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Does engagement with opposing views help break down ideological `echo chambers'; or does it backfire and reinforce them? This question remains critical as academics, policymakers and activists grapple with the question of how to regulate…
With the ever-increasing spread of misinformation on online social networks, it has become very important to identify the spreaders of misinformation (unintentional), disinformation (intentional), and misinformation refutation. It can help…
Coordinated campaigns are used to influence and manipulate social media platforms and their users, a critical challenge to the free exchange of information online. Here we introduce a general, unsupervised network-based methodology to…
Social networking and micro-blogging services, such as Twitter, play an important role in sharing digital information. Despite the popularity and usefulness of social media, they are regularly abused by corrupt users. One of these nefarious…
As more and more personal photos are shared online, being able to obfuscate identities in such photos is becoming a necessity for privacy protection. People have largely resorted to blacking out or blurring head regions, but they result in…
In most real-world applications, it is seldom the case that a given observable evolves independently of its environment. In social networks, users' behavior results from the people they interact with, news in their feed, or trending topics.…
The new information and communication technology providers collect increasing amounts of personal data, a lot of which is user generated. Unless use policies are privacy-friendly, this leaves users vulnerable to privacy risks such as…
Escalating proliferation of inorganic accounts, commonly known as bots, within the digital ecosystem represents an ongoing and multifaceted challenge to online security, trustworthiness, and user experience. These bots, often employed for…
The aim of this paper is to examine how consumer perceptions of social media advertisements affect advertising value and brand awareness. With a rapid increase in the number of social media users over the last ten years, a new advertising…
Online Social Networks (OSNs) witness a rise in user activity whenever an event takes place. Malicious entities exploit this spur in user-engagement levels to spread malicious content that compromises system reputation and degrades user…
Corrections given by ordinary social media users, also referred to as Social Correction have emerged as a viable intervention against misinformation as per the recent literature. However, little is known about how often users give disputing…
We uncover a previously unknown, ongoing astroturfing attack on the popularity mechanisms of social media platforms: ephemeral astroturfing attacks. In this attack, a chosen keyword or topic is artificially promoted by coordinated and…
With the growing popularity of microblogging services such as Twitter in recent years, an increasing number of users are using these services in their daily lives. The huge volume of information generated by users raises new opportunities…
Identifying influencers in a given social network has become an important research problem for various applications, including accelerating the spread of information in viral marketing and preventing the spread of fake news and rumors. The…
Instagram infographics are a digital activism tool that have redefined action frames for technology-facilitated social movements. From the 1960s through the 1980s, United States ethnic movements practiced collective action: ideologically…
Influential users play an important role in online social networks since users tend to have an impact on one other. Therefore, the proposed work analyzes users and their behavior in order to identify influential users and predict user…
In the recent years, social media has grown to become a major source of information for many online users. This has given rise to the spread of misinformation through deepfakes. Deepfakes are videos or images that replace one persons face…
A growing body of evidence points to critical vulnerabilities of social media, such as the emergence of partisan echo chambers and the viral spread of misinformation. We show that these vulnerabilities are amplified by abusive behaviors…
An increasing number of today's social interactions occurs using online social media as communication channels. Some online social networks have become extremely popular in the last decade. They differ among themselves in the character of…
In this work, we are interested in finding the most efficient use of a budget to promote an opinion by paying agents within a group to supplant their true opinions. We model opinions as continuous scalars ranging from 0 to 1 with 1 (0)…