Related papers: Beyond Trolling: Malware-Induced Misperception Att…
The internet promised to democratize access to knowledge and make the world more open and understanding. The reality of today's internet, however, is far from this ideal. Misinformation, lies, and conspiracies dominate many social media…
Social media platforms systematically reward popularity over authenticity, incentivizing users to strategically tailor their expression for attention. In this paper, we introduce (i) popularity as a strategic expression mechanism, distinct…
This paper presents a specific man-in-the-middle exploit: Ambient Tactical Deception (ATD) in online communication, realized via a malicious web browser extension. Extensions manipulate web content in unobtrusive ways as ambient…
This paper presents a study on the growing threat of "sleeper social bots," AI-driven social bots in the political landscape, created to spread disinformation and manipulate public opinion. We based the name sleeper social bots on their…
Cybercrime is a pervasive threat that impacts every facet of society. Its reach transcends geographic borders and extends far beyond the digital realm, often serving as the catalyst for offline crimes. As modern conflicts become…
Astroturfing, i.e., the fabrication of public discourse by private or state-controlled sponsors via the creation of fake online accounts, has become incredibly widespread in recent years. It gives a disproportionally strong voice to wealthy…
The integrity of elections is central to democratic systems. However, a myriad of malicious actors aspire to influence election outcomes for financial or political benefit. A common means to such ends is by manipulating perceptions of the…
Online extremism has severe societal consequences, including normalizing hate speech, user radicalization, and increased social divisions. Various mitigation strategies have been explored to address these consequences. One such strategy…
We developed and used a collection of statistical methods (unsupervised machine learning) to extract relevant information from a Twitter supplied data set consisting of alleged Russian trolls who (allegedly) attempted to influence the 2016…
As social media has become a predominant mode of communication globally, the rise of abusive content threatens to undermine civil discourse. Recognizing the critical nature of this issue, a significant body of research has been dedicated to…
We argue that governments should mandate a three-tier anonymity framework on social-media platforms as a reactionary measure prompted by the ease-of-production of deepfakes and large-language-model-driven misinformation. The tiers are…
Nowadays, artificial intelligence algorithms are used for targeted and personalized content distribution in the large scale as part of the intense competition for attention in the digital media environment. Unfortunately, targeted…
The framing of political issues can influence policy and public opinion. Even though the public plays a key role in creating and spreading frames, little is known about how ordinary people on social media frame political issues. By creating…
The growing reliance on social media for news consumption necessitates effective countermeasures to mitigate the rapid spread of misinformation. Prebunking, a proactive method that arms users with accurate information before they come…
This paper presents TrollHunter2020, a real-time detection mechanism we used to hunt for trolling narratives on Twitter during the 2020 U.S. elections. Trolling narratives form on Twitter as alternative explanations of polarizing events…
Language models (LMs) are pretrained on diverse data sources, including news, discussion forums, books, and online encyclopedias. A significant portion of this data includes opinions and perspectives which, on one hand, celebrate democracy…
Polarization among US political parties, media and elites is a widely studied topic. Prominent lines of prior research across multiple disciplines have observed and analyzed growing polarization in social media. In this paper, we present a…
As the last few years have seen an increase in online hostility and polarization both, we need to move beyond the fack-checking reflex or the praise for better moderation on social networking sites (SNS) and investigate their impact on…
Conversational AI has been proposed as a scalable way to correct public misconceptions and spread misinformation. Yet its effectiveness may depend on perceptions of its political neutrality. As LLMs enter partisan conflict, elites…
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…