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Far-right actors are often purveyors of Islamophobic hate speech online, using social media to spread divisive and prejudiced messages which can stir up intergroup tensions and conflict. Hateful content can inflict harm on targeted victims,…
We report the first, to the best of our knowledge, hand-in-hand collaboration between human rights activists and machine learners, leveraging crowd-sourcing to study online abuse against women on Twitter. On a technical front, we carefully…
Online toxic attacks, such as harassment, trolling, and hate speech have been linked to an increase in offline violence and negative psychological effects on victims. In this paper, we studied the impact of toxicity on users' online…
While social media has become an empowering agent to individual voices and freedom of expression, it also facilitates anti-social behaviors including online harassment, cyberbullying, and hate speech. In this paper, we present the first…
This year (2014) in the month of May, the tenure of the 15th Lok Sabha was to end and the elections to the 543 parliamentary seats were to be held. A whooping $5 billion were spent on these elections, which made us stand second only to the…
In micro-blogging platforms, people connect and interact with others. However, due to cognitive biases, they tend to interact with like-minded people and read agreeable information only. Many efforts to make people connect with those who…
The advent of social media changed the way we consume content favoring a disintermediated access and production. This scenario has been matter of critical discussion about its impact on society. Magnified in the case of Arab Spring or…
The daily exposure of social media users to propaganda and disinformation campaigns has reinvigorated the need to investigate the local and global patterns of diffusion of different (mis)information content on social media. Echo chambers…
Sentiment analysis is the task of automatic analysis of opinions and emotions of users towards an entity or some aspect of that entity. Political Sentiment Analysis of social media helps the political strategists to scrutinize the…
Using language models, we analyze a sample of 67 million tweets and 30 million Reddit comments referencing a set of 215 political entities from 2010-2023 from partisan users, journalists, and politicians. Our analysis indicates outgroup…
Increasing evidence suggests that a growing amount of social media content is generated by autonomous entities known as social bots. In this work we present a framework to detect such entities on Twitter. We leverage more than a thousand…
Online abuse is becoming an increasingly prevalent issue in modern-day society, with 41 percent of Americans having experienced online harassment in some capacity in 2021. People who identify as women, in particular, can be subjected to a…
State-sponsored "bad actors" increasingly weaponize social media platforms to launch cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns during elections. Social media companies, due to their rapid growth and scale, struggle to prevent the…
Ego networks have proved to be a valuable tool for understanding the relationships that individuals establish with their peers, both in offline and online social networks. Particularly interesting are the cognitive constraints associated…
The Internet Research Agency (IRA) influences online political conversations in the United States, exacerbating existing partisan divides and sowing discord. In this paper we investigate the IRA's communication strategies by analyzing…
Twitter is increasingly used for political, advertising and marketing campaigns, where the main aim is to influence users to support specific causes, individuals or groups. We propose a novel methodology for mining and analyzing Twitter…
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…
In the pursuit of bolstering user safety, social media platforms deploy active moderation strategies, including content removal and user suspension. These measures target users engaged in discussions marked by hate speech or toxicity, often…
Global recruitment into radical Islamic movements has spurred renewed interest in the appeal of political extremism. Is the appeal a rational response to material conditions or is it the expression of psychological and personality disorders…
Polarization in American politics has been extensively documented and analyzed for decades, and the phenomenon became all the more apparent during the 2016 presidential election, where Trump and Clinton depicted two radically different…