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The ever-increasing amount of information flowing through Social Media forces the members of these networks to compete for attention and influence by relying on other people to spread their message. A large study of information propagation…
In recent years, the reliability of information on the Internet has emerged as a crucial issue of modern society. Social network sites (SNSs) have revolutionized the way in which information is spread by allowing users to freely share…
An identity denotes the role an individual or a group plays in highly differentiated contemporary societies. In this paper, our goal is to classify Twitter users based on their role identities. We first collect a coarse-grained public…
Following the 2016 US presidential election, there has been an increased focus on politically-motivated manipulation of mass-user behavior on social media platforms. Since a large volume of political discussion occurs on these platforms,…
Social media has become a key medium of communication in today's society. This realisation has led to many parties employing artificial users (or bots) to mislead others into believing untruths or acting in a beneficial manner to such…
Toxicity is endemic to online social networks including Twitter. It follows a Pareto like distribution where most of the toxicity is generated by a very small number of profiles and as such, analyzing and characterizing these toxic profiles…
Serious concerns have been raised about the role of 'socialbots' in manipulating public opinion and influencing the outcome of elections by retweeting partisan content to increase its reach. Here we analyze the role and influence of…
An essential topic in online social network security is how to accurately detect bot accounts and relieve their harmful impacts (e.g., misinformation, rumor, and spam) on genuine users. Based on a real-world data set, we construct…
Social bots play a significant role in many online social networks (OSN) as they imitate human behavior. This fact raises difficult questions about their capabilities and potential risks. Given the recent advances in Generative AI (GenAI),…
Bots, social media accounts controlled by software rather than by humans, have recently been under the spotlight for their association with various forms of online manipulation. To date, much work has focused on social bot detection, but…
Social bots have emerged over the last decade, initially creating a nuisance while more recently used to intimidate journalists, sway electoral events, and aggravate existing social fissures. This social threat has spawned a bot detection…
Social botnets have become an important phenomenon on social media. There are many ways in which social bots can disrupt or influence online discourse, such as, spam hashtags, scam twitter users, and astroturfing. In this paper we…
The increased relevance of social media in our daily life has been accompanied by efforts to manipulate online conversations and opinions. Deceptive social bots -- automated or semi-automated accounts designed to impersonate humans -- have…
Fake news in social media has quickly become one of the most discussed topics in today's society. With false information proliferating and causing a significant impact in the political, economical, and social domains, research efforts to…
In the context of Twitter, social capitalists are specific users trying to increase their number of followers and interactions by any means. These users are not healthy for the Twitter network since they flaw notions of influence and…
We present the first in-depth and large-scale study of misleading repurposing, in which a malicious user changes the identity of their social media account via, among other things, changes to the profile attributes in order to use the…
It has recently become possible to study the dynamics of information diffusion in techno-social systems at scale, due to the emergence of online platforms, such as Twitter, with millions of users. One question that systematically recurs is…
The issue of quantifying and characterizing various forms of social media manipulation and abuse has been at the forefront of the computational social science research community for over a decade. In this paper, I provide a…
With the increasing use of online social networks as a source of news and information, the propensity for a rumor to disseminate widely and quickly poses a great concern, especially in disaster situations where users do not have enough time…
Fake news are affecting a large proportion of the population even becoming a danger to the society. Mostly, this disinformation flow take place through Internet. Being aware of that problem, in this work we propose a synthetic indicator…