Related papers: A Decade of Social Bot Detection
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…
As digitalization increases, countries employ digital diplomacy, harnessing digital resources to project their desired image. Digital diplomacy also encompasses the interactivity of digital platforms, providing a trove of public opinion…
From 2018 to 2023, Brazil experienced its most fiercely contested elections in history, resulting in the election of far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro followed by the left-wing, Lula da Silva. This period was marked by a murder attempt, a…
Efforts by foreign actors to influence public opinion have gained considerable attention because of their potential to impact democratic elections. Thus, the ability to identify and counter sources of disinformation is increasingly becoming…
Social Media are evolving as a pervasive source of news able to reach a larger audience through their spreading power. The main drawback is given by the presence of malicious accounts, known as social bots, which are often used to diffuse…
In recent years, the proliferation of disinformation has become an issue against the backdrop of the spread of social media. In this study, we focus on socialbots, one of the causes of this problem, and analyze several domestic cases to…
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…
The Web contains several social media platforms for discussion, exchange of ideas, and content publishing. These platforms are used by people, but also by distributed agents known as bots. Although bots have existed for decades, with many…
It is a widely accepted fact that state-sponsored Twitter accounts operated during the 2016 US presidential election spreading millions of tweets with misinformation and inflammatory political content. Whether these social media campaigns…
Social media bot detection has always been an arms race between advancements in machine learning bot detectors and adversarial bot strategies to evade detection. In this work, we bring the arms race to the next level by investigating the…
Online social networks (OSNs) are increasingly threatened by social bots which are software-controlled OSN accounts that mimic human users with malicious intentions. A social botnet refers to a group of social bots under the control of a…
Bots, social media accounts controlled by software rather than by humans, have recently been under the spotlight for their association with various forms of online manipulation. To date, much work has focused on social bot detection, but…
Social bots represent a new generation of bots that make use of online social networks (OSNs) as a command and control (C\&C) channel. Malicious social bots were responsible for launching large-scale spam campaigns, promoting low-cap…
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…
Social media platforms continue to struggle with the growing presence of social bots-automated accounts that can influence public opinion and facilitate the spread of disinformation. Over time, these social bots have advanced significantly,…
With people moving out of physical public spaces due to containment measures to tackle the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, online platforms become even more prominent tools to understand social discussion. Studying social media can…
Automatic fake news detection with machine learning can prevent the dissemination of false statements before they gain many views. Several datasets labeling statements as legitimate or false have been created since the 2016 United States…
U.S. Presidential Election forecasting has been a research interest for several decades. Currently, election prediction consists of two main approaches: traditional models that incorporate economic data and poll surveys, and models that…
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…
The integrity of democratic political discourse is at the core to guarantee free and fair elections. With social media often dictating the tones and trends of politics-related discussion, it is of paramount important to be able to study…