Related papers: A Few Observations About State-Centric Online Prop…
This paper examines news consumption in response to a major polarizing event, and we use the May 2021 Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an example. We conduct a detailed analysis of the news consumption of more than eight thousand Twitter…
The Israel-Palestine Conflict, one of the most enduring conflicts in history, dates back to the start of 20th century, with the establishment of the British Mandate in Palestine and has deeply rooted complex issues in politics, demography,…
For U.S. presidential elections, most states use the so-called winner-take-all system, in which the state's presidential electors are awarded to the winning political party in the state after a popular vote phase, regardless of the actual…
This short paper examines some of the ongoing research at the UMB Data and Society Lab hosted at the Faculty of Political Science and International Relations at Matej Bel University. It begins with an introduction on the necessity of…
Parents - particularly moms - increasingly consult social media for support when taking decisions about their young children, and likely also when advising other family members such as elderly relatives. Minimizing malignant online…
There is growing concern that over the past decade, industrialized democratic nations are becoming increasingly politically polarized. Indeed, elections in the US, UK, France, and Germany have all seen tightly won races, with notable…
State and geopolitical censorship on Twitter, now X, has been turning into a routine, raising concerns about the boundaries between criminal content and freedom of speech. One such censorship practice, withholding content in a particular…
This work advances investigations into the visual media shared by agents in disinformation campaigns by characterizing the images shared by accounts identified by Twitter as being part of such campaigns. Using images shared by US…
As a response to the Russian aggression against Ukraine, the European Union (EU), through the notion of "digital sovereignty", imposed sanctions on organizations and individuals affiliated with the Russian Federation that prohibit…
Politicians with large media visibility and social media audiences have a significant influence on public discourse. Consequently, their dissemination of misinformation can have profound implications for society. This study investigated the…
The proliferation of misinformation and propaganda is a global challenge, with profound effects during major crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Understanding the spread of misinformation and its social…
Europe's contemporary political landscape has been shaped by massive shifts in recent decades caused by geopolitical upheavals such as Brexit and now, COVID-19. The way in which policy makers respond to the current pandemic could have large…
Studies of online influence operations, coordinated efforts to disseminate and amplify disinformation, focus on forensic analysis of social networks or of publicly available datasets of trolls and bot accounts. However, little is known…
This short paper explores trends in extremist Facebook data from July 2023 to June 2024. We examined engagement, sentiment, and topics within Facebook groups categorized as anti-Israel/Semitic, anti-Palestine/Muslim, and anti-both, mapping…
The COVID-19 pandemic has not only had severe political, economic, and societal effects, it has also affected media and communication systems in unprecedented ways. While traditional journalistic media has tried to adapt to the rapidly…
Multiple countries have recently experienced extreme political polarization, which in some cases led to escalation of hate crime, violence and political instability. Beside the much discussed presidential elections in the United States and…
Conventional preventive measures during pandemic include social distancing and lockdown. Such measures in the time of social media brought about a new set of challenges - vulnerability to the toxic impact of online misinformation is high. A…
A new era of Information Warfare has arrived. Various actors, including state-sponsored ones, are weaponizing information on Online Social Networks to run false information campaigns with targeted manipulation of public opinion on specific…
Gathering information about where to migrate is an important part of the migration process, especially during forced migration, when people must make rapid decisions under uncertainty. This study examines how forced migration relates to…
We investigate the presence (and the influence) of disinformation spreading on online social networks in Italy, in the5-month period preceding the 2019 European Parliament elections. To this aim we collected a large-scale dataset oftweets…