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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…
Online Social Media represent a pervasive source of information able to reach a huge audience. Sadly, recent studies show how online social bots (automated, often malicious accounts, populating social networks and mimicking genuine users)…
In recent times, social media sites such as Twitter have been extensively used for debating politics and public policies. These debates span millions of tweets and numerous topics of public importance. Thus, it is imperative that this vast…
The daily exposure of social media users to propaganda and disinformation campaigns has reinvigorated the need to investigate the local and global patterns of diffusion of different (mis)information content on social media. Echo chambers…
We present a highly effective unsupervised framework for detecting the stance of prolific Twitter users with respect to controversial topics. In particular, we use dimensionality reduction to project users onto a low-dimensional space,…
Hate speech on online platforms has been credibly linked to multiple instances of real world violence. This calls for an urgent need to understand how toxic content spreads and how it might be mitigated on online social networks, and…
Nowadays, Social Networks have become an essential communication tools producing a large amount of information about their users and their interactions, which can be analysed with Data Mining methods. In the last years, Social Networks are…
In the pursuit of bolstering user safety, social media platforms deploy active moderation strategies, including content removal and user suspension. These measures target users engaged in discussions marked by hate speech or toxicity, often…
Digital traces of conversations in micro-blogging platforms and OSNs provide information about user opinion with a high degree of resolution. These information sources can be exploited to under- stand and monitor collective behaviors. In…
Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered recommender systems play a crucial role in determining the content that users are exposed to on social media platforms. However, the behavioural patterns of these systems are often opaque, complicating…
Automated social media accounts, known as bots, are increasingly recognized as key tools for manipulative online activities. These activities can stem from coordination among several accounts and these automated campaigns can manipulate…
For more than a decade now, academicians and online platform administrators have been studying solutions to the problem of bot detection. Bots are computer algorithms whose use is far from being benign: malicious bots are purposely created…
People use microblogging platforms like Twitter to involve with other users for a wide range of interests and practices. Twitter profiles run by different types of users such as humans, bots, spammers, businesses and professionals. This…
Twitter, a microblogging service, is todays most popular platform for communication in the form of short text messages, called Tweets. Users use Twitter to publish their content either for expressing concerns on information news or views on…
Centrality is one of the most studied concepts in social network analysis. There is a huge literature regarding centrality measures, as ways to identify the most relevant users in a social network. The challenge is to find measures that can…
The rise of ideological divides in public discourse has received considerable attention in recent years. However, much of this research has been concentrated on Western democratic nations, leaving other regions largely unexplored. Here, we…
Twitter is one of the most popular social networks attracting millions of users, while a considerable proportion of online discourse is captured. It provides a simple usage framework with short messages and an efficient application…
Thanks to platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, people can know facts and events that otherwise would have been silenced. However, social media significantly contribute also to fast spreading biased and false news while targeting specific…
$\textit{Fake followers}$ are those Twitter accounts specifically created to inflate the number of followers of a target account. Fake followers are dangerous for the social platform and beyond, since they may alter concepts like popularity…
Propaganda is the expression of an opinion or an action by an individual or a group deliberately designed to influence the opinions or the actions of other individuals or groups with reference to predetermined ends, which is achieved by…