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In the last few years, many closed social networks such as WhatsAPP and WeChat have emerged to cater for people's growing demand of privacy and independence. In a closed social network, the posted content is not available to all users or…
Selfies have become increasingly fashionable in the social media era. People are willing to share their selfies in various social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Flicker. The popularity of selfie have caught researchers'…
The spread of misinformation through online social media platforms has had substantial societal consequences. As a result, platforms have introduced measures to alert users of news content that may be misleading or contain inaccuracies as a…
This work examines the influence of misinformation and the role of AI agents, called bots, on social network platforms. To quantify the impact of misinformation, it proposes two new metrics based on attributes of tweet engagement and user…
Social media platforms often assume that users can self-correct against misinformation. However, social media users are not equally susceptible to all misinformation as their biases influence what types of misinformation might thrive and…
It is common practice for researchers to join public WhatsApp chats and scrape their contents for analysis. However, research shows collecting data this way contradicts user expectations and preferences, even if the data is effectively…
WhatsApp and many other commonly used communication platforms guarantee end-to-end encryption (E2EE), which requires that service providers lack the cryptographic keys to read communications on their own platforms. WhatsApp's…
Research on information diffusion generally assumes complete knowledge of the underlying network. However, in the presence of factors such as increasing privacy awareness, restrictions on application programming interfaces (APIs) and…
Information cascades exist in a wide variety of platforms on Internet. A very important real-world problem is to identify which information cascades can go viral. A system addressing this problem can be used in a variety of applications…
This study examines Facebook and YouTube content from over a thousand news outlets in four European languages from 2018 to 2023, using a Bayesian structural time-series model to evaluate the impact of viral posts. Our results show that most…
According to the World Economic Forum, the diffusion of unsubstantiated rumors on online social media is one of the main threats for our society. The disintermediated paradigm of content production and consumption on online social media…
The dissemination of fake news intended to deceive people, influence public opinion and manipulate social outcomes, has become a pressing problem on social media. Moreover, information sharing on social media facilitates diffusion of viral…
In the vast expanse of online communication, identifying unilateral preference patterns can be pivotal in understanding and mitigating risks such as predatory behavior. This paper presents a comprehensive approach to dissect and visualize…
Online hate speech is responsible for violent attacks such as, e.g., the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018, thereby posing a significant threat to vulnerable groups and society in general. However, little is known about what makes hate…
Information diffusion on social media platforms is often assumed to occur primarily through explicit social connections, such as follower or friend ties. However, information frequently propagates beyond these observable ties -- through…
Does talking to others make people more accurate or less accurate on numeric estimates such as quantitative evaluations or probabilistic forecasts? Research on peer-to-peer communication suggests that discussion between people will usually…
We study how social image concerns shape information sharing among peers. Individuals receive a signal about a binary state of the world characterized by both a direction and a veracity status. While the direction is freely observable,…
Misinformation posting and spreading in Social Media is ignited by personal decisions on the truthfulness of news that may cause wide and deep cascades at a large scale in a fraction of minutes. When individuals are exposed to information,…
Misinformation under the form of rumor, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories spreads on social media at alarming rates. One hypothesis is that, since social media are shaped by homophily, belief in misinformation may be more likely to thrive on…
Misinformation on social media presents a major threat to modern societies. While previous research has analyzed the virality across true and false social media posts, not every misleading post is necessarily equally viral. Rather,…