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Resistance to progressive policies and hate speech have been consolidating on Brazilian Telegram, with anti-woke communities rejecting diversity and promoting a worldview that sees these social changes as a threat. Therefore, this study…
Users online tend to consume information adhering to their system of beliefs and to ignore dissenting information. During the COVID-19 pandemic, users get exposed to a massive amount of information about a new topic having a high level of…
Since June 2013, when Brazil faced the largest and most significant mass protests in a generation, a political crisis is in course. In midst of this crisis, Brazilian politicians use social media to communicate with the electorate in order…
The 2016 United States presidential election was marked by the abuse of targeted advertising on Facebook. Concerned with the risk of the same kind of abuse to happen in the 2018 Brazilian elections, we designed and deployed an independent…
Social media have substantially altered the way brands and businesses advertise: Online Social Networks provide brands with more versatile and dynamic channels for advertisement than traditional media (e.g., TV and radio). Levels of…
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…
In this work we study a simple mathematical model to analyze the emergence and control of radicalization phenomena, motivated by the recent far-right extremist events in Brazil, occurred in January 8, 2023. For this purpose, we considered a…
This paper explores the growth of online mobilizations using data from the 'indignados' (the 'outraged') movement in Spain, which emerged under the influence of the revolution in Egypt and as a precursor to the global Occupy mobilizations.…
Instant messaging platforms such as Telegram became one of the main means of communication used by people all over the world. Most of them are home of several groups and channels that connect thousands of people focused on political topics.…
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…
Over the past decade, Brazil has experienced a decline in vaccination coverage, reversing decades of public health progress achieved through the National Immunization Program (PNI). Growing evidence points to the widespread circulation of…
Vaccination remains a cornerstone of global public health, yet the COVID-19 pandemic exposed how online misinformation, political polarization, and declining institutional trust can undermine immunization efforts. Most of the prior…
Information and communications technologies have enabled the rise of the phenomenon named sharing economy, which represents activities between people, coordinated by online platforms, to obtain, provide, or share access to goods and…
In the intricate landscape of social media, genuine content dissemination may be altered by a number of threats. Coordinated Behavior (CB), defined as orchestrated efforts by entities to deceive or mislead users about their identity and…
Research has investigated the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on business performance and survival, indicating particularly adverse effects for small and midsize businesses (SMBs). Yet only limited work has examined whether and how online…
On social platforms like Twitter, strategic targeted attacks are becoming increasingly common, especially against vulnerable groups such as female journalists. Two key challenges in identifying strategic online behavior are the complex…
This work presents a framework for collecting, processing and mining geo-located tweets in order to extract meaningful and actionable knowledge in the context of smart cities. We collected and characterized more than 9M tweets from the two…
Unraveling the role of opinion leaders in the digital realm, this study investigates the influence of key actors on Telegram, a hybrid platform that combines messaging app features with social network dynamics, where channel administrators…
Transmitting messages in the most efficient way as possible has always been one of politicians main concerns during electoral processes. Due to the rapidly growing number of users, online social networks have become ideal platforms for…
We are currently living in a state of uncertainty due to the pandemic caused by the Sars-CoV-2 virus. There are several factors involved in the epidemic spreading such as the individual characteristics of each city/country. The true shape…