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In this paper, we introduce new formal methods and provide empirical evidence to highlight a unique safety concern prevalent in reinforcement learning (RL)-based recommendation algorithms -- 'user tampering.' User tampering is a situation…
Polarized topics often spark discussion and debate on social media. Recent studies have shown that polarized debates have a specific clustered structure in the endorsement net- work, which indicates that users direct their endorsements…
According to the World Economic Forum, the diffusion of unsubstantiated rumors on online social media is one of the main threats for our society. The disintermediated paradigm of content production and consumption on online social media…
Political trolls initiate online discord not only for the lulz (laughs) but also for ideological reasons, such as promoting their desired political candidates. Political troll groups recently gained spotlight because they were considered…
We restrict the propagation of misinformation in a social-media-like environment while preserving the spread of correct information. We model the environment as a random network of users in which each news item propagates in the network in…
Political debate nowadays takes place mainly on online social media, with election periods amplifying ideological engagement. Reddit is generally considered more resistant to polarization and echo chamber effects than platforms like Twitter…
Although misinformation tends to spread online, it can have serious real-world consequences. In order to develop automated tools to detect and mitigate the impact of misinformation, researchers must leverage algorithms that can adapt to the…
The problem of how to effectively mitigate the flow of misinformation remains a significant challenge. The classical approach to this is public disapproval of claims or "debunking." The approach is still widely used on social media, but it…
The fifty-eighth American presidential election in 2016 still arouse fierce controversyat present. A portion of politicians as well as medium and voters believe that theRussian government interfered with the election of 2016 by controlling…
Nowadays, social media represent persuasive tools that have been progressively weaponized to affect people's beliefs, spread manipulative narratives, and sow conflicts along divergent factions. Software-controlled accounts (i.e., bots) are…
Social media platforms struggle to protect users from harmful content through content moderation. These platforms have recently leveraged machine learning models to cope with the vast amount of user-generated content daily. Since moderation…
Bots are, for many Web and social media users, the source of many dangerous attacks or the carrier of unwanted messages, such as spam. Nevertheless, crawlers and software agents are a precious tool for analysts, and they are continuously…
Misinformation spread presents a technological and social threat to society. With the advance of AI-based language models, automatically generated texts have become difficult to identify and easy to create at scale. We present "The Rumour…
Several elections run in the last years have been characterized by attempts to manipulate the result of the election through the diffusion of fake or malicious news over social networks. This problem has been recognized as a critical issue…
Harmful content detection models tend to have higher false positive rates for content from marginalized groups. In the context of marginal abuse modeling on Twitter, such disproportionate penalization poses the risk of reduced visibility,…
US voters shared large volumes of polarizing political news and information in the form of links to content from Russian, WikiLeaks and junk news sources. Was this low quality political information distributed evenly around the country, or…
Over the past couple of years, anecdotal evidence has emerged linking coordinated campaigns by state-sponsored actors with efforts to manipulate public opinion on the Web, often around major political events, through dedicated accounts, or…
Twitter influences political debates. Phenomena like fake news and hate speech show that political discourse on micro-blogging can become strongly polarised by algorithmic enforcement of selective perception. Some political actors actively…
How communities respond to diverse societal challenges, from economic crises to political upheavals, is shaped by their collective minds - shared representations of ongoing events and current topics. In turn, collective minds are shaped by…
Online social networks have dramatically altered the landscape of public discourse, creating both opportunities for enhanced civic participation and risks of deepening social divisions. Prevalent approaches to studying online polarization…