Related papers: The Alt-Right and Global Information Warfare
Content on Twitter's home timeline is selected and ordered by personalization algorithms. By consistently ranking certain content higher, these algorithms may amplify some messages while reducing the visibility of others. There's been…
Over the past decade, we have witnessed the rise of misinformation on the Internet, with online users constantly falling victims of fake news. A multitude of past studies have analyzed fake news diffusion mechanics and detection and…
The massive spread of digital misinformation has been identified as a major global risk and has been alleged to influence elections and threaten democracies. Communication, cognitive, social, and computer scientists are engaged in efforts…
In Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the critical term is paradigm-shift when it suddenly becomes evident that earlier assumptions no longer are correct and the plurality of the scientific community that studies this domain…
Twitter influences political debates. Phenomena like fake news and hate speech show that political discourse on micro-blogging can become strongly polarised by algorithmic enforcement of selective perception. Some political actors actively…
Hate and extremism cannot be controlled globally without understanding how they operate at scale. Both have escalated dramatically during the Israel-Hamas and Ukraine-Russia wars. Here we show how the online hate-extremism system is now…
This study provides a systematic comparative analysis of media visibility of different political families during the 2024 European Parliament elections. We analyzed close to 21,500 unique news from leading national outlets in Austria,…
In order to combat the creation and spread of harmful content online, this paper defines and contextualizes the concept of inauthentic, societal-scale manipulation by malicious actors. We review the literature on societally harmful content…
Online Radicalization (also called Cyber-Terrorism or Extremism or Cyber-Racism or Cyber- Hate) is widespread and has become a major and growing concern to the society, governments and law enforcement agencies around the world. Research…
The world is facing the challenge of climate crisis. Despite the consensus in scientific community about anthropogenic global warming, the web is flooded with articles spreading climate misinformation. These articles are carefully…
The Web consists of numerous Web communities, news sources, and services, which are often exploited by various entities for the dissemination of false information. Yet, we lack tools and techniques to effectively track the propagation of…
At the latest since the advent of the Internet, disinformation and conspiracy theories have become ubiquitous. Recent examples like QAnon and Pizzagate prove that false information can lead to real violence. In this motivation statement for…
Recent terrorist attacks carried out on behalf of ISIS on American and European soil by lone wolf attackers or sleeper cells remind us of the importance of understanding the dynamics of radicalization mediated by social media communication…
The political discourse in Western European countries such as Germany has recently seen a resurgence of the topic of refugees, fueled by an influx of refugees from various Middle Eastern and African countries. Even though the topic of…
The past decade has seen a substantial rise in the amount of mis- and disinformation online, from targeted disinformation campaigns to influence politics, to the unintentional spreading of misinformation about public health. This…
State-sponsored organizations are increasingly linked to efforts aimed to exploit social media for information warfare and manipulating public opinion. Typically, their activities rely on a number of social network accounts they control,…
The Syria conflict has been described as the most socially mediated in history, with online social media playing a particularly important role. At the same time, the ever-changing landscape of the conflict leads to difficulties in applying…
This study examines how Russian far-right communities on Telegram shape perceptions of political figures through memes and visual narratives. Far from passive spectators, these actors co-produce propaganda, blending state-aligned messages…
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…
Due to its status as the most popular video sharing platform, YouTube plays an important role in the online strategy of extreme right groups, where it is often used to host associated content such as music and other propaganda. In this…