Related papers: Women, politics and Twitter: Using machine learnin…
Twitter as a new form of social media potentially contains useful information that opens new opportunities for content analysis on tweets. This paper examines the predictive power of Twitter regarding the US presidential election of 2012.…
Gender bias in political discourse is a significant problem on today's social media. Previous studies found that the gender of politicians indeed influences the content directed towards them by the general public. However, these works are…
When machine-learning algorithms are used in high-stakes decisions, we want to ensure that their deployment leads to fair and equitable outcomes. This concern has motivated a fast-growing literature that focuses on diagnosing and addressing…
The explosive growth of social media has not only revolutionized communication but also brought challenges such as political polarization, misinformation, hate speech, and echo chambers. This dissertation employs computational social…
Foreign information operations conducted by Russian and Chinese actors exploit the United States' permissive information environment. These campaigns threaten democratic institutions and the broader Westphalian model. Yet, existing…
Online abuse and threats towards politicians have become a significant concern in the Netherlands, like in many other countries across the world. This paper analyses gender differences in abuse received by Dutch politicians on Twitter,…
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…
Inspired by the recent social movement of #MeToo, we are building a chatbot to assist survivors of sexual harassment cases (designed for the city of Maastricht but can easily be extended). The motivation behind this work is twofold:…
Modelling and forecasting real-life human behaviour using online social media is an active endeavour of interest in politics, government, academia, and industry. Since its creation in 2006, Twitter has been proposed as a potential…
Online social networks create echo-chambers where people are infrequently exposed to opposing opinions. Even if such exposure occurs, the persuasive effect may be minimal or nonexistent. Recent studies have shown that exposure to opposing…
In February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This event had global repercussions, especially on the political decisions of European countries. As expected, the role of Italy in the conflict became a major campaign…
Individuals of modern societies share ideas and participate in collective processes within a pervasive, variable, and mostly hidden ecosystem of content filtering technologies that determine what information we see online. Despite the…
With the online proliferation of hate speech, there is an urgent need for systems that can detect such harmful content. In this paper, We present the machine learning models developed for the Automatic Misogyny Identification (AMI) shared…
Political discourse on Twitter is a moving target: politicians continuously make statements about their positions. It is therefore crucial to track their discourse on social media to understand their ideological positions and goals.…
Politics in different countries show diverse degrees of polarization, which tends to be stronger on social media, given how easy it became to connect and engage with like-minded individuals on the web. A way of reducing polarization would…
Online abuse directed towards women on the social media platform Twitter has attracted considerable attention in recent years. An automated method to effectively identify misogynistic abuse could improve our understanding of the patterns,…
Argumentative dialogues across political divides can reduce polarization, yet opportunities for citizens to engage with opposing views in accessible and structured ways remain limited. AI dialogue partners offer a scalable framework for…
In this work we study how pervasive is the presence of disinformation in the Italian debate around immigration on Twitter and the role of automated accounts in the diffusion of such content. By characterising the Twitter users with an…
Social media platforms play a pivotal role in shaping public opinion and amplifying political discourse, particularly during elections. However, the same dynamics that foster democratic engagement can also exacerbate polarization. To better…
During deliberation processes, mediators and facilitators typically need to select a small and representative set of opinions later used to produce digestible reports for stakeholders. In online deliberation platforms, algorithmic selection…