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Despite their playful purpose social media changed the way users access information, debate, and form their opinions. Recent studies, indeed, showed that users online tend to promote their favored narratives and thus to form polarized…
Social media platforms offer unprecedented opportunities for connectivity and exchange of ideas; however, they also serve as fertile grounds for the dissemination of disinformation. Over the years, there has been a rise in state-sponsored…
In a stylized voting model, we establish that increasing the share of critical thinkers -- individuals who are aware of the ambivalent nature of a certain issue -- in the population increases the efficiency of surveys (elections) but might…
Biased news contributes to societal polarization and is often reinforced by hostile reader comments, constituting a vital yet often overlooked aspect of news dissemination. Our study reveals that offensive comments support biased content,…
Influence maximization (IM) aims to find seed users on an online social network to maximize the spread of information about a target product through word-of-mouth propagation among all users. Prior IM methods mostly focus on maximizing the…
In 2016, a network of social media accounts animated by Russian operatives attempted to divert political discourse within the American public around the presidential elections. This was a coordinated effort, part of a Russian-led complex…
Social media platforms have been widely linked to societal harms, including rising polarization and the erosion of constructive debate. Can these problems be mitigated through prosocial interventions? We address this question using a novel…
For Iranians and the Iranian diaspora, the Farsi Twittersphere provides an important alternative to state media and an outlet for political discourse. But this understudied online space has become an opinion manipulation battleground, with…
Fake news on Social Media undermines democratic institutions and processes. Especially since 2016, researchers from many disciplines have focussed on ways to address the phenomenon. Much of the research focus to date has been on…
The exponential growth of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook has revolutionized textual communication and textual content publication in human society. However, they have been increasingly exploited to propagate toxic…
This paper aims to build an actionable framework for permissible online content moderation to combat misinformation. Often strong content moderation policies are invoked when misinformation causes harm. By adopting Mill's ethical framework,…
Online Social Networks (OSNs) widely adopt content moderation to mitigate the spread of abusive and toxic discourse. Nonetheless, the real effectiveness of moderation interventions remains unclear due to the high cost of data collection and…
We study how coordinated disinformation campaigns affect elections. We develop a constrained information design model in which a sender deploys uninformative messages that mimic voters' exogenous informative signals. Voters initially…
Social media has enabled users and organizations to obtain information about technology usage like software usage and even security feature usage. However, on the dark side it has also allowed an adversary to potentially exploit the users…
Online social networks (OSNs) are ubiquitous attracting millions of users all over the world. Being a popular communication media OSNs are exploited in a variety of cyber attacks. In this article, we discuss the Chameleon attack technique,…
Quantifying how individuals react to social influence is crucial for tackling collective political behavior online. While many studies of opinion in public forums focus on social feedback, they often overlook the potential for human…
We investigate the political roles of "Internet trolls" in social media. Political trolls, such as the ones linked to the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA), have recently gained enormous attention for their ability to sway public…
Online social networks are used to diffuse opinions and ideas among users, enabling a faster communication and a wider audience. The way in which opinions are conditioned by social interactions is usually called social influence. Social…
Online social media are key platforms for the public to discuss political issues. As a result, researchers have used data from these platforms to analyze public opinions and forecast election results. Recent studies reveal the existence of…
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.…