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Influence operations are large-scale efforts to manipulate public opinion. The rapid detection and disruption of these operations is critical for healthy public discourse. Emergent AI technologies may enable novel operations which evade…
Over the past couple of years, the topic of "fake news" and its influence over people's opinions has become a growing cause for concern. Although the spread of disinformation on the Internet is not a new phenomenon, the widespread use of…
The detection of state-sponsored trolls operating in influence campaigns on social media is a critical and unsolved challenge for the research community, which has significant implications beyond the online realm. To address this challenge,…
Influential node detection is a central research topic in social network analysis. Many existing methods rely on the assumption that the network structure is completely known \textit{a priori}. However, in many applications, network…
Russian Internet Trolls use fake personas to spread disinformation through multiple social media streams. Given the increased frequency of this threat across social media platforms, understanding those operations is paramount in combating…
Influence campaigns are a growing concern in the online spaces. Policymakers, moderators and researchers have taken various routes to fight these campaigns and make online systems safer for regular users. To this end, our paper presents…
Social networks have triumphed in communicating people online, but they have also been exploited to launch influence operations for manipulating society. The deployment of software-controlled accounts (e.g., social bots) has proven to be…
The behavior and decision making of groups or communities can be dramatically influenced by individuals pushing particular agendas, e.g., to promote or disparage a person or an activity, to call for action, etc.. In the examination of…
How, in 20 short years, did we go from the promise of the internet to democratize access to knowledge and make the world more understanding and enlightened, to the litany of daily horrors that is today's internet? We are awash in…
Twitter, a popular social media outlet, has evolved into a vast source of linguistic data, rich with opinion, sentiment, and discussion. Due to the increasing popularity of Twitter, its perceived potential for exerting social influence has…
Identifying influential nodes that can jointly trigger the maximum influence spread in networks is a fundamental problem in many applications such as viral marketing, online advertising, and disease control. Most existing studies assume…
Recent accounts from researchers, journalists, as well as federal investigators, reached a unanimous conclusion: social media are systematically exploited to manipulate and alter public opinion. Some disinformation campaigns have been…
Social-media data provides increasing opportunities for automated analysis of large sets of textual documents. So far, automated tools have been developed to account for either the social networks between the participants of the debates, or…
Social media expose millions of users every day to information campaigns --- some emerging organically from grassroots activity, others sustained by advertising or other coordinated efforts. These campaigns contribute to the shaping of…
Twitter bot detection has become an important and challenging task to combat misinformation and protect the integrity of the online discourse. State-of-the-art approaches generally leverage the topological structure of the Twittersphere,…
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…
This paper presents the research of the influence of cognitive, behavioral, representational factors on the susceptibility of the participants in social networks to misinformation, as well as on the activity of the nodes in this regard. The…
Nowadays, false and unverified information on social media sway individuals' perceptions during major geo-political events and threaten the quality of the whole digital information ecosystem. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, several…
Modern social media platforms play an important role in facilitating rapid dissemination of information through their massive user networks. Fake news, misinformation, and unverifiable facts on social media platforms propagate disharmony…
Online Social Media represent a pervasive source of information able to reach a huge audience. Sadly, recent studies show how online social bots (automated, often malicious accounts, populating social networks and mimicking genuine users)…