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Extremist communities increasingly rely on social media to sustain and amplify divisive discourse. However, the relationship between their internal participation structures, audience engagement, and narrative expression remains…
It has been suggested that online search and retrieval contributes to the intellectual isolation of users within their preexisting ideologies, where people's prior views are strengthened and alternative viewpoints are infrequently…
The debates on minority issues are often dominated by or held among the concerned minority: gender equality debates have often failed to engage men, while those about race fail to effectively engage the dominant group. To test this…
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…
Online hate speech is responsible for violent attacks such as, e.g., the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018, thereby posing a significant threat to vulnerable groups and society in general. However, little is known about what makes hate…
The Internet Research Agency (IRA) influences online political conversations in the United States, exacerbating existing partisan divides and sowing discord. In this paper we investigate the IRA's communication strategies by analyzing…
Video communication has been rapidly increasing over the past decade, with YouTube providing a medium where users can post, discover, share, and react to videos. There has also been an increase in the number of videos citing research…
Receiving negative sentiment, offensive comments, or even hate speech is a constant part of the working experience of content creators (CCs) on YouTube - a growing occupational group in the platform economy. This study investigates how…
Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a decentralized social movement protesting violence against Black individuals and communities, with a focus on police brutality. The movement gained significant attention following the killings of Ahmaud Arbery,…
The internet has transformed activism, giving rise to more organic, diverse, and dynamic social movements that transcend geo-political boundaries. Despite extensive research on the role of social media and the internet in cross-cultural…
Social media has become a major driver of social change, by facilitating the formation of online social movements. Automatically understanding the perspectives driving the movement and the voices opposing it, is a challenging task as…
Representation shapes public attitudes and behaviors. With the recent advances and rapid adoption of LLMs, the way these systems are introduced will negotiate societal expectations for their role in high-stakes domains like health. Yet it…
As the number and the diversity of news outlets on the Web grow, so does the opportunity for "alternative" sources of information to emerge. Using large social networks like Twitter and Facebook, misleading, false, or agenda-driven…
We propose a novel framework for predicting the factuality of reporting of news media outlets by studying the user attention cycles in their YouTube channels. In particular, we design a rich set of features derived from the temporal…
The Alt-Right is a neo-fascist white supremacist movement that is involved in violent extremism and shows signs of engagement in extensive disinformation campaigns. Using social media data mining, this study develops a deeper understanding…
This study investigates how the majority group influences individual judgment formation and expression in anonymous, spontaneous online conversations. Drawing on theories of social conformity and anti-conformity, we analyze everyday…
Suicide remains a leading cause of death in Western countries. As social media becomes central to daily life, digital footprints offer valuable insight into suicidal behavior. Focusing on individuals who attempted suicide while uploading…
Polarization among US political parties, media and elites is a widely studied topic. Prominent lines of prior research across multiple disciplines have observed and analyzed growing polarization in social media. In this paper, we present a…
With the high prevalence of offensive language against minorities in social media, counter-hate speeches (CHS) generation is considered an automatic way of tackling this challenge. The CHS is supposed to appear as a third voice to educate…
Racism and intolerance on social media contribute to a toxic online environment which may spill offline to foster hatred, and eventually lead to physical violence. That is the case with online antisemitism, the specific category of hatred…