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The proliferation of harmful content shared online poses a threat to online information integrity and the integrity of discussion across platforms. Despite various moderation interventions adopted by social media platforms, researchers and…
Online social media platforms such as YouTube have a wide, global reach. However, little is known about the experience of low-resourced language speakers on such platforms; especially in how they experience and navigate harmful content. To…
Online extremist communities operate within a wider information ecosystem shaped by real-world events, news coverage, and cross-community interaction. We adopt a systems perspective to examine these influences using seven years of data from…
There appears to be a dilemma between the freedom of expression and protection from the adverse effects of uncivil political expression online. While previous studies have revealed various factors that affect attitudes toward freedom of…
Social media has played an important role in shaping political discourse over the last decade. At the same time, it is often perceived to have increased political polarization, thanks to the scale of discussions and their public nature. In…
The sudden emergence of large-scale riots in otherwise unconnected cities across the UK in summer 2024 came as a shock for both government officials and citizens. Irrespective of these riots' specific trigger, a key question is how the…
This study examines the structural dynamics of Truth Social, a politically aligned social media platform, during two major political events: the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade and the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago. Using a…
In this study, we characterize the cross-platform mobilization of YouTube and BitChute videos on Twitter during the 2020 U.S. Election fraud discussions. Specifically, we extend the VoterFraud2020 dataset to describe the prevalence of…
The societal issue of digital hostility has previously attracted a lot of attention. The topic counts an ample body of literature, yet remains prominent and challenging as ever due to its subjective nature. We posit that a better…
"Media events" such as political debates generate conditions of shared attention as many users simultaneously tune in with the dual screens of broadcast and social media to view and participate. Are collective patterns of user behavior…
This study examines Facebook and YouTube content from over a thousand news outlets in four European languages from 2018 to 2023, using a Bayesian structural time-series model to evaluate the impact of viral posts. Our results show that most…
The 2016 United States presidential election has been characterized as a period of extreme divisiveness that was exacerbated on social media by the influence of fake news, trolls, and social bots. However, the extent to which the public…
YouTube, a widely popular online platform, has transformed the dynamics of con-tent consumption and interaction for users worldwide. With its extensive range of content crea-tors and viewers, YouTube serves as a hub for video sharing,…
We provide an NLP framework to uncover four linguistic dimensions of political polarization in social media: topic choice, framing, affect and illocutionary force. We quantify these aspects with existing lexical methods, and propose…
Hate speech is ubiquitous on the Web. Recently, the offline causes that contribute to online hate speech have received increasing attention. A recurring question is whether the occurrence of extreme events offline systematically triggers…
The aftermath of the 2020 US Presidential Election witnessed an unprecedented attack on the democratic values of the country through the violent insurrection at Capitol Hill on January 6th, 2021. The attack was fueled by the proliferation…
Social media represent powerful tools of mass communication and information diffusion. They played a pivotal role during recent social uprisings and political mobilizations across the world. Here we present a study of the Gezi Park movement…
Language change is a complex social phenomenon, revealing pathways of communication and sociocultural influence. But, while language change has long been a topic of study in sociolinguistics, traditional linguistic research methods rely on…
Web platforms have allowed political manifestation and debate for decades. Technology changes have brought new opportunities for expression, and the availability of longitudinal data of these debates entice new questions regarding who…
The spread of inaccurate and misleading information may alter behaviours and complicate crisis management, especially during an emergency like the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper aims to investigate information diffusion during the COVID-19…