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The riots in Stockholm in May 2013 were an event that reverberated in the world media for its dimension of violence that had spread through the Swedish capital. In this study we have investigated the role of social media in creating media…
The ongoing Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic highlights the inter-connectedness of our present-day globalized world. With social distancing policies in place, virtual communication has become an important source of (mis)information. As…
In recent years, online social networks have been the target of adversaries who seek to introduce discord into societies, to undermine democracies and to destabilize communities. Often the goal is not to favor a certain side of a conflict…
Social media platforms have become one of the main channels where people disseminate and acquire information, of which the reliability is severely threatened by rumors widespread in the network. Existing approaches such as suspending users…
Election prediction has long been an evergreen in political science literature. Traditionally, such efforts included polling aggregates, economic indicators, partisan affiliation, and campaign effects to predict aggregate voting outcomes.…
As the COVID-19 pandemic evolved, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used Twitter to disseminate safety guidance and updates, reaching millions of users. This study analyzes two years of tweets from, to, and about the CDC…
With public information becoming widely accessible and shared on today's web, greater insights are possible into crowd actions by citizens and non-state actors such as large protests and cyber activism. We present efforts to predict the…
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…
The current prevalence of conspiracy theories on the internet is a significant issue, tackled by many computational approaches. However, these approaches fail to recognize the relevance of distinguishing between texts which contain a…
Rumors have ignited revolutions, undermined the trust in political parties, or threatened the stability of human societies. Such destructive potential has been significantly enhanced by the development of on-line social networks. Several…
This paper studies opinion dynamics in multilayer (social) networks. Extending a single-layer model, we formulate opinion updates as a synchronous coordination game in which agents minimize a local cost to stay close to their neighbors'…
The present study argues that political communication on social media is mediated by a platform's digital architecture, defined as the technical protocols that enable, constrain, and shape user behavior in a virtual space. A framework for…
Information is key during a crisis such as the one produced by the current COVID-19 pandemic as it greatly shapes people opinion, behavior and their psychology. Infodemic of misinformation is an important secondary crisis associated to the…
The proliferation of social media platforms like Twitter has heightened the consequences of the spread of misinformation. To understand and model the spread of misinformation, in this paper, we leveraged the SEIZ (Susceptible, Exposed,…
Rumors and conspiracy theories thrive in environments of low confidence and low trust. Consequently, it is not surprising that ones related to the Covid-19 pandemic are proliferating given the lack of any authoritative scientific consensus…
The proliferation of large language models has introduced a new paradigm of synthetic political communication in which narratives may be generated, semantically coordinated, and strategically disseminated across platforms at scale. We…
Social platforms such as Gab and Parler, branded as `free-speech' networks, have seen a significant growth of their user base in recent years. This popularity is mainly attributed to the stricter moderation enforced by mainstream platforms…
People who share similar opinions towards controversial topics could form an echo chamber and may share similar political views toward other topics as well. The existence of such connections, which we call connected behavior, gives…
Automatic detection of online hate speech serves as a crucial step in the detoxification of the online discourse. Moreover, accurate classification can promote a better understanding of the proliferation of hate as a social phenomenon.…
Digital media enables not only fast sharing of information, but also disinformation. One prominent case of an event leading to circulation of disinformation on social media is the MH17 plane crash. Studies analysing the spread of…