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Social media trolling is a powerful tactic to manipulate public opinion on issues with a high moral component. Troll farms, as evidenced in the past, created fabricated content to provoke or silence people to share their opinion on social…
Social media platforms such as Twitter have a fundamental role in facilitating the spread and discussion of ideas online through the concept of retweeting and replying. However, these features also contribute to the spread of…
Twitter, prompted by the rapid spread of alternative narratives, started actively warning users about the spread of COVID-19 misinformation. This form of soft moderation comes in two forms: as a warning cover before the Tweet is displayed…
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…
The massive spread of digital misinformation has been identified as a major global risk and has been alleged to influence elections and threaten democracies. Communication, cognitive, social, and computer scientists are engaged in efforts…
Data extracted from social networks like Twitter are increasingly being used to build applications and services that mine and summarize public reactions to events, such as traffic monitoring platforms, identification of epidemic outbreaks,…
Social media, once hailed as a vehicle for democratization and the promotion of positive social change across the globe, are under attack for becoming a tool of political manipulation and spread of disinformation. A case in point is the…
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.…
Vaccine hesitancy, which has recently been driven by online narratives, significantly degrades the efficacy of vaccination strategies, such as those for COVID-19. Despite broad agreement in the medical community about the safety and…
Thanks to platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, people can know facts and events that otherwise would have been silenced. However, social media significantly contribute also to fast spreading biased and false news while targeting specific…
In this work we study how pervasive is the presence of disinformation in the Italian debate around immigration on Twitter and the role of automated accounts in the diffusion of such content. By characterising the Twitter users with an…
While most social media companies have attempted to address the challenge of COVID-19 misinformation, the success of those policies is difficult to assess, especially when focusing on individual platforms. This study explores the…
The proliferation of harmful content shared online poses a threat to online information integrity and the integrity of discussion across platforms. Despite various moderation interventions adopted by social media platforms, researchers and…
In this work, we collect a moderate-sized representative corpus of tweets (200,000 approx.) pertaining Covid-19 vaccination spanning over a period of seven months (September 2020 - March 2021). Following a Transfer Learning approach, we…
Polarization, declining trust, and wavering support for democratic norms are pressing threats to U.S. democracy. Exposure to verified and quality news may lower individual susceptibility to these threats and make citizens more resilient to…
Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered recommender systems play a crucial role in determining the content that users are exposed to on social media platforms. However, the behavioural patterns of these systems are often opaque, complicating…
Until recently, social media was seen to promote democratic discourse on social and political issues. However, this powerful communication platform has come under scrutiny for allowing hostile actors to exploit online discussions in an…
Social bots are currently regarded an influential but also somewhat mysterious factor in public discourse and opinion making. They are considered to be capable of massively distributing propaganda in social and online media and their…
The idea that social media platforms like Twitter are inhabited by vast numbers of social bots has become widely accepted in recent years. Social bots are assumed to be automated social media accounts operated by malicious actors with the…
There is an ongoing debate about how to moderate toxic speech on social media and the impact of content moderation on online discourse. This paper proposes and validates a methodology for measuring the content-moderation-induced distortions…