Related papers: The Alt-Right and Global Information Warfare

Communication on social media platforms is not only culturally and politically relevant, it is also increasingly widespread across societies. Users not only communicate via social media platforms, but also search specifically for…

The battle against the spread of misinformation on the Internet is a daunting task faced by modern society. Fake news content is primarily distributed through digital platforms, with websites dedicated to producing and disseminating such…

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…

In the 21st Century information environment, adversarial actors use disinformation to manipulate public opinion. The distribution of false, misleading, or inaccurate information with the intent to deceive is an existential threat to the…

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…

The Russian Internet Research Agency's (IRA) online interference campaign in the 2016 U.S. presidential election represents a turning point in the trajectory of democratic elections in the digital age. What can we learn about how the IRA…

Social media platforms offer unprecedented opportunities for connectivity and exchange of ideas; however, they also serve as fertile grounds for the dissemination of disinformation. Over the years, there has been a rise in state-sponsored…

WhatsApp emerged as a major communication platform in many countries in the recent years. Despite offering only one-to-one and small group conversations, WhatsApp has been shown to enable the formation of a rich underlying network, crossing…

Until recently, social media were seen to promote democratic discourse on social and political issues. However, this powerful communication ecosystem has come under scrutiny for allowing hostile actors to exploit online discussions in an…

How, in 20 short years, did we go from the promise of the internet to democratize access to knowledge and make the world more understanding and enlightened, to the litany of daily horrors that is today's internet? We are awash in…

The creation, dissemination, and consumption of disinformation and fabricated content on social media is a growing concern, especially with the ease of access to such sources, and the lack of awareness of the existence of such false…

The massive diffusion of social media fosters disintermediation and changes the way users are informed, the way they process reality, and the way they engage in public debate. The cognitive layer of users and the related social dynamics…

Recent events, such as the 2016 US Presidential Campaign, Brexit and the COVID-19 "infodemic", have brought into the spotlight the dangers of online disinformation. There has been a lot of research focusing on fact-checking and…

Fake news emerged as an apparent global problem during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Addressing it requires a multidisciplinary effort to define the nature and extent of the problem, detect fake news in real time, and mitigate its…

As recent events have demonstrated, disinformation spread through social networks can have dire political, economic and social consequences. Detecting disinformation must inevitably rely on the structure of the network, on users…

Many recent political events, like the 2016 US Presidential elections or the 2018 Brazilian elections have raised the attention of institutions and of the general public on the role of Internet and social media in influencing the outcome of…

Social media platforms have been exploited to conduct election interference in recent years. In particular, the Russian-backed Internet Research Agency (IRA) has been identified as a key source of misinformation spread on Twitter prior to…

Fake news is an age-old phenomenon, widely assumed to be associated with political propaganda published to sway public opinion. Yet, with the growth of social media, it has become a lucrative business for Web publishers. Despite many…

In the past few years, the research community has dedicated growing interest to the issue of false news circulating on social networks. The widespread attention on detecting and characterizing false news has been motivated by considerable…

The massive spread of misinformation in social networks has become a global risk, implicitly influencing public opinion and threatening social/political development. Misinformation detection (MID) has thus become a surging research topic in…