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An infodemic is an emerging phenomenon caused by an overabundance of information online. This proliferation of information makes it difficult for the public to distinguish trustworthy news and credible information from untrustworthy sites…
A growing number of empirical studies suggest that negative advertising is effective in campaigning, while the mechanisms are rarely mentioned. With the scandal of Cambridge Analytica and Russian intervention behind the Brexit and the 2016…
Research into influence campaigns on Twitter has mostly relied on identifying malicious activities from tweets obtained via public APIs. These APIs provide access to public tweets that have not been deleted. However, bad actors can delete…
Twitter bots are a controversial element of the platform, and their negative impact is well known. In the field of scientific communication, they have been perceived in a more positive light, and the accounts that serve as feeds alerting…
Social media play a key role in shaping citizens' political opinion. According to the Eurobarometer, the percentage of EU citizens employing online social networks on a daily basis has increased from 18% in 2010 to 48% in 2019. The…
Twitter is one of the most popular social networks attracting millions of users, while a considerable proportion of online discourse is captured. It provides a simple usage framework with short messages and an efficient application…
Anthropomorphic social bots are engineered to emulate human verbal communication and generate toxic or inflammatory content across social networking services (SNSs). Bot-disseminated misinformation could subtly yet profoundly reshape…
We investigate the presence (and the influence) of disinformation spreading on online social networks in Italy, in the5-month period preceding the 2019 European Parliament elections. To this aim we collected a large-scale dataset oftweets…
In this paper, we present quantitative and qualitative analysis of the top retweeted tweets (viral tweets) pertaining to the US presidential elections from September 1, 2016 to Election Day on November 8, 2016. For everyday, we tagged the…
On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, also known now as Russo-Ukrainian War. We have initiated an ongoing dataset acquisition from Twitter API. Until the day this paper was written the dataset has reached the amount of 57.3 million…
Social media platforms can expose influential trends in many aspects of everyday life. However, the movements they represent can be contaminated by disinformation. Social bots are one of the significant sources of disinformation in social…
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…
Polarization in American politics has been extensively documented and analyzed for decades, and the phenomenon became all the more apparent during the 2016 presidential election, where Trump and Clinton depicted two radically different…
Social media are now a routine part of political campaigns all over the world. However, studies of the impact of campaigning on social platform have thus far been limited to cross-sectional datasets from one election period which are…
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…
The proliferation of harmful and offensive content is a problem that many online platforms face today. One of the most common approaches for moderating offensive content online is via the identification and removal after it has been posted,…
Nowadays, false and unverified information on social media sway individuals' perceptions during major geo-political events and threaten the quality of the whole digital information ecosystem. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, several…
Toxic sentiment analysis on Twitter (X) often focuses on specific topics and events such as politics and elections. Datasets of toxic users in such research are typically gathered through lexicon-based techniques, providing only a…
In recent times, social media sites such as Twitter have been extensively used for debating politics and public policies. These debates span millions of tweets and numerous topics of public importance. Thus, it is imperative that this vast…
With the remarkable capability to reach the public instantly, social media has become integral in sharing scholarly articles to measure public response. Since spamming by bots on social media can steer the conversation and present a false…