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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,…
Recent research has shown a substantial active presence of bots in online social networks (OSNs). In this paper we utilise our past work on studying bots (Stweeler) to comparatively analyse the usage and impact of bots and humans on…
Twitter bots are a controversial element of the platform, and their negative impact is well known. In the field of scientific communication, they have been perceived in a more positive light, and the accounts that serve as feeds alerting…
Bots, software-controlled accounts that operate on social media, have been used to manipulate and deceive. We studied the characteristics and activity of bots around major political events, including elections in various countries. In this…
It has been widely recognized that automated bots may have a significant impact on the outcomes of national events. It is important to raise public awareness about the threat of bots on social media during these important events, such as…
Objective: Domestic abuse cases have risen significantly over the last four years, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges for victims and survivors in accessing support. In this study, we investigate the role that chatbots…
Social media has become an indispensable channel for political communication. However, the political discourse is increasingly characterized by hate speech, which affects not only the reputation of individual politicians but also the…
According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, in the United States hundreds of thousands initiate smoking each year, and millions live with smoking-related dis- eases. Many tobacco users discuss their habits and preferences on…
Algorithms are widely applied to detect hate speech and abusive language in social media. We investigated whether the human-annotated data used to train these algorithms are biased. We utilized a publicly available annotated Twitter dataset…
Efforts by foreign actors to influence public opinion have gained considerable attention because of their potential to impact democratic elections. Thus, the ability to identify and counter sources of disinformation is increasingly becoming…
Generative AI models continue to become more powerful. The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 has ushered in a new era of AI. ChatGPT and other similar chatbots have a range of capabilities, from answering student homework questions to…
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…
The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine emphasises the role social media plays in modern-day warfare, with conflict occurring in both the physical and information environments. There is a large body of work on identifying malicious…
The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 marked the beginning of a new era in AI, the availability of generative AI tools for everyone to use. ChatGPT and other similar chatbots boast a wide range of capabilities from answering student…
The Turing test aimed to recognize the behavior of a human from that of a computer algorithm. Such challenge is more relevant than ever in today's social media context, where limited attention and technology constrain the expressive power…
Political online participation in the form of discussing political issues and exchanging opinions among citizens is gaining importance with more and more formats being held digitally. To come to a decision, a thorough discussion and…
As our reliance on social media platforms and web services increase day by day, exploiters view these platforms as an opportunity to manipulate our thoughts ad actions. These platforms have become an open playground for social bot accounts.…
Online abuse is becoming an increasingly prevalent issue in modern-day society, with 41 percent of Americans having experienced online harassment in some capacity in 2021. People who identify as women, in particular, can be subjected to a…
This paper explores ways in which the harmful effects of cyber hate may be mitigated through mechanisms for enhancing the self governance of new digital spaces. We report findings from a mixed methods study of responses to cyber hate posts,…
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…