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In recent decades, the massification of online social connections has made information globally accessible in a matter of seconds. Unfortunately, this has been accompanied by a dramatic surge in extreme opinions, without a clear solution in…

Recent years have seen a marked increase in the spread of misinformation, a phenomenon which has been accelerated and amplified by social media such as Facebook and Twitter. While some actors spread misinformation to push a specific agenda,…

Terror attacks have been linked in part to online extremist content. Although tens of thousands of Islamist extremism supporters consume such content, they are a small fraction relative to peaceful Muslims. The efforts to contain the…

We present a toy model of opinion spreading in a society which combines a self-reinforcing mechanism with diffusion. The relative strength of these two mechanisms - called the affectability of the system - is a free parameter of the model.…

Harmful content detection models tend to have higher false positive rates for content from marginalized groups. In the context of marginal abuse modeling on Twitter, such disproportionate penalization poses the risk of reduced visibility,…

We study the evolution of long-lived controversial debates as manifested on Twitter from 2011 to 2016. Specifically, we explore how the structure of interactions and content of discussion varies with the level of collective attention, as…

Recently, social media platforms are heavily moderated to prevent the spread of online hate speech, which is usually fertile in toxic words and is directed toward an individual or a community. Owing to such heavy moderation, newer and more…

Online Radicalization (also called Cyber-Terrorism or Extremism or Cyber-Racism or Cyber- Hate) is widespread and has become a major and growing concern to the society, governments and law enforcement agencies around the world. Research…

While exposure to diverse viewpoints may reduce polarization, it can also have a backfire effect and exacerbate polarization when the discussion is adversarial. Here, we examine the question whether intergroup interactions around important…

The exponential growths of social media and micro-blogging sites not only provide platforms for empowering freedom of expressions and individual voices, but also enables people to express anti-social behaviour like online harassment,…

All societies have been much more bipolar over the past few years, particularly after the emergence of online social networks and media. In fact, the gap between the two ends of social spectrum is going to be even deeper after the spread of…

Using the @NGRPresident Twitter handle, the Government of Nigeria issued a special directive banning Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) with immediate effect. The SARS is a special police unit under the Nigeria Police Force tasked with the…

The framing of events in various media and discourse spaces is crucial in the era of misinformation and polarization. Many studies, however, are limited to specific media or networks, disregarding the importance of cross-platform diffusion.…

Hate speech is ubiquitous on the Web. Recently, the offline causes that contribute to online hate speech have received increasing attention. A recurring question is whether the occurrence of extreme events offline systematically triggers…

Terrorist attacks not only harm citizens but also shift their attention, which has long-lasting impacts on public opinion and government policies. Yet measuring the changes in public attention beyond media coverage has been methodologically…

Colonialism--the policies and practices wherein a foreign body imposes its ways of life on local communities--has historically impacted how collectives perceive themselves in relation to others. One way colonialism has impacted how people…

The rise of right-wing populism in Europe has brought to the forefront the significance of analysing social media discourse to understand the dissemination of extremist ideologies and their impact on political outcomes. Twitter, as a…

We provide an NLP framework to uncover four linguistic dimensions of political polarization in social media: topic choice, framing, affect and illocutionary force. We quantify these aspects with existing lexical methods, and propose…

Due to the wide adoption of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc., there is an emerging need of detecting online posts that can go against the community acceptance standards. The hostility detection task has been well explored…

Gang-involved youth in cities such as Chicago sometimes post on social media to express their aggression towards rival gangs and previous research has demonstrated that a deep learning approach can predict aggression and loss in posts. To…