Related papers: Anomaly Detection with Joint Representation Learni…
Twitter, a popular social network, presents great opportunities for on-line machine learning research. However, previous research has focused almost entirely on learning from passively collected data. We study the problem of learning to…
Polarization is a troubling phenomenon that can lead to societal divisions and hurt the democratic process. It is therefore important to develop methods to reduce it. We propose an algorithmic solution to the problem of reducing…
Online narratives spread unevenly across platforms, with content emerging on one site often appearing on others, hours, days or weeks later. Existing cross-platform information diffusion models often treat platforms as isolated systems,…
A vast amount of textual web streams is influenced by events or phenomena emerging in the real world. The social web forms an excellent modern paradigm, where unstructured user generated content is published on a regular basis and in most…
Social networking and micro-blogging services, such as Twitter, play an important role in sharing digital information. Despite the popularity and usefulness of social media, they are regularly abused by corrupt users. One of these nefarious…
Social media users express their political preferences via interaction with other users, by spontaneous declarations or by participation in communities within the network. This makes a social network such as Twitter a valuable data source…
Coordinated campaigns frequently exploit social media platforms by artificially amplifying topics, making inauthentic trends appear organic, and misleading users into engagement. Distinguishing these coordinated efforts from genuine public…
Political trolls initiate online discord not only for the lulz (laughs) but also for ideological reasons, such as promoting their desired political candidates. Political troll groups recently gained spotlight because they were considered…
Transmitting messages in the most efficient way as possible has always been one of politicians main concerns during electoral processes. Due to the rapidly growing number of users, online social networks have become ideal platforms for…
Bots are, for many Web and social media users, the source of many dangerous attacks or the carrier of unwanted messages, such as spam. Nevertheless, crawlers and software agents are a precious tool for analysts, and they are continuously…
The current study yielded a number of important findings. We managed to build a neural network that achieved an accuracy score of 91 per cent in classifying troll and genuine tweets. By means of regression analysis, we identified a number…
Social networks (SNs) are increasingly important sources of news for many people. The online connections made by users allows information to spread more easily than traditional news media (e.g., newspaper, television). However, they also…
In this paper we illustrate the use of Data Science techniques to analyse complex human communication. In particular, we consider tweets from leaders of political parties as a dynamical proxy to political programmes and ideas. We also study…
An important task in network analysis is the detection of anomalous events in a network time series. These events could merely be times of interest in the network timeline or they could be examples of malicious activity or network…
Concerns about AI-generated political content are growing, yet there is limited empirical evidence on how deepfakes actually appear and circulate across social platforms during major events in democratic countries. In this study, we present…
We aim at solving the problem of predicting people's ideology, or political tendency. We estimate it by using Twitter data, and formalize it as a classification problem. Ideology-detection has long been a challenging yet important problem.…
Social networks have triumphed in communicating people online, but they have also been exploited to launch influence operations for manipulating society. The deployment of software-controlled accounts (e.g., social bots) has proven to be…
Coordinated inauthentic behavior is used as a tool on social media to shape public opinion by elevating or suppressing topics using systematic engagements -- e.g. through *likes* or similar reactions. In an honest world, reactions may be…
Much of the research quantifying volume and spread of online misinformation measures the construct at the source level, identifying a set of specific unreliable domains that account for a relatively small share of news consumption. This…
Research across different disciplines has documented the expanding polarization in social media. However, much of it focused on the US political system or its culturally controversial topics. In this work, we explore polarization on Twitter…