Related papers: A Quantitative Approach to Understanding Online An…
The political discourse in Western European countries such as Germany has recently seen a resurgence of the topic of refugees, fueled by an influx of refugees from various Middle Eastern and African countries. Even though the topic of…
The hacktivist group Anonymous is unusual in its public-facing nature. Unlike other cybercriminal groups, which rely on secrecy and privacy for protection, Anonymous is prevalent on the social media site, Twitter. In this paper we…
With the rapid growth of social media usage, a common trend has emerged where users often make sarcastic comments on posts. While sarcasm can sometimes be harmless, it can blur the line with cyberbullying, especially when used in negative…
Neo-fascism is a political and societal ideology that has been having remarkable growth in the last decade in the United States of America (USA), as well as in other Western societies. It poses a grave danger to democracy and the minorities…
The huge amount of data made available by the massive usage of social media has opened up the unprecedented possibility to carry out a data-driven study of political processes. While particular attention has been paid to phenomena like…
Internet memes have become an increasingly pervasive form of contemporary social communication that attracted a lot of research interest recently. In this paper, we analyze the data of 129,326 memes collected from Reddit in the middle of…
Online hate speech is responsible for violent attacks such as, e.g., the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018, thereby posing a significant threat to vulnerable groups and society in general. However, little is known about what makes hate…
Proactively identifying misinformation spreaders is an important step towards mitigating the impact of fake news on our society. In this paper, we introduce a new contemporary Reddit dataset for fake news spreader analysis, called FACTOID,…
Terrorist attacks not only harm citizens but also shift their attention, which has long-lasting impacts on public opinion and government policies. Yet measuring the changes in public attention beyond media coverage has been methodologically…
Automatic hate speech detection is an important yet complex task, requiring knowledge of common sense, stereotypes of protected groups, and histories of discrimination, each of which may constantly evolve. In this paper, we propose a…
The prevalence of online hate and abuse is a pressing global concern. While tackling such societal harms is a priority for research across the social sciences, it is a difficult task, in part because of the magnitude of the problem. User…
We propose an analytical framework able to investigate discussions about polarized topics in online social networks from many different angles. The framework supports the analysis of social networks along several dimensions: time, space and…
As civil discourse increasingly takes place online, misinformation and the polarization of news shared in online communities have become ever more relevant concerns with real world harms across our society. Studying online news sharing at…
Online debates are often characterised by extreme polarisation and heated discussions among users. The presence of hate speech online is becoming increasingly problematic, making necessary the development of appropriate countermeasures. In…
The rise in popularity of Twitter has led to a debate on its impact on public opinions. The optimists foresee an increase in online participation and democratization due to social media's personal and interactive nature. Cyber-pessimists,…
While civilized users employ social media to stay informed and discuss daily occurrences, haters perceive these platforms as fertile ground for attacking groups and individuals. The prevailing approach to counter this phenomenon involves…
We introduce ExtremeBB, a textual database of over 53.5M posts made by 38.5k users on 12 extremist bulletin board forums promoting online hate, harassment, the manosphere and other forms of extremism. It enables large-scale analyses of…
Online social media, periodically serves as a platform for cascading polarizing topics of conversation. The inherent community structure present in online social networks (homophily) and the advent of fringe outlets like Gab have created…
With a surge in the usage of social media postings to express opinions, emotions, and ideologies, there has been a significant shift towards the calibration of social media as a rapid medium of conveying viewpoints and outlooks over the…
Existing studies of how information diffuses across social networks have thus far concentrated on analysing and recovering the spread of deterministic innovations such as URLs, hashtags, and group membership. However investigating how…