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Harassing and hateful speech in online spaces has become a common problem for platform maintainers and their users. The toxicity created by such content can discourage user participation and engagement. Therefore, it is crucial for and a…
With the rapid growth of social media usage, a common trend has emerged where users often make sarcastic comments on posts. While sarcasm can sometimes be harmless, it can blur the line with cyberbullying, especially when used in negative…
This paper examines the shift in focus on content policies and user attitudes on the social media platform Reddit. We do this by focusing on comments from general Reddit users from five posts made by admins (moderators) on updates to Reddit…
Social media have been seen to accelerate the spread of negative content such as disinformation and hate speech, often unleashing reckless herd mentality within networks, further aggravated by malicious entities using bots for…
Optimism about the Internet's potential to bring the world together has been tempered by concerns about its role in inflaming the 'culture wars'. Via mass selection into like-minded groups, online society may be becoming more fragmented and…
With increasing attention to online anti-social behaviors such as personal attacks and bigotry, it is critical to have an accurate accounting of how widespread anti-social behaviors are. In this paper, we empirically measure the prevalence…
While cross-partisan conversations are central to a vibrant democracy, these are hard conversations to have, especially in the United States amidst unprecedented levels of partisan animosity. Such interactions often devolve into…
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…
The aim of this paper is to present methods to systematically analyze individual and group behavioral patterns observed in community driven discussion platforms like Reddit where users exchange information and views on various topics of…
User contributions in the form of posts, comments, and votes are essential to the success of online communities. However, allowing user participation also invites undesirable behavior such as trolling. In this paper, we characterize…
Understanding the sociodemographic composition of online platforms is essential for accurately interpreting digital behavior and its societal implications. Yet, current methods often lack the transparency and reliability required, risking…
Online platforms have sanctioned individuals and communities associated with fringe movements linked to hate speech, violence, and terrorism, but can these sanctions contribute to the abandonment of these movements? Here, we investigate…
Controversial posts are those that split the preferences of a community, receiving both significant positive and significant negative feedback. Our inclusion of the word "community" here is deliberate: what is controversial to some…
Making online social communities 'better' is a challenging undertaking, as online communities are extraordinarily varied in their size, topical focus, and governance. As such, what is valued by one community may not be valued by another.…
This study proposes content and interaction analysis techniques for a large repository created from social media content. Though we have presented our study for a large platform dedicated to discussions around financial topics, the proposed…
Most social network analysis works at the level of interactions between users. But the vast growth in size and complexity of social networks enables us to examine interactions at larger scale. In this work we use a dataset of 76M…
We propose a system to predict harmful discussions on social media platforms. Our solution uses contextual deep language models and proposes the novel idea of integrating state-of-the-art Graph Transformer Networks to analyze all…
Over the past decade, social media platforms have been key in spreading rumors, leading to significant negative impacts. To counter this, the community has developed various Rumor Detection (RD) algorithms to automatically identify them…
Widespread conspiracy theories may significantly impact our society. This paper focuses on the QAnon conspiracy theory, a consequential conspiracy theory that started on and disseminated successfully through social media. Our work…
Online volunteers are an uncompensated yet valuable labor force for many social platforms. For example, volunteer content moderators perform a vast amount of labor to maintain online communities. However, as social platforms like Reddit…