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Aggression against Ukraine has drawn widespread international attention, particularly in the wake of the two Russian invasions into Ukrainian territory in 2014 and 2022. Although previous studies have examined social-media dynamics around…

Estimating the political leanings of social media users is a challenging and ever more pressing problem given the increase in social media consumption. We introduce Retweet-BERT, a simple and scalable model to estimate the political…

Social media platforms enable the rapid dissemination and consumption of information. However, users instantly consume such content regardless of the reliability of the shared data. Consequently, the latter crowdsourcing model is exposed to…

This paper considers the problem of automatically characterizing overall attitudes and biases that may be associated with emerging information operations via artificial intelligence. Accurate analysis of these emerging topics usually…

Online Social Media represent a pervasive source of information able to reach a huge audience. Sadly, recent studies show how online social bots (automated, often malicious accounts, populating social networks and mimicking genuine users)…

Metadata are associated to most of the information we produce in our daily interactions and communication in the digital world. Yet, surprisingly, metadata are often still catergorized as non-sensitive. Indeed, in the past, researchers and…

Increasing evidence suggests that a growing amount of social media content is generated by autonomous entities known as social bots. In this work we present a framework to detect such entities on Twitter. We leverage more than a thousand…

Social bots are currently regarded an influential but also somewhat mysterious factor in public discourse and opinion making. They are considered to be capable of massively distributing propaganda in social and online media and their…

Nowadays, people from all around the world use social media sites to share information. Twitter for example is a platform in which users send, read posts known as tweets and interact with different communities. Users share their daily…

For more than a decade now, academicians and online platform administrators have been studying solutions to the problem of bot detection. Bots are computer algorithms whose use is far from being benign: malicious bots are purposely created…

This paper addresses the important problem of discerning hateful content in social media. We propose a detection scheme that is an ensemble of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) classifiers, and it incorporates various features associated with…

In recent years we have witnessed an explosion of data collected for different human dynamics, from email communication to social networks activities. Extract useful information from these huge data sets represents a major challenge. In the…

One of the hallmarks of a free and fair society is the ability to conduct a peaceful and seamless transfer of power from one leader to another. Democratically, this is measured in a citizen population's trust in the electoral system of…

In many economically relevant contexts where machine learning is deployed, multiple platforms obtain data from the same pool of users, each of whom selects the platform that best serves them. Prior work in this setting focuses exclusively…

Electoral prediction from Twitter data is an appealing research topic. It seems relatively straightforward and the prevailing view is overly optimistic. This is problematic because while simple approaches are assumed to be good enough, core…

Offensive language is pervasive in social media. Individuals frequently take advantage of the perceived anonymity of computer-mediated communication, using this to engage in behavior that many of them would not consider in real life. The…

Approximately 50% of tweets in X's user timelines are personalized recommendations from accounts they do not follow. This raises a critical question: What political content are users exposed to beyond their established networks, and what…

Twitter has become a pivotal platform for conducting information operations (IOs), particularly during high-stakes political events. In this study, we analyze over a million tweets about the 2024 U.S. presidential election to explore an…

Efficient and reliable social bot classification is crucial for detecting information manipulation on social media. Despite rapid development, state-of-the-art bot detection models still face generalization and scalability challenges, which…

News media has long been an ecosystem of creation, reproduction, and critique, where news outlets report on current events and add commentary to ongoing stories. Understanding the dynamics of news information creation and dispersion is…