinely used their users' data for targeted ads, to improve their services, and to sell to third-party buyers. But an increasing awareness of the importance of users'…
With the rapid diffusion of social networks in combination with mobile phones, a new social threat of sextortion has emerged, in which vulnerable young women are essentially blackmailed with their explicit shared multimedia content. The…
Recently, Meta has shifted towards AI-mediated ad targeting mechanisms that do not require advertisers to provide detailed targeting criteria, likely driven by excitement over AI capabilities as well as new data privacy policies and…
Smart speakers collect voice commands, which can be used to infer sensitive information about users. Given the potential for privacy harms, there is a need for greater transparency and control over the data collected, used, and shared by…
Recommender systems are vulnerable to injective attacks, which inject limited fake users into the platforms to manipulate the exposure of target items to all users. In this work, we identify that conventional injective attackers overlook…
Regulators and browsers increasingly restrict user tracking to protect users' privacy online. In two large-scale empirical studies, we study the economic implications for publishers relying on selling advertising space to finance their…
Over the last two decades, the scale and complexity of Anonymous networks and its associated technologies grows exponentially as privacy has become a major concern of individuals. Also, some cyber attackers make use of privacy…
The amount of personal information unwillingly exposed by users on online social networks is staggering, as shown in recent research. Moreover, recent reports indicate that these networks are infested with tens of millions of fake users…
Over the past decades, superplatforms, digital companies that integrate a vast range of third-party services and applications into a single, unified ecosystem, have built their fortunes on monopolizing user attention through targeted…
AI systems have increasingly become our gateways to the Internet. We argue that just as advertising has driven the monetization of web search and social media, so too will commercial incentives shape the content served by AI. Unlike…
Cyberbullying has been a significant challenge in the digital era world, given the huge number of people, especially adolescents, who use social media platforms to communicate and share information. Some individuals exploit these platforms…