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On the morning of November 9th 2016, the world woke up to the shocking outcome of the US Presidential elections: Donald Trump was the 45th President of the United States of America. An unexpected event that still has tremendous consequences…
According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, in the United States hundreds of thousands initiate smoking each year, and millions live with smoking-related dis- eases. Many tobacco users discuss their habits and preferences on…
On the 21st of February 2022, Russia recognised the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic, three days before launching an invasion of Ukraine. Since then, an active debate has taken place on social media, mixing…
Computational propaganda deploys social or political bots to try to shape, steer and manipulate online public discussions and influence decisions. Collective behaviour of populations of social bots has not been yet widely studied, though…
Due to popularity surge social networks became lucrative targets for spammers and guerilla marketers, who are trying to game ranking systems and broadcast their messages at little to none cost. Ranking systems, for example Twitter's Trends,…
Online social networks are used to diffuse opinions and ideas among users, enabling a faster communication and a wider audience. The way in which opinions are conditioned by social interactions is usually called social influence. Social…
Fake news are affecting a large proportion of the population even becoming a danger to the society. Mostly, this disinformation flow take place through Internet. Being aware of that problem, in this work we propose a synthetic indicator…
State-sponsored trolls are the main actors of influence campaigns on social media and automatic troll detection is important to combat misinformation at scale. Existing troll detection models are developed based on training data for known…
We study the Twitter conversation following the August 2017 `Unite the Right' rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, using tools from network analysis and data science. We use media followership on Twitter and principal component analysis…
Escalating proliferation of inorganic accounts, commonly known as bots, within the digital ecosystem represents an ongoing and multifaceted challenge to online security, trustworthiness, and user experience. These bots, often employed for…
We examine partisan differences in the behavior, communication patterns and social interactions of more than 18,000 politically-active Twitter users to produce evidence that points to changing levels of partisan engagement with the American…
This article presents a preliminary approach towards characterizing political fake news on Twitter through the analysis of their meta-data. In particular, we focus on more than 1.5M tweets collected on the day of the election of Donald…
The Web contains several social media platforms for discussion, exchange of ideas, and content publishing. These platforms are used by people, but also by distributed agents known as bots. Although bots have existed for decades, with many…
State-sponsored influence operations (SIOs) have become a pervasive and complex challenge in the digital age, particularly on social media platforms where information spreads rapidly and with minimal oversight. These operations are…
We consider the problem of identifying coordinated influence campaigns conducted by automated agents or bots in a social network. We study several different Twitter datasets which contain such campaigns and find that the bots exhibit…
For more than a decade scholars have been investigating the disinformation flow on social media contextually to societal events, like, e.g., elections. In this paper, we analyze the Twitter traffic related to the US 2020 pre-election debate…
Politics is one of the most prevalent topics discussed on social media platforms, particularly during major election cycles, where users engage in conversations about candidates and electoral processes. Malicious actors may use this…
The presence of political misinformation and ideological echo chambers on social media platforms is concerning given the important role that these sites play in the public's exposure to news and current events. Algorithmic systems employed…
Social media platforms are often blamed for exacerbating political polarization and worsening public dialogue. Many claim that hyperpartisan users post pernicious content, slanted to their political views, inciting contentious and toxic…
The discussion-board site 4chan has been part of the Internet's dark underbelly since its inception, and recent political events have put it increasingly in the spotlight. In particular, /pol/, the "Politically Incorrect" board, has been a…