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A rapidly increasing amount of human conversation occurs online. But divisiveness and conflict can fester in text-based interactions on social media platforms, in messaging apps, and on other digital forums. Such toxicity increases…
Even with various regulations in place across countries and social media platforms (Government of India, 2021; European Parliament and Council of the European Union, 2022, digital abusive speech remains a significant issue. One potential…
The outbreak of the novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) has greatly influenced people's daily lives across the globe. Emergent measures and policies (e.g., lockdown, social distancing) have been taken by governments to combat this highly…
Depression is a leading cause of disability worldwide, but is often under-diagnosed and under-treated. One of the tenets of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is that individuals who are depressed exhibit distorted modes of thinking,…
User posts whose perceived toxicity depends on the conversational context are rare in current toxicity detection datasets. Hence, toxicity detectors trained on existing datasets will also tend to disregard context, making the detection of…
The explosive growth of social media has not only revolutionized communication but also brought challenges such as political polarization, misinformation, hate speech, and echo chambers. This dissertation employs computational social…
Content moderators review disturbing content to protect social media users, often at significant cost to their mental health. Recent reports document the mental health conditions of African moderators as notably problematic. Beyond the…
The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) recently has affected human life to a great extent. Besides direct physical and economic threats, the pandemic also indirectly impact people's mental health conditions, which can be…
Digital food content could impact viewers' dietary health, with individuals with eating disorders being particularly sensitive to it. However, a comprehensive understanding of why and how these individuals interact with such content is…
Gambling disorder is a complex behavioral addiction that is challenging to understand and address, with severe physical, psychological, and social consequences. Early Risk Detection (ERD) on the Web has become a key task in the scientific…
Websites with hyper-partisan, left or right-leaning focus offer content that is typically biased towards the expectations of their target audience. Such content often polarizes users, who are repeatedly primed to specific (extreme) content,…
Disinformation and false content produced by generative AI pose a significant challenge for journalists and fact-checkers who must rapidly verify digital media information. While there is an abundance of NLP models for detecting credibility…
Web search is among the most ubiquitous online activities, commonly used to acquire new knowledge and to satisfy learning-related objectives through informational search sessions. The importance of learning as an outcome of web search has…
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected lives of people from different countries for almost two years. The changes on lifestyles due to the pandemic may cause psychosocial stressors for individuals, and have a potential to lead to mental health…
Considerable efforts are currently underway to mitigate the negative impacts of echo chambers, such as increased susceptibility to fake news and resistance towards accepting scientific evidence. Prior research has presented the development…
Our consumption of online information is mediated by filtering, ranking, and recommendation algorithms that introduce unintentional biases as they attempt to deliver relevant and engaging content. It has been suggested that our reliance on…
Social media platforms actively moderate content glorifying harmful behaviors like eating disorders, which include anorexia and bulimia. However, users have adapted to evade moderation by using coded hashtags. Our study investigates the…
Depression is debilitating, and not uncommon. Indeed, studies of excessive social media users show correlations with depression, ADHD, and other mental health concerns. Given that there is a large number of people with excessive social…
Online toxic attacks, such as harassment, trolling, and hate speech have been linked to an increase in offline violence and negative psychological effects on victims. In this paper, we studied the impact of toxicity on users' online…
In a world of information overload, understanding how we can most effectively manage information is crucial to success. We set out to understand how people view deletion, the removal of material no longer needed: does it help by reducing…