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In the past few years, there has been a significant rise in toxic and hateful content on various social media platforms. Recently Black Lives Matter movement came into the picture, causing an avalanche of user generated responses on the…
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…
We investigate the impact of free speech and the relaxation of moderation on online social media platforms using Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter as a case study. By curating a dataset of over 10 million tweets, our study employs a novel…
The prevalence of online hate and abuse is a pressing global concern. While tackling such societal harms is a priority for research across the social sciences, it is a difficult task, in part because of the magnitude of the problem. User…
Many extreme right groups have had an online presence for some time through the use of dedicated websites. This has been accompanied by increased activity in social media platforms in recent years, enabling the dissemination of extreme…
We address the problem of predicting the leading political ideology, i.e., left-center-right bias, for YouTube channels of news media. Previous work on the problem has focused exclusively on text and on analysis of the language used, topics…
YouTube plays an ever more important role as a political medium. Yet, the implications are to-date not well understood and difficult to analyse, since access to YouTube's statistics is limited. To address this gap, we surveyed 124 people…
Social movements use social computing systems to complement offline mobilizations, but prior literature has focused almost exclusively on movement actors' use of social media. In this paper, we analyze participation and attention to topics…
Climate change debates have gained increasing visibility on social media, with YouTube emerging as one of the most influential platforms for political communication. Reaching billions of users worldwide, it functions both as a news outlet…
The use of language is innately political and often a vehicle of cultural identity as well as the basis for nation building. Here, we examine language choice and tweeting activity of Ukrainian citizens based on more than 4 million…
This paper makes three contributions. First, via a substantial corpus of 1,419,047 comments posted on 3,161 YouTube news videos of major US cable news outlets, we analyze how users engage with LGBTQ+ news content. Our analyses focus both on…
In January 2019, YouTube announced it would exclude potentially harmful content from video recommendations but allow such videos to remain on the platform. While this step intends to reduce YouTube's role in propagating such content,…
In recent years, offensive, abusive and hateful language, sexism, racism and other types of aggressive and cyberbullying behavior have been manifesting with increased frequency, and in many online social media platforms. In fact, past…
Do online platforms facilitate the consumption of potentially harmful content? Using paired behavioral and survey data provided by participants recruited from a representative sample in 2020 (n=1,181), we show that exposure to alternative…
Understanding the dynamics of language toxicity on social media is important for us to investigate the propagation of misinformation and the development of echo chambers for political scenarios such as U.S. presidential elections. Recent…
This short paper explores trends in extremist Facebook data from July 2023 to June 2024. We examined engagement, sentiment, and topics within Facebook groups categorized as anti-Israel/Semitic, anti-Palestine/Muslim, and anti-both, mapping…
A concern among content moderation researchers is that hard moderation measures, such as banning content producers, will push users to more extreme information environments. Research in this area is still new, but predominately focuses on…
We explore how the polarization around controversial topics evolves on Twitter - over a long period of time (2011 to 2016), and also as a response to major external events that lead to increased related activity. We find that increased…
We conduct a preliminary analysis of comments on political YouTube content containing misinformation in comparison to comments on trustworthy or apolitical videos, labelling the bias and factual ratings of our channels according to Media…
Populist rhetoric employed on online media is characterized as deeply impassioned and often imbued with strong emotions. The aim of this paper is to empirically investigate the differences in affective nonverbal communication of political…