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The communication revolution has perpetually reshaped the means through which people send and receive information. Social media is an important pillar of this revolution and has brought profound changes to various aspects of our lives.…
We introduce the notion of "seminar users", who are social media users engaged in propaganda in support of a political entity. We develop a framework that can identify such users with 84.4% precision and 76.1% recall. While our dataset is…
The popularity of social media platforms such as Twitter has led to the proliferation of automated bots, creating both opportunities and challenges in information dissemination, user engagements, and quality of services. Past works on…
In addition to more personalized content feeds, some leading social media platforms give a prominent role to content that is more widely popular. On Twitter, "trending topics" identify popular topics of conversation on the platform, thereby…
The discourse around conspiracy theories is currently thriving amidst the rampant misinformation in online environments. Research in this field has been focused on detecting conspiracy theories on social media, often relying on limited…
The popularity of Twitter has fostered the emergence of various fraudulent user activities - one such activity is to artificially bolster the social reputation of Twitter profiles by gaining a large number of followers within a short time…
In recent years, offensive, abusive and hateful language, sexism, racism and other types of aggressive and cyberbullying behavior have been manifesting with increased frequency, and in many online social media platforms. In fact, past…
Veracity of data posted on the microblog platforms has in recent years been a subject of intensive study by professionals specializing in various fields of informatics as well as sociology, particularly in the light of increasing importance…
The detection of online influence operations -- coordinated campaigns by malicious actors to spread narratives -- has traditionally depended on content analysis or network features. These approaches are increasingly brittle as generative…
Social media expose millions of users every day to information campaigns --- some emerging organically from grassroots activity, others sustained by advertising or other coordinated efforts. These campaigns contribute to the shaping of…
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,…
We present in this paper our approach for modeling inter-topic preferences of Twitter users: for example, those who agree with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) also agree with free trade. This kind of knowledge is useful not only for…
Twitter is used for a variety of reasons, including information dissemination, marketing, political organizing and to spread propaganda, spamming, promotion, conversations, and so on. Characterizing these activities and categorizing…
Social media platforms systematically reward popularity over authenticity, incentivizing users to strategically tailor their expression for attention. In this paper, we introduce (i) popularity as a strategic expression mechanism, distinct…
Social networks have triumphed in communicating people online, but they have also been exploited to launch influence operations for manipulating society. The deployment of software-controlled accounts (e.g., social bots) has proven to be…
Micro-blogging systems such as Twitter expose digital traces of social discourse with an unprecedented degree of resolution of individual behaviors. They offer an opportunity to investigate how a large-scale social system responds to…
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…
Since the advent of online social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, useful health-related studies have been conducted using the information posted by online participants. Personal health-related issues such as mental health,…
Accurately estimating how users respond to moderation interventions is paramount for developing effective and user-centred moderation strategies. However, this requires a clear understanding of which user characteristics are associated with…
Twitter bots amplify target content in a coordinated manner to make them appear popular, which is an astroturfing attack. Such attacks promote certain keywords to push them to Twitter trends to make them visible to a broader audience. Past…