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Internet users and businesses are increasingly using online social networks (OSN) to drive audience traffic and increase their popularity. In order to boost social presence, OSN users need to increase the visibility and reach of their…
Bots are automated social media users that can be used to amplify (mis)information and sow harmful discourse. In order to effectively influence users, bots can be generated to reproduce human user behavior. Indeed, people tend to trust…
The dissemination of fake news intended to deceive people, influence public opinion and manipulate social outcomes, has become a pressing problem on social media. Moreover, information sharing on social media facilitates diffusion of viral…
Social media feeds typically favor posts according to user engagement. The most ubiquitous type of engagement (and the type we study) is *likes*. Users customarily take engagement metrics such as likes as a neutral proxy for quality and…
A very large number of people use Online Social Networks daily. Such platforms thus become attractive targets for agents that seek to gain access to the attention of large audiences, and influence perceptions or opinions. Botnets,…
Illicit drug trafficking via social media sites such as Instagram has become a severe problem, thus drawing a great deal of attention from law enforcement and public health agencies. How to identify illicit drug dealers from social media…
Recent studies have confirmed a growing trend, especially among youngsters, of using Online Social Media as favourite information platform at the expense of traditional mass media. Indeed, they can easily reach a wide audience at a high…
In online discussion communities, users can interact and share information and opinions on a wide variety of topics. However, some users may create multiple identities, or sockpuppets, and engage in undesired behavior by deceiving others or…
The pervasive use of social media has grown to over two billion users to date, and is commonly utilized as a means to share information and shape world events. Evidence suggests that passive social media usage (i.e., viewing without taking…
Popular social media platforms TikTok, Facebook and Instagram allow third-parties to run targeted advertising campaigns on sensitive attributes in-platform. These ads are interactive by default, meaning users can comment or ``react'' (e.g.,…
News feeds in virtually all social media platforms include engagement metrics, such as the number of times each post is liked and shared. We find that exposure to these social engagement signals increases the vulnerability of users to…
There has been concern about the proliferation of the "QAnon" conspiracy theory on Facebook, but little is known about how its misleading narrative propagated on the world's largest social media platform. Thus, the present research analyzed…
The spread of misinformation poses a threat to the social media ecosystem. Effective countermeasures to mitigate this threat require that social media platforms be able to accurately detect low-credibility accounts even before the content…
Purpose: This research investigates controversial online marketing techniques that involve buying hundreds or even thousands of upvotes, likes, comments, etc. Methodology: Observation and categorization of 7,426 campaigns posted on the…
Organizations have long used deception as a means to exert influence in pursuit of their agendas. In particular, information operations such as propaganda distribution, support of antigovernment protest, and revelation of politically and…
Consuming news from social media is becoming increasingly popular. Social media appeals to users due to its fast dissemination of information, low cost, and easy access. However, social media also enables the widespread of fake news.…
In the last decades an increasing deal of research has investigated the phenomenon of opinion misperception in human communities and, more recently, in social media. Opinion misperception is the wrong evaluation by community's members of…
Prior work has shown that Twitter users use skin-toned emoji as an act of self-representation to express their racial/ethnic identity. We test whether this signal of identity can influence readers' perceptions about the content of a post…
We consider a network of interacting agents and we model the process of choice on the adoption of a given innovative product by means of statistical-mechanics tools. The modelization allows us to focus on the effects of direct interactions…
Cyberbullying is a growing problem affecting more than half of all American teens. The main goal of this paper is to investigate fundamentally new approaches to understand and automatically detect incidents of cyberbullying over images in…