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Social bots are currently regarded an influential but also somewhat mysterious factor in public discourse and opinion making. They are considered to be capable of massively distributing propaganda in social and online media and their…
Twitter has become one of the main sources of news for many people. As real-world events and emergencies unfold, Twitter is abuzz with hundreds of thousands of stories about the events. Some of these stories are harmless, while others could…
Despite remarkable advances that large language models have achieved in chatbots, maintaining a non-toxic user-AI interactive environment has become increasingly critical nowadays. However, previous efforts in toxicity detection have been…
Bots constitute a significant portion of Internet traffic and are a source of various issues across multiple domains. Modern bots often become indistinguishable from real users, as they employ similar methods to browse the web, including…
The communication revolution has perpetually reshaped the means through which people send and receive information. Social media is an important pillar of this revolution and has brought profound changes to various aspects of our lives.…
Recent research brought awareness of the issue of bots on social media and the significant risks of mass manipulation of public opinion in the context of political discussion. In this work, we leverage Twitter to study the discourse during…
Although social bots can be engineered for constructive applications, their potential for misuse in manipulative schemes and malware distribution cannot be overlooked. This dichotomy underscores the critical need to detect social bots on…
Online hate speech is associated with substantial social harms, yet it remains unclear how consistently platforms enforce hate speech policies or whether enforcement is feasible at scale. We address these questions through a global audit of…
Twitter users signal social identity in their profile descriptions, or bios, in a number of important but complex ways that are not well-captured by existing characterizations of how identity is expressed in language. Better ways of…
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…
Twitter has grown to become an important platform to access immediate information about major events and dynamic topics. As one example, recent work has shown that classifiers trained to detect topical content on Twitter can generalize well…
Because of its willingness to share data with academia and industry, Twitter has been the primary social media platform for scientific research as well as for consulting businesses and governments in the last decade. In recent years, a…
Once an email problem, spam has nowadays branched into new territories with disruptive effects. In particular, spam has established itself over the recent years as a ubiquitous, annoying, and sometimes threatening aspect of online social…
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…
Recent studies have confirmed a growing trend, especially among youngsters, of using Online Social Media as favourite information platform at the expense of traditional mass media. Indeed, they can easily reach a wide audience at a high…
Online social networks (OSNs) are increasingly threatened by social bots which are software-controlled OSN accounts that mimic human users with malicious intentions. A social botnet refers to a group of social bots under the control of a…
Many Twitter users are bots. They can be used for spamming, opinion manipulation and online fraud. Recently we discovered the Star Wars botnet, consisting of more than 350,000 bots tweeting random quotations exclusively from Star Wars…
Bots are frequently used in Github repositories to automate repetitive activities that are part of the distributed software development process. They communicate with human actors through comments. While detecting their presence is…
Estimating the political leanings of social media users is a challenging and ever more pressing problem given the increase in social media consumption. We introduce Retweet-BERT, a simple and scalable model to estimate the political…
The massive spread of digital misinformation has been identified as a major global risk and has been alleged to influence elections and threaten democracies. Communication, cognitive, social, and computer scientists are engaged in efforts…