Related papers: SCG: Spotting Coordinated Groups in Social Media
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…
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…
The proliferation of interactive AI like ChatGPT has fueled intense public discourse surrounding AI- generated content (AIGC). While some fear job displacement, others anticipate productivity gains. Social media provides a rich source of…
Understanding how political attention is divided and over what subjects is crucial for research on areas such as agenda setting, framing, and political rhetoric. Existing methods for measuring attention, such as manual labeling according to…
Information spreading social media platforms has become ubiquitous in our lives due to viral information propagation regardless of its veracity. Some information cascades turn out to be viral since they circulated rapidly on the Internet.…
Recent research has focused on the monitoring of global-scale online data for improved detection of epidemics, mood patterns, movements in the stock market, political revolutions, box-office revenues, consumer behaviour and many other…
Extracting topics from large collections of unstructured text-documents has become a central task in current NLP applications and algorithms like NMF, LDA as well as their generalizations are the well-established current state of the art.…
Recently a simple military exercise on the Internet was perceived as the beginning of a new civil war in the US. Social media aggregate people around common interests eliciting a collective framing of narratives and worldviews. However, the…
Coordination is a fundamental aspect of life. The advent of social media has made it integral also to online human interactions, such as those that characterize thriving online communities and social movements. At the same time,…
User-generated content (UGC) on social media platforms is vulnerable to incitements and manipulations, necessitating effective regulations. To address these challenges, those platforms often deploy automated content moderators tasked with…
Social media moderation policies are often at the center of public debate, and their implementation and enactment are sometimes surrounded by a veil of mystery. Unsurprisingly, due to limited platform transparency and data access,…
Twitter bot detection has become an important and challenging task to combat misinformation and protect the integrity of the online discourse. State-of-the-art approaches generally leverage the topological structure of the Twittersphere,…
Coordinated campaigns frequently exploit social media platforms by artificially amplifying topics, making inauthentic trends appear organic, and misleading users into engagement. Distinguishing these coordinated efforts from genuine public…
As platforms increasingly rely on learning algorithms, collectives may form and seek ways to influence these platforms to align with their own interests. This can be achieved by coordinated submission of altered data. To evaluate the…
On social media platforms like Twitter, users regularly share their opinions and comments with software vendors and service providers. Popular software products might get thousands of user comments per day. Research has shown that such…
Societies are complex systems which tend to polarize into sub-groups of individuals with dramatically opposite perspectives. This phenomenon is reflected -- and often amplified -- in online social networks where, however, humans are no more…
With the 2022 US midterm elections approaching, conspiratorial claims about the 2020 presidential elections continue to threaten users' trust in the electoral process. To regulate election misinformation, YouTube introduced policies to…
Social media platforms have become a hub for political activities and discussions, democratizing participation in these endeavors. However, they have also become an incubator for manipulation campaigns, like information operations (IOs).…
This thesis addresses two paradoxes: (1) why empirical studies find that fake news represent only a small share of the information consulted and shared on social media despite the absence of editorial control or journalistic norms, and (2)…
Within OSNs, many of our supposedly online friends may instead be fake accounts called social bots, part of large groups that purposely re-share targeted content. Here, we study retweeting behaviors on Twitter, with the ultimate goal of…