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Othering, the act of portraying outgroups as fundamentally different from the ingroup, often escalates into framing them as existential threats--fueling intergroup conflict and justifying exclusion and violence. These dynamics are…
Online extremism has severe societal consequences, including normalizing hate speech, user radicalization, and increased social divisions. Various mitigation strategies have been explored to address these consequences. One such strategy…
The expanding influence of social media platforms over the past decade has impacted the way people communicate. The level of obscurity provided by social media and easy accessibility of the internet has facilitated the spread of hate…
The recent past has highlighted the influential role of social networks and online media in shaping public debate on current affairs and political issues. This paper is focused on studying the role of politically-motivated actors and their…
Aggression against Ukraine has drawn widespread international attention, particularly in the wake of the two Russian invasions into Ukrainian territory in 2014 and 2022. Although previous studies have examined social-media dynamics around…
This study quantifies influence between media outlets by applying a novel methodology that uses causal effect estimation on networks and transformer language models. We demonstrate the obscured influence of state-controlled outlets over…
The viral video documenting the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin inspired nation-wide protests that brought national attention to widespread racial injustice and biased policing practices towards black…
This study uses TikTok (N = 8,173) to examine how short-form video platforms challenge the protest paradigm in the recent Black Lives Matter movement. A computer-mediated visual analysis, computer vision, is employed to identify the…
Growing evidence suggests that YouTube's recommendation algorithm plays a role in online radicalization via surfacing extreme content. Radical Islamist groups, in particular, have been profiting from the global appeal of YouTube to…
Climate activism is crucial in stimulating collective societal and behavioral change towards sustainable practices through political pressure. Although multiple factors contribute to the participation in activism, their complex…
The presidential elections in the United States on 3 November 2020 have caused extensive discussions on social media. A part of the content on US elections is organic, coming from users discussing their opinions of the candidates, political…
This study assesses the effect of the #MeToo movement on the language used in judicial opinions on sexual violence related cases from 51 U.S. state and federal appellate courts. The study introduces various indicators to quantify the extent…
Social media are decentralized, interactive, and transformative, empowering users to produce and spread information to influence others. This has changed the dynamics of political communication that were previously dominated by traditional…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to promote prosocial and constructive discourse online. Yet little is known about how these models negotiate and shape underlying values when reframing people's arguments on value-laden…
How do news sources tackle controversial issues? In this work, we take a data-driven approach to understand how controversy interplays with emotional expression and biased language in the news. We begin by introducing a new dataset of…
Social networks play an important role in people's daily socialization, particularly through social media platforms, which have become key channels for communication and information dissemination. The digital ecosystem does not only evolve…
The relationship between crime and the media has long been a focal point of academic research, with traditional media playing a significant role in shaping public perceptions of safety and community well-being. However, the advent of social…
This paper presents how techniques from natural language processing can be used to examine the sentiment trajectories of gang-related drill music in the United Kingdom (UK). This work is important because key public figures are loosely…
Optimism about the Internet's potential to bring the world together has been tempered by concerns about its role in inflaming the 'culture wars'. Via mass selection into like-minded groups, online society may be becoming more fragmented and…
Until recently, social media were seen to promote democratic discourse on social and political issues. However, this powerful communication ecosystem has come under scrutiny for allowing hostile actors to exploit online discussions in an…