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With growing role of social media in shaping public opinions and beliefs across the world, there has been an increased attention to identify and counter the problem of hate speech on social media. Hate speech on online spaces has serious…
The social web has linked people on a global scale, transforming how we communicate and interact. The massive interconnectedness has created new vulnerabilities in the form of social manipulation and misinformation. As the social web…
Social media is nearly ubiquitous in modern life, raising concerns about its societal impacts -- from mental health and polarization to violence and democratic disruption. Yet research on its causal effects is still inconclusive: Various…
Many extreme right groups have had an online presence for some time through the use of dedicated websites. This has been accompanied by increased activity in social media platforms in recent years, enabling the dissemination of extreme…
The explosive growth of social media has not only revolutionized communication but also brought challenges such as political polarization, misinformation, hate speech, and echo chambers. This dissertation employs computational social…
Hate speech is one type of harmful online content which directly attacks or promotes hate towards a group or an individual member based on their actual or perceived aspects of identity, such as ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation.…
Political polarization in online social platforms is a rapidly growing phenomenon worldwide. Despite their relevance to modern-day politics, the structure and dynamics of polarized states in digital spaces are still poorly understood. We…
Racism and intolerance on social media contribute to a toxic online environment which may spill offline to foster hatred, and eventually lead to physical violence. That is the case with online antisemitism, the specific category of hatred…
The phrase "online harms" has emerged in recent years out of a growing political willingness to address the ethical and social issues associated with the use of the Internet and digital technology at large. The broad landscape that…
Social networks are organized into communities with dense internal connections, giving rise to high values of the clustering coefficient. In addition, these networks have been observed to be assortative, i.e. highly connected vertices tend…
Social media and the internet have become an integral part of how people spread and consume information. Over a period of time, social media evolved dramatically, and almost half of the population is using social media to express their…
Recently, social debates have been marked by increased polarization of social groups. Such polarization not only implies that groups cannot reach a consensus on fundamental questions but also materializes in more modular social…
The community structure of complex networks reveals both their organization and hidden relationships among their constituents. Most community detection methods currently available are not deterministic, and their results typically depend on…
Understanding the emergence of strong controversial issues in modern societies is a key issue in opinion studies. A commonly diffused idea is the fact that the increasing of homophily in social networks, due to the modern ICT, can be a…
Exploiting social media to spread hate has tremendously increased over the years. Lately, multi-modal hateful content such as memes has drawn relatively more traction than uni-modal content. Moreover, the availability of implicit content…
Quantifying human group dynamics represents a unique challenge. Unlike animals and other biological systems, humans form groups in both real (offline) and virtual (online) spaces -- from potentially dangerous street gangs populated mostly…
The proposal is to use clusters, graphs and networks as models in order to analyse the Web structure. Clusters, graphs and networks provide knowledge representation and organization. Clusters were generated by co-site analysis. The sample…
Recent years have seen a marked increase in the spread of misinformation, a phenomenon which has been accelerated and amplified by social media such as Facebook and Twitter. While some actors spread misinformation to push a specific agenda,…
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…
Many models have been proposed to explain opinion formation in groups of individuals; most of these models study opinion propagation as the interaction between nodes/agents in a social network. Opinion formation is a complex process and a…