Related papers: Scalable and Generalizable Social Bot Detection th…
Social media platforms enable instant and ubiquitous connectivity and are essential to social interaction and communication in our technological society. Apart from its advantages, these platforms have given rise to negative behaviors in…
Bot detection using machine learning (ML), with network flow-level features, has been extensively studied in the literature. However, existing flow-based approaches typically incur a high computational overhead and do not completely capture…
Stance detection, as the task of determining the viewpoint of a social media post towards a target as 'favor' or 'against', has been understudied in the challenging yet realistic scenario where there is limited labeled data for a certain…
While existing social bot detectors perform well on benchmarks, their robustness across diverse real-world scenarios remains limited due to unclear ground truth and varied misleading cues. In particular, the impact of shortcut learning,…
The goal of this project is to create and study novel techniques to identify early warning signals for socially disruptive events, like riots, wars, or revolutions using only publicly available data on social media. Such techniques need to…
We have witnessed a boosted demand for graph analytics at Twitter in recent years, and graph analytics has become one of the key parts of Twitter's large-scale data analytics and machine learning for driving engagement, serving the most…
Computational propaganda deploys social or political bots to try to shape, steer and manipulate online public discussions and influence decisions. Collective behaviour of populations of social bots has not been yet widely studied, though…
Social media platforms attempting to curb abuse and misinformation have been accused of political bias. We deploy neutral social bots who start following different news sources on Twitter, and track them to probe distinct biases emerging…
Hashtag segmentation is the task of breaking a hashtag into its constituent tokens. Hashtags often encode the essence of user-generated posts, along with information like topic and sentiment, which are useful in downstream tasks. Hashtags…
Online social media platforms have made the world more connected than ever before, thereby making it easier for everyone to spread their content across a wide variety of audiences. Twitter is one such popular platform where people publish…
Malicious Twitter bots are detrimental to public discourse on social media. Past studies have looked at spammers, fake followers, and astroturfing bots, but retweet bots, which artificially inflate content, are not well understood. In this…
Social media channels such as Twitter have emerged as popular platforms for crowds to respond to public events such as speeches, sports and debates. While this promises tremendous opportunities to understand and make sense of the reception…
The discovery of phenomena in social networks has prompted renewed interests in the field. Data in social networks however can be massive, requiring scalable Big Data architecture. Conversely, research in Big Data needs the volume and…
Social networks are quickly becoming the primary medium for discussing what is happening around real-world events. The information that is generated on social platforms like Twitter can produce rich data streams for immediate insights into…
Twitter is a popular social network platform where users can interact and post texts of up to 280 characters called tweets. Hashtags, hyperlinked words in tweets, have increasingly become crucial for tweet retrieval and search. Using…
We tackle the challenge of topic classification of tweets in the context of analyzing a large collection of curated streams by news outlets and other organizations to deliver relevant content to users. Our approach is novel in applying…
Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have facilitated the spread of misinformation, necessitating automated detection systems. This systematic review evaluates 36 studies that apply machine learning (ML) and deep…
"Social sensing" is a form of crowd-sourcing that involves systematic analysis of digital communications to detect real-world events. Here we consider the use of social sensing for observing natural hazards. In particular, we present a case…
Geographically annotated social media is extremely valuable for modern information retrieval. However, when researchers can only access publicly-visible data, one quickly finds that social media users rarely publish location information. In…
During sudden onset crisis events, the presence of spam, rumors and fake content on Twitter reduces the value of information contained on its messages (or "tweets"). A possible solution to this problem is to use machine learning to…