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Online Social Networks represent a novel opportunity for political campaigns, revolutionising the paradigm of political communication. Nevertheless, many studies uncovered the presence of d/misinformation campaigns or of malicious…
Social media platforms continue to struggle with the growing presence of social bots-automated accounts that can influence public opinion and facilitate the spread of disinformation. Over time, these social bots have advanced significantly,…
Recent advances in the field of generative artificial intelligence (AI) have blurred the lines between authentic and machine-generated content, making it almost impossible for humans to distinguish between such media. One notable…
We study the problem of identifying botnets and the IP addresses which they comprise, based on the observation of a fraction of the global email spam traffic. Observed mailing campaigns constitute evidence for joint botnet membership, they…
Compromising legitimate accounts is a way of disseminating malicious content to a large user base in Online Social Networks (OSNs). Since the accounts cause lots of damages to the user and consequently to other users on OSNs, early…
Twitter bot detection has become an increasingly important task to combat misinformation, facilitate social media moderation, and preserve the integrity of the online discourse. State-of-the-art bot detection methods generally leverage the…
Bots, in recent times, have posed a major threat to enterprise networks. With the distributed nature of the way in which botnets operate, the problems faced by enterprises have become acute. A bot is a program that operates as an agent for…
The rapid growth of social media in recent years has fed into some highly undesirable phenomena such as proliferation of abusive and offensive language on the Internet. Previous research suggests that such hateful content tends to come from…
The discourse around conspiracy theories is currently thriving amidst the rampant misinformation in online environments. Research in this field has been focused on detecting conspiracy theories on social media, often relying on limited…
It has been widely recognized that automated bots may have a significant impact on the outcomes of national events. It is important to raise public awareness about the threat of bots on social media during these important events, such as…
Social media, once hailed as a vehicle for democratization and the promotion of positive social change across the globe, are under attack for becoming a tool of political manipulation and spread of disinformation. A case in point is the…
Online social networks like Twitter actively monitor their platform to identify accounts that go against their rules. Twitter enforces account level moderation, i.e. suspension of a Twitter account in severe cases of platform abuse. A point…
There is evidence that Russia's Internet Research Agency attempted to interfere with the 2016 U.S. election by running fake accounts on Twitter - often referred to as "Russian trolls". In this work, we: 1) develop machine learning models…
The omnipresent COVID-19 pandemic gave rise to a parallel spreading of misinformation, also referred to as an Infodemic. Consequently, social media have become targets for the application of social bots, that is, algorithms that mimic human…
Social media platforms face an ongoing challenge in combating the proliferation of social bots, automated accounts that are also known to distort public opinion and support the spread of disinformation. Over the years, social bots have…
Amidst widespread reports of digital influence operations during major elections, policymakers, scholars, and journalists have become increasingly interested in the political impact of social media 'bots.' Most recently, platform companies…
On daily basis, millions of Twitter accounts post a vast number of tweets including numerous Twitter entities (mentions, replies, hashtags, photos, URLs). Many of these entities are used in common by many accounts. The more common entities…
We explore the feasibility of automatically finding accounts that publish sensitive content on Twitter. One natural approach to this problem is to first create a list of sensitive keywords, and then identify Twitter accounts that use these…
Society's reliance on social media as a primary source of news has spawned a renewed focus on the spread of misinformation. In this work, we identify the differences in how social media accounts identified as bots react to news sources of…
Coordinated campaigns are used to influence and manipulate social media platforms and their users, a critical challenge to the free exchange of information online. Here we introduce a general, unsupervised network-based methodology to…