Related papers: Social media cluster dynamics create resilient glo…
Hate and extremism cannot be controlled globally without understanding how they operate at scale. Both have escalated dramatically during the Israel-Hamas and Ukraine-Russia wars. Here we show how the online hate-extremism system is now…
Online hate messaging is a pervasive issue plaguing the well-being of social media users. This research empirically investigates a novel theory positing that online hate may be driven primarily by the pursuit of social approval rather than…
Online hate is dynamic, adaptive -- and is now surging armed with AI/GPT tools. Its consequences include personal traumas, child sex abuse and violent mass attacks. Overcoming it will require knowing how it operates at scale. Here we…
Support for extremist entities - whether from the far right, or far left - often manages to survive globally online despite significant external pressure, and may ultimately inspire violent acts by individuals having no obvious prior…
Hateful rhetoric is plaguing online discourse, fostering extreme societal movements and possibly giving rise to real-world violence. A potential solution to this growing global problem is citizen-generated counter speech where citizens…
Online communities featuring 'anti-X' hate and extremism, somehow thrive online despite moderator pressure. We present a first-principles theory of their dynamics, which accounts for the fact that the online population comprises diverse…
Recent years have seen the world become a closely connected society with the emergence of different types of social networks. Online social networks have provided a way to bridge long distances and establish numerous communication channels…
The structure of a network can significantly influence the properties of the dynamical processes which take place on them. While many studies have been devoted to this influence, much less attention has been devoted to the interplay and…
Complex networks as the World Wide Web, the web of human sexual contacts or criminal networks often do not have an engineered architecture but instead are self-organized by the actions of a large number of individuals. From these local…
We present a minimal yet empirically-grounded theory for the spread of online harms (e.g. misinformation, hate) across current multi-platform social media and future Metaverses. New physics emerges from the interplay between the intrinsic…
We show that malicious COVID-19 content, including hate speech, disinformation, and misinformation, exploits the multiverse of online hate to spread quickly beyond the control of any individual social media platform. Machine learning topic…
Citizen-generated counter speech is a promising way to fight hate speech and promote peaceful, non-polarized discourse. However, there is a lack of large-scale longitudinal studies of its effectiveness for reducing hate speech. To this end,…
This paper explores ways in which the harmful effects of cyber hate may be mitigated through mechanisms for enhancing the self governance of new digital spaces. We report findings from a mixed methods study of responses to cyber hate posts,…
A better understanding of how support evolves online for undesirable behaviors such as extremism and hate, could help mitigate future harms. Here we show how the highly irregular growth curves of groups supporting two high-profile extremism…
Reputation-based cooperation on social networks offers a causal mechanism between graph properties and social trust. Recent papers on the `structural microfoundations` of the society used this insight to show how demographic processes, such…
Many social networks, e.g., Slashdot and Twitter, can be represented as directed graphs (digraphs) with two types of links between entities: mutual (bi-directional) and one-way (uni-directional) connections. Social science theories reveal…
Terrorism instills fear in the minds of people and takes away the freedom of individuals to act as they will. Terrorism has turned out to be an international menace today. Here, we study the terrorist attack incidents which occurred in the…
Members of different political groups not only disagree about issues but also dislike and distrust each other. While social media can amplify this emotional divide -- called affective polarization by political scientists -- there is a lack…
The sudden emergence of large-scale riots in otherwise unconnected cities across the UK in summer 2024 came as a shock for both government officials and citizens. Irrespective of these riots' specific trigger, a key question is how the…
A social network is often divided into many factions. People are friends within each faction, while they are enemies of the other factions, and even my enemy's enemy is not necessarily my friend. This configuration can be described in terms…