Related papers: An Unsupervised Approach to Detect Spam Campaigns …

Existence of spam URLs over emails and Online Social Media (OSM) has become a growing phenomenon. To counter the dissemination issues associated with long complex URLs in emails and character limit imposed on various OSM (like Twitter), the…

Botnets (networks of compromised computers) are often used for malicious activities such as spam, click fraud, identity theft, phishing, and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Most of previous researches have introduced fully or…

Over the past few years, there is a heated debate and serious public concerns regarding online content moderation, censorship, and the principle of free speech on the Web. To ease these concerns, social media platforms like Twitter and…

We tackle the challenge of topic classification of tweets in the context of analyzing a large collection of curated streams by news outlets and other organizations to deliver relevant content to users. Our approach is novel in applying…

In recent years, bullying and aggression against users on social media have grown significantly, causing serious consequences to victims of all demographics. In particular, cyberbullying affects more than half of young social media users…

Bots, software-controlled accounts that operate on social media, have been used to manipulate and deceive. We studied the characteristics and activity of bots around major political events, including elections in various countries. In this…

We propose a strikingly novel, simple, and effective approach to model online user behavior: we extract and analyze digital DNA sequences from user online actions and we use Twitter as a benchmark to test our proposal. We obtain an incisive…

With people moving out of physical public spaces due to containment measures to tackle the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, online platforms become even more prominent tools to understand social discussion. Studying social media can…

Social media expose millions of users every day to information campaigns --- some emerging organically from grassroots activity, others sustained by advertising or other coordinated efforts. These campaigns contribute to the shaping of…

We developed and used a collection of statistical methods (unsupervised machine learning) to extract relevant information from a Twitter supplied data set consisting of alleged Russian trolls who (allegedly) attempted to influence the 2016…

This project addresses the problem of sentiment analysis in twitter; that is classifying tweets according to the sentiment expressed in them: positive, negative or neutral. Twitter is an online micro-blogging and social-networking platform…

Adversarial Internet robots (botnets) represent a growing threat to the safe use and stability of the Internet. Botnets can play a role in launching adversary reconnaissance (scanning and phishing), influence operations (upvoting), and…

Solicited public opinion surveys reach a limited subpopulation of willing participants and are expensive to conduct, leading to poor time resolution and a restricted pool of expert-chosen survey topics. In this study, we demonstrate that…

Twitter has captured the interest of the scientific community not only for its massive user base and content, but also for its openness in sharing its data. Twitter shares a free 1% sample of its tweets through the "Streaming API", a…

Conspiracy theories can threaten society by spreading misinformation, deepening polarization, and eroding trust in democratic institutions. Social media often fuels the spread of conspiracies, primarily driven by two key actors:…

Parody is a figurative device used to imitate an entity for comedic or critical purposes and represents a widespread phenomenon in social media through many popular parody accounts. In this paper, we present the first computational study of…

Twitter, like many social media and data brokering companies, makes their data available through a search API (application programming interface). In addition to filtering results by date and location, researchers can search for tweets with…

Social networks offer a ready channel for fake and misleading news to spread and exert influence. This paper examines the performance of different reputation algorithms when applied to a large and statistically significant portion of the…

Twitter is now a gold marketing tool for entities concerned with online reputation. To automatically monitor online reputation of entities , systems have to deal with ambiguous entity names, polarity detection and topic detection. We…

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,…