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Following the 2016 US presidential election, there has been an increased focus on politically-motivated manipulation of mass-user behavior on social media platforms. Since a large volume of political discussion occurs on these platforms,…
With the rise in popularity of public social media and micro-blogging services, most notably Twitter, the people have found a venue to hear and be heard by their peers without an intermediary. As a consequence, and aided by the public…
As of today, abuse is a pressing issue to participants and administrators of Online Social Networks (OSN). Abuse in Twitter can spawn from arguments generated for influencing outcomes of a political election, the use of bots to…
The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine was accompanied by a large-scale, pro-Russian propaganda campaign on social media. However, the strategy behind the dissemination of propaganda has remained unclear, particularly how the online discourse…
The detection of online influence operations -- coordinated campaigns by malicious actors to spread narratives -- has traditionally depended on content analysis or network features. These approaches are increasingly brittle as generative…
Even though the Internet and social media have increased the amount of news and information people can consume, most users are only exposed to content that reinforces their positions and isolates them from other ideological communities.…
State-sponsored trolls, malicious actors who deploy sophisticated linguistic manipulation in coordinated information campaigns, posing threats to online discourse integrity. While Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on…
Increasing popularity of Twitter in politics is subject to commercial and academic interest. To fully exploit the merits of this platform, reaching the target audience with desired political leanings is critical. This paper extends the…
Twitter, a popular social media outlet, has evolved into a vast source of linguistic data, rich with opinion, sentiment, and discussion. Due to the increasing popularity of Twitter, its perceived potential for exerting social influence has…
In theory, a major advantage to the big data approach in studying online communities is that it should be possible to collect a representative random sample from a broadly defined population. However, in practice, data collection processes…
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…
We disclose a methodology to determine the participants in discussions and their contributions in social networks with a local relationship (e.g., nationality), providing certain levels of trust and efficiency in the process. The dynamic is…
As social media has permeated large parts of the population it simultaneously has become a way to reach many people e.g. with political messages. One way to efficiently reach those people is the application of automated computer programs…
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, as one of the most popular social networks, provides a platform for communication and online discourse. Unfortunately, it has also become a target for bots and fake accounts, resulting in the spread of false information and…
Social media platforms have been exploited to conduct election interference in recent years. In particular, the Russian-backed Internet Research Agency (IRA) has been identified as a key source of misinformation spread on Twitter prior to…
In this paper we developed and tested a new algorithm of detecting in social networks users (so-called trolls) who behave in an insulting and provocative way towards other users. In order to detect trolls it is proposed to unite users in…
This paper presents TrollHunter2020, a real-time detection mechanism we used to hunt for trolling narratives on Twitter during the 2020 U.S. elections. Trolling narratives form on Twitter as alternative explanations of polarizing events…
Predicting the political leaning of social media users is an increasingly popular task, given its usefulness for electoral forecasts, opinion dynamics models and for studying the political dimension of polarization and disinformation. Here,…
Digital traces of conversations in micro-blogging platforms and OSNs provide information about user opinion with a high degree of resolution. These information sources can be exploited to under- stand and monitor collective behaviors. In…