Related papers: Analyzing the "Sleeping Giants" Activism Model in …

This paper presents a study on the growing threat of "sleeper social bots," AI-driven social bots in the political landscape, created to spread disinformation and manipulate public opinion. We based the name sleeper social bots on their…

The record-breaking increase of internet usage in 2020 with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has made us think about the alarming consequences of it in the aspect of climate change. As countries go into lockdown the use of the internet…

Usage of mobile wireless Internet has grown very fast in recent years. This radical change in availability of Internet has led to communication of big amount of data over mobile networks and consequently new challenges and opportunities for…

In the context of COVID-19 pandemic, social networks such as Twitter and YouTube stand out as important sources of information. YouTube, as the largest and most engaging online media consumption platform, has a large influence in the spread…

Recent events have led to a burgeoning awareness on the misuse of social media sites to affect political events, sway public opinion, and confuse the voters. Such serious, hostile mass manipulation has motivated a large body of works on…

Many years after online social networks exceeded our collective attention, social influence is still built on attention capital. Quality is not a prerequisite for viral spreading, yet large diffusion cascades remain the hallmark of a social…

In this paper, our goal is to analyze and compare cellular network usage data from pre-lockdown, during lockdown, and post-lockdown phases surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic to understand and model human mobility patterns during the…

We study the problem of real time data capture on social media. Due to the different limitations imposed by those media, but also to the very large amount of information, it is impossible to collect all the data produced by social networks…

Detecting and suspending fake accounts (Sybils) in online social networking (OSN) services protects both OSN operators and OSN users from illegal exploitation. Existing social-graph-based defense schemes effectively bound the accepted…

With the explosive growth of the Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19), misinformation on social media has developed into a global phenomenon with widespread and detrimental societal effects. Despite recent progress and efforts in detecting…

Messaging systems built on mesh networks consisting of smartphones communicating over Bluetooth have been used by protesters around the world after governments have disrupted Internet connectivity. Unfortunately, existing systems have been…

The rise of social media has ignited an unprecedented circulation of false information in our society. It is even more evident in times of crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Fact-checking efforts have expanded greatly and have been…

Quantifying how individuals react to social influence is crucial for tackling collective political behavior online. While many studies of opinion in public forums focus on social feedback, they often overlook the potential for human…

A number of organizations ranging from terrorist groups such as ISIS to politicians and nation states reportedly conduct explicit campaigns to influence opinion on social media, posing a risk to democratic processes. There is thus a growing…

Mining the silent members of an online community, also called lurkers, has been recognized as an important problem that accompanies the extensive use of online social networks (OSNs). Existing solutions to the ranking of lurkers can aid…

Automatic response forecasting for news media plays a crucial role in enabling content producers to efficiently predict the impact of news releases and prevent unexpected negative outcomes such as social conflict and moral injury. To…

Crisis situations are characterised by their sudden occurrence and an unclear information situation. In that context, social media platforms have become a highly utilised resource for collective information gathering to fill these gaps.…

We conducted ethnographic research with 31 misinformation creators and consumers in Brazil and the US before, during, and after a major election to understand the consumption and production of election and medical misinformation. This study…

Minority groups have been using social media to organize social movements that create profound social impacts. Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Stop Asian Hate (SAH) are two successful social movements that have spread on Twitter that promote…

Context. The lockdown orders established in multiple countries in response to the Covid-19 pandemics are arguably one of the most widespread and deepest shock experienced by societies in recent years. Studying their impact trough the lens…