Related papers: A Few Observations About State-Centric Online Prop…
The rapid dissemination of misinformation through online social networks poses a pressing issue with harmful consequences jeopardizing human health, public safety, democracy, and the economy; therefore, urgent action is required to address…
Online political advertising has become the cornerstone of political campaigns. The budget spent solely on political advertising in the U.S. has increased by more than 100% from \$700 million during the 2017-2018 U.S. election cycle to…
State-sponsored organizations are increasingly linked to efforts aimed to exploit social media for information warfare and manipulating public opinion. Typically, their activities rely on a number of social network accounts they control,…
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 dramatically reshaped the European security landscape. In Finland, public opinion on NATO had long been polarized along the left-right partisan axis, but the invasion led to a rapid convergence of the…
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 use of language is innately political and often a vehicle of cultural identity as well as the basis for nation building. Here, we examine language choice and tweeting activity of Ukrainian citizens based on more than 4 million…
Amidst growing concern over media manipulation, NLP attention has focused on overt strategies like censorship and "fake news'". Here, we draw on two concepts from the political science literature to explore subtler strategies for government…
On 24 February 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine, starting one of the largest military conflicts in Europe in recent years. In this paper we present preliminary findings about the impact of the conflict on the Internet performance in Ukraine and…
The rise of large language models (LLMs) has a significant impact on information warfare. By facilitating the production of content related to disinformation and propaganda campaigns, LLMs can amplify different types of information…
Advertisement and propaganda have changed continuously in the past decades, mainly due to the people's interactions at online platforms and social networks, and operate nowadays reaching a highly specific online audience instead targeting…
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…
Conspiracy theories have long drawn public attention, but their explosive growth on platforms like Telegram during the COVID-19 pandemic raises pressing questions about their impact on societal trust, democracy, and public health. We…
In this paper, we examine how online political micro-targeting is regulated in Europe. While there are no specific rules on such micro-targeting, there are general rules that apply. We focus on three fields of law: data protection law,…
The reports of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections brought into the center of public attention concerns related to the ability of foreign actors to increase social discord and take advantage of personal user data for…
The proliferation of online misinformation has emerged as one of the biggest threats to society. Considerable efforts have focused on building misinformation detection models, still the perils of misinformation remain abound. Mitigating…
The move of propaganda and disinformation to the online environment is possible thanks to the fact that within the last decade, digital information channels radically increased in popularity as a news source. The main advantage of such…
Using individual-level data from Gallup World Poll and the Levada Center, we provide an in-depth analysis of how Russia's invasion of Ukraine has affected sentiments in the Russian population. Our results show that after the invasion, a…
We report empirical evidence of web defacement and DDoS attacks carried out by low-level cybercrime actors in the Israel-Gaza conflict. Our quantitative measurements indicate an immediate increase in such cyberattacks following the…
"Kompromat" (the Russian word for "compromising material") has been efficiently used to harass Russian political and business elites since the days of the USSR. Online crowdsourcing projects such as "RuCompromat" made it possible to catalog…
The advent of WWW changed the way we can produce and access information. Recent studies showed that users tend to select information that is consistent with their system of beliefs, forming polarized groups of like-minded people around…