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Online harms are a growing problem in digital spaces, putting user safety at risk and reducing trust in social media platforms. One of the most persistent forms of harm is hate speech. To address this, we need tools that combine the speed…
The popularity of social media platforms such as Twitter has led to the proliferation of automated bots, creating both opportunities and challenges in information dissemination, user engagements, and quality of services. Past works on…
Online Social Networks represent a novel opportunity for political campaigns, revolutionising the paradigm of political communication. Nevertheless, many studies uncovered the presence of d/misinformation campaigns or of malicious…
Chatbots, or bots for short, are multi-modal collaborative assistants that can help people complete useful tasks. Usually, when chatbots are referenced in connection with elections, they often draw negative reactions due to the fear of…
While social media platforms, such as Twitter, provide a medium for large-scale opinion sharing during news events, it is manually impossible for individuals or media agencies to process the vast volume of content to identify key…
Social media platforms can expose influential trends in many aspects of everyday life. However, the movements they represent can be contaminated by disinformation. Social bots are one of the significant sources of disinformation in social…
In an era where social media platforms are central to political communication, the activity of bots raises pressing concerns about amplification, manipulation, and misinformation. Drawing on more than 315 million tweets posted from August…
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…
Counterspeech offers a non-repressive approach to moderate hate speech in online communities. Research has examined how counterspeech chatbots restrain hate speakers and support targets, but their impact on bystanders remains unclear.…
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…
A wide range of participation is essential for democracy, as it helps prevent the dominance of extreme views, erosion of legitimacy, and political polarization. However, engagement in online political discussions often features a limited…
Bots are social media accounts that automate interaction with other users, and they are active on the StrongerIn-Brexit conversation happening over Twitter. These automated scripts generate content through these platforms and then interact…
The massive spread of digital misinformation has been identified as a major global risk and has been alleged to influence elections and threaten democracies. Communication, cognitive, social, and computer scientists are engaged in efforts…
For more than a decade now, academicians and online platform administrators have been studying solutions to the problem of bot detection. Bots are computer algorithms whose use is far from being benign: malicious bots are purposely created…
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…
A number of organizations ranging from terrorist groups such as ISIS to politicians and nation states reportedly conduct explicit campaigns to influence opinion on social media, posing a risk to democratic processes. There is thus a growing…
Social media platforms provide several social interactional features. Due to the large scale reach of social media, these interactional features help enable various types of political discourse. Constructive and diversified discourse is…
The idea that social media platforms like Twitter are inhabited by vast numbers of social bots has become widely accepted in recent years. Social bots are assumed to be automated social media accounts operated by malicious actors with the…
Social bots are currently regarded an influential but also somewhat mysterious factor in public discourse and opinion making. They are considered to be capable of massively distributing propaganda in social and online media and their…
Social media is commonly used by the public during election campaigns to express their opinions regarding different issues. Among various social media channels, Twitter provides an efficient platform for researchers and politicians to…