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

Social media platforms have witnessed a substantial increase in social bot activity, significantly affecting online discourse. Our study explores the dynamic nature of bot engagement related to Extinction Rebellion climate change protests…

Initially conceived for entertainment, social media platforms have profoundly transformed the dissemination of information and consequently reshaped the dynamics of agenda-setting. In this scenario, understanding the factors that capture…

With more than 500 million daily tweets from over 330 million active users, Twitter constantly attracts malicious users aiming to carry out phishing and malware-related attacks against its user base. It therefore becomes of paramount…

For more than a decade scholars have been investigating the disinformation flow on social media contextually to societal events, like, e.g., elections. In this paper, we analyze the Twitter traffic related to the US 2020 pre-election debate…

Twitter bots amplify target content in a coordinated manner to make them appear popular, which is an astroturfing attack. Such attacks promote certain keywords to push them to Twitter trends to make them visible to a broader audience. Past…

To help activists call new volunteers to action, we present Botivist: a platform that uses Twitter bots to find potential volunteers and request contributions. By leveraging different Twitter accounts, Botivist employs different strategies…

During the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, social networks become the preeminent medium for communication, social discussion, and entertainment. Social network users are regularly expressing their opinions about the impacts of the…

In this paper, we introduce a network-based methodology to study how clusters represented by political entities evolve over time. We constructed networks of voting data from the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, where deputies are nodes and…

With rise in security breaches over the past few years, there has been an increasing need to mine insights from social media platforms to raise alerts of possible attacks in an attempt to defend conflict during competition. In this study,…

This paper investigates the research question if senders of large amounts of irrelevant or unsolicited information - commonly called "spammers" - distort the network structure of social networks. Two large social networks are analyzed, the…

In this project, we describe a method of modeling semantic leadership across a set of communities associated with the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which has been informed by qualitative research on the structure of social media and Black…

In the digital realm, rich data serves as a crucial source of insights into the complexities of social, political, and economic landscapes. Addressing the growing need for high-quality information on events and the imperative to combat hate…

Online social networks have transformed the ways in which political mobilization messages are disseminated, raising new questions about how peer influence operates at scale. Building on the landmark 61-million-person Facebook experiment…

Conversational systems typically focus on functional tasks such as scheduling appointments or creating todo lists. Instead we design and evaluate SlugBot (SB), one of 8 semifinalists in the 2018 AlexaPrize, whose goal is to support casual…

In the last decade, social media has evolved as one of the leading platform to create, share, or exchange information; it is commonly used as a way for individuals to maintain social connections. In this online digital world, people use to…

We present an effective Sybil attack against social location based services. Our attack is based on creating a large number of reputed "bot drivers", and controlling their reported locations using fake GPS reports. We show how this attack…

Social media platforms provide a rich environment for analyzing user behavior. Recently, deep learning-based methods have been a mainstream approach for social media analysis models involving complex patterns. However, these methods are…

We present the Social Influence Game (SIG), a framework for modeling adversarial persuasion in social networks with an arbitrary number of competing players. Our goal is to provide a tractable and interpretable model of contested influence…

Social networks have been popular platforms for information propagation. An important use case is viral marketing: given a promotion budget, an advertiser can choose some influential users as the seed set and provide them free or discounted…

Social media platforms, particularly Twitter, have become pivotal arenas for influence campaigns, often orchestrated by state-sponsored information operations (IOs). This paper delves into the detection of key players driving IOs by…