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Religiosity is a powerful force shaping human societies, affecting domains as diverse as economic growth or the ability to cope with illness. As more religious leaders and organizations as well as believers start using social networking…
While social media offer users a platform for self-expression, identity exploration, and community management, among other functions, they also offer space for religious practice and expression. In this paper, we explore social media spaces…
Gender analysis of Twitter can reveal important socio-cultural differences between male and female users. There has been a significant effort to analyze and automatically infer gender in the past for most widely spoken languages' content,…
We analyze 26.2 million comments published in Arabic language on Twitter, from July 2014 to January 2015, when ISIS' strength reached its peak and the group was prominently expanding the territorial area under its control. By doing that, we…
The rise in popularity of Twitter has led to a debate on its impact on public opinions. The optimists foresee an increase in online participation and democratization due to social media's personal and interactive nature. Cyber-pessimists,…
The emergence of social network site has attracted many users across the world to share their feeling, news, achievements and personal thoughts over several platforms. The recent crisis due to worldwide lockdown amid COVID 19 has shown how…
We introduce the notion of "seminar users", who are social media users engaged in propaganda in support of a political entity. We develop a framework that can identify such users with 84.4% precision and 76.1% recall. While our dataset is…
Theories of privacy and how it relates to the use of Information Communication Technology (ICT) have been a topic of research for decades. However, little attention has been paid to the perception of privacy from the perspective of…
Using a dataset of over 1.9 million messages posted on Twitter by about 25,000 ISIS members, we explore how ISIS makes use of social media to spread its propaganda and to recruit militants from the Arab world and across the globe. By…
We explore the meaning of privacy from the perspective of Qatari nationals as it manifests in digital environments. Although privacy is an essential and widely respected value in many cultures, the way in which it is understood and enacted…
Arabic Twitter space is crawling with bots that fuel political feuds, spread misinformation, and proliferate sectarian rhetoric. While efforts have long existed to analyze and detect English bots, Arabic bot detection and characterization…
For Iranians and the Iranian diaspora, the Farsi Twittersphere provides an important alternative to state media and an outlet for political discourse. But this understudied online space has become an opinion manipulation battleground, with…
Twitter is a popular platform for e-commerce in the Arab region including the sale of illegal goods and services. Social media platforms present multiple opportunities to mine information about behaviors pertaining to both illicit and…
This study investigates the spread of conspiracy theories in Arabic digital spaces through computational analysis of online content. By combining Named Entity Recognition and Topic Modeling techniques, specifically the Top2Vec algorithm, we…
Social media platforms play an increasingly important role in shaping political discussion and information flows. This study examines the structure of participation and attention in Arabic-language discourse about Hezbollah on X (formerly…
Twitter is one of the most popular online micro-blogging and social networking platforms. This platform allows individuals to freely express opinions and interact with others regardless of geographic barriers. However, with the good that…
Social botnets have become an important phenomenon on social media. There are many ways in which social bots can disrupt or influence online discourse, such as, spam hashtags, scam twitter users, and astroturfing. In this paper we…
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…
Misinformation is a growing concern in a decade involving critical global events. While social media regulation is mainly dedicated towards the detection and prevention of fake news and political misinformation, there is limited research…
Online social media has become an important platform to organize around different socio-cultural and political topics. An extensive scholarship has discussed how people are divided into echo-chamber-like groups. However, there is a lack of…