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Background: Social media chatter in 2020 has been largely dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Existing research shows that COVID-19 discourse is highly politicized, with political preferences linked to beliefs and disbeliefs about the…
Social media users who report content are key allies in the management of online misinformation, however, no research has been conducted yet to understand their role and the different trends underlying their reporting activity. We suggest…
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…
Political misinformation, astroturfing and organised trolling are online malicious behaviours with significant real-world effects. Many previous approaches examining these phenomena have focused on broad campaigns rather than the small…
Online discussions are often characterized by strong behavioral asymmetries: a relatively small fraction of users actively produces content, while the majority primarily consumes and redistributes it. Here we propose a community-detection…
Detecting organized political campaigns is of paramount importance in fighting against disinformation on social media. Existing approaches for the identification of such organized actions employ techniques mostly from network science, graph…
User-generated content (e.g., tweets and profile descriptions) and shared content between users (e.g., news articles) reflect a user's online identity. This paper investigates whether correlations between user-generated and user-shared…
An important challenge in the process of tracking and detecting the dissemination of misinformation is to understand the political gap between people that engage with the so called "fake news". A possible factor responsible for this gap is…
Modeling user engagement dynamics on social media has compelling applications in user-persona detection and political discourse mining. Most existing approaches depend heavily on knowledge of the underlying user network. However, a large…
In recent years, mass-broadcast messaging platforms like Telegram have gained prominence for both, serving as a harbor for private communication and enabling large-scale disinformation campaigns. The encrypted and networked nature of these…
How can we detect when global events fundamentally reshape public discourse? This study introduces a topological framework for identifying structural change in media narratives using persistent homology. Drawing on international news…
We explore the effects of coordinated users (i.e., users characterized by an unexpected, suspicious, or exceptional similarity) in information spreading on Twitter by quantifying the efficacy of their tactics in deceiving feed algorithms to…
The emergence of toxic information on social networking sites, such as Twitter, Parler, and Reddit, has become a growing concern. Consequently, this study aims to assess the level of toxicity in COVID-19 discussions on Twitter, Parler, and…
This study explores the dynamic relationship between online discourse, as observed in tweets, and physical hate crimes, focusing on marginalized groups. Leveraging natural language processing techniques, including keyword extraction and…
Understanding political polarization on social platforms is important as public opinions may become increasingly extreme when they are circulated in homogeneous communities, thus potentially causing damage in the real world. Automatically…
Social media platforms often foster environments where users primarily engage with content that aligns with their existing beliefs, thereby reinforcing their views and limiting exposure to opposing viewpoints. In this paper, we analyze X…
The Web has become the main source for news acquisition. At the same time, news discussion has become more social: users can post comments on news articles or discuss news articles on other platforms like Reddit. These features empower and…
Political organizations worldwide keep innovating their use of social media technologies. In the 2019 Indian general election, organizers used a network of WhatsApp groups to manipulate Twitter trends through coordinated mass postings. We…
Political debate nowadays takes place mainly on online social media, with election periods amplifying ideological engagement. Reddit is generally considered more resistant to polarization and echo chamber effects than platforms like Twitter…
We propose a graph contextualization method, pairGraphText, to study political engagement on Facebook during the 2012 French presidential election. It is a spectral algorithm that contextualizes graph data with text data for online…