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Foreign information operations conducted by Russian and Chinese actors exploit the United States' permissive information environment. These campaigns threaten democratic institutions and the broader Westphalian model. Yet, existing…
The digital media, identified as computational propaganda provides a pathway for propaganda to expand its reach without limit. State-backed propaganda aims to shape the audiences' cognition toward entities in favor of a certain political…
State-sponsored influence operations (SIOs) have become a pervasive and complex challenge in the digital age, particularly on social media platforms where information spreads rapidly and with minimal oversight. These operations are…
Why do Social Media Corporations (SMCs) engage in state-linked information operations? Social media can significantly influence the global political landscape, allowing governments and other political entities to engage in concerted…
Coordinated campaigns are used to influence and manipulate social media platforms and their users, a critical challenge to the free exchange of information online. Here we introduce a general, unsupervised network-based methodology to…
According to the classical definition, propaganda is the management of collective attitudes by manipulation of significant symbols. However this definition has changed to computational propaganda, the way manipulation takes place in digital…
Following the 2016 US elections Twitter launched their Information Operations (IO) hub where they archive account activity connected to state linked information operations. In June 2020, Twitter took down and released a set of accounts…
An infodemic is an emerging phenomenon caused by an overabundance of information online. This proliferation of information makes it difficult for the public to distinguish trustworthy news and credible information from untrustworthy sites…
Information Operations (IOs) pose a significant threat to the integrity of democratic processes, with the potential to influence election-related online discourse. In anticipation of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, we present a study…
The declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic has largely amplified the spread of related information on social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, and WeChat.Unlike the previous studies which focused on how to detect the misinformation or fake…
The conflict in Ukraine has been not only characterised by military engagement but also by a significant information war, with social media platforms like X, formerly known as Twitter playing an important role in shaping public perception.…
COVID-19 resulted in an infodemic, which could erode public trust, impede virus containment, and outlive the pandemic itself. The evolving and fragmented media landscape is a key driver of the spread of misinformation. Using misinformation…
In recent months, COVID-19 has become a global pandemic and had a huge impact on the world. People under different conditions have very different attitudes toward the epidemic. Due to the real-time and large-scale nature of social media, we…
The omnipresent COVID-19 pandemic gave rise to a parallel spreading of misinformation, also referred to as an Infodemic. Consequently, social media have become targets for the application of social bots, that is, algorithms that mimic human…
State-sponsored "bad actors" increasingly weaponize social media platforms to launch cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns during elections. Social media companies, due to their rapid growth and scale, struggle to prevent the…
Nowadays, social media represent persuasive tools that have been progressively weaponized to affect people's beliefs, spread manipulative narratives, and sow conflicts along divergent factions. Software-controlled accounts (i.e., bots) are…
Propaganda campaigns aim at influencing people's mindset with the purpose of advancing a specific agenda. They exploit the anonymity of the Internet, the micro-profiling ability of social networks, and the ease of automatically creating and…
Social media platforms have become key tools for coordinated influence operations, enabling state actors to manipulate public opinion through strategic, collective actions. While previous research has suggested collaboration between states,…
The rapid growth of social media presents a unique opportunity to study coordinated agent behavior in an unfiltered environment. Online processes often exhibit complex structures that reflect the nature of the user behavior, whether it is…
Computational Politics is the study of computational methods to analyze and moderate users' behaviors related to political activities such as election campaign persuasion, political affiliation, and opinion mining. With the rapid…