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Recent research brought awareness of the issue of bots on social media and the significant risks of mass manipulation of public opinion in the context of political discussion. In this work, we leverage Twitter to study the discourse during…
The spread of harmful mis-information in social media is a pressing problem. We refer accounts that have the capability of spreading such information to viral proportions as "Pathogenic Social Media" accounts. These accounts include…
The omnipresent COVID-19 pandemic gave rise to a parallel spreading of misinformation, also referred to as an Infodemic. Consequently, social media have become targets for the application of social bots, that is, algorithms that mimic human…
There is evidence that Russia's Internet Research Agency attempted to interfere with the 2016 U.S. election by running fake accounts on Twitter - often referred to as "Russian trolls". In this work, we: 1) develop machine learning models…
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…
Twitter is increasingly used for political, advertising and marketing campaigns, where the main aim is to influence users to support specific causes, individuals or groups. We propose a novel methodology for mining and analyzing Twitter…
Fake news detection algorithms apply machine learning to various news attributes and their relationships. However, their success is usually evaluated based on how the algorithm performs on a static benchmark, independent of real users. On…
Even though the Internet and social media have increased the amount of news and information people can consume, most users are only exposed to content that reinforces their positions and isolates them from other ideological communities.…
We explore the feasibility of automatically finding accounts that publish sensitive content on Twitter. One natural approach to this problem is to first create a list of sensitive keywords, and then identify Twitter accounts that use these…
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities in generating realistic text across diverse subjects. Concerns have been raised that they could be utilized to produce fake content with a deceptive intention, although evidence…
The discourse around conspiracy theories is currently thriving amidst the rampant misinformation in online environments. Research in this field has been focused on detecting conspiracy theories on social media, often relying on limited…
In the Social Web scenario, large amounts of User-Generated Content (UGC) are diffused through social media often without almost any form of traditional trusted intermediaries. Therefore, the risk of running into misinformation is not…
This paper presents a quantitative study of Twitter, one of the most popular micro-blogging services, from the perspective of user influence. We crawl several datasets from the most active communities on Twitter and obtain 20.5 million user…
Socialbots are software-driven user accounts on social platforms, acting autonomously (mimicking human behavior), with the aims to influence the opinions of other users or spread targeted misinformation for particular goals. As socialbots…
This brief communication presents preliminary findings on automated Twitter accounts distributing links to scientific papers deposited on the preprint repository arXiv. It discusses the implication of the presence of such bots from the…
Malicious actors create inauthentic social media accounts controlled in part by algorithms, known as social bots, to disseminate misinformation and agitate online discussion. While researchers have developed sophisticated methods to detect…
Information quality in social media is an increasingly important issue, but web-scale data hinders experts' ability to assess and correct much of the inaccurate content, or `fake news,' present in these platforms. This paper develops a…
This project addresses the problem of sentiment analysis in twitter; that is classifying tweets according to the sentiment expressed in them: positive, negative or neutral. Twitter is an online micro-blogging and social-networking platform…
Social media accounts engaging in online manipulation can change their behaviors for re-purposing or to evade detection. Existing detection systems are built on features that do not exploit such behavioral patterns. Here we investigate the…
We investigate how users perceive social media account verification, how those perceptions compare to platform practices, and what happens when a gap emerges. We use recent changes in Twitter's verification process as a natural experiment,…