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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 year 2020 will be remembered for two events of global significance: the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. In this chapter, we summarize recent studies using large public Twitter data sets on these issues. We have…
Online social media are key platforms for the public to discuss political issues. As a result, researchers have used data from these platforms to analyze public opinions and forecast election results. Recent studies reveal the existence of…
Online social media enables mass-level, transparent, and democratized discussion on numerous socio-political issues. Due to such openness, these platforms often endure manipulation and misinformation - leading to negative impacts. To…
Polls posted on social media have emerged in recent years as an important tool for estimating public opinion, e.g., to gauge public support for business decisions and political candidates in national elections. Here, we examine nearly two…
Adversarial interactions against politicians on social media such as Twitter have significant impact on society. In particular they disrupt substantive political discussions online, and may discourage people from seeking public office. In…
Automated social media accounts, known as bots, are increasingly recognized as key tools for manipulative online activities. These activities can stem from coordination among several accounts and these automated campaigns can manipulate…
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…
Our work represents another step into the detection and prevention of these ever-more present political manipulation efforts. We, therefore, start by focusing on understanding what the state-of-the-art approaches lack -- since the problem…
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…
For many, social networks have become the primary source of news, although the correctness of the provided information and its trustworthiness are often unclear. The investigations of the 2016 US presidential elections have brought the…
Social Media have been extensively used for commercial and political communication, besides their initial scope of providing an easy-to-use outlet to produce and consume user-generated content. Besides being a popular medium, Social Media…
Twitter as a new form of social media potentially contains useful information that opens new opportunities for content analysis on tweets. This paper examines the predictive power of Twitter regarding the US presidential election of 2012.…
One of the hallmarks of a free and fair society is the ability to conduct a peaceful and seamless transfer of power from one leader to another. Democratically, this is measured in a citizen population's trust in the electoral system of…
Online manipulation is a pressing concern for democracies, but the actions and strategies of coordinated inauthentic accounts, which have been used to interfere in elections, are not well understood. We analyze a five million-tweet…
During the 2016 US elections Twitter experienced unprecedented levels of propaganda and fake news through the collaboration of bots and hired persons, the ramifications of which are still being debated. This work proposes an approach to…
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…
Online Social Networks represent a novel opportunity for political campaigns, revolutionising the paradigm of political communication. Nevertheless, many studies uncovered the presence of d/misinformation campaigns or of malicious…
With the significant increase in users on social media platforms, a new means of political campaigning has appeared. Twitter and Facebook are now notable campaigning tools during elections. Indeed, the candidates and their parties now take…
Identifying and characterizing disinformation in political discourse on social media is critical to ensure the integrity of elections and democratic processes around the world. Persistent manipulation of social media has resulted in…