Related papers: Applying Word Embeddings to Measure Valence in Inf…

Online harassment is a significant social problem. Prevention of online harassment requires rapid detection of harassing, offensive, and negative social media posts. In this paper, we propose the use of word embedding models to identify…

Incivility refers to behaviors that violate collective norms and disrupt cooperation within the political process. Although large-scale online data and automated techniques have enabled the quantitative analysis of uncivil discourse, prior…

Many recent political events, like the 2016 US Presidential elections or the 2018 Brazilian elections have raised the attention of institutions and of the general public on the role of Internet and social media in influencing the outcome of…

Studies of online influence operations, coordinated efforts to disseminate and amplify disinformation, focus on forensic analysis of social networks or of publicly available datasets of trolls and bot accounts. However, little is known…

On social platforms like Twitter, strategic targeted attacks are becoming increasingly common, especially against vulnerable groups such as female journalists. Two key challenges in identifying strategic online behavior are the complex…

Technology-facilitated gender-based violence has become a global threat to women's political representation and democracy. Understanding how online hate affects its targets is thus paramount. We analyse 10 million tweets directed at female…

Social media trolling is a powerful tactic to manipulate public opinion on issues with a high moral component. Troll farms, as evidenced in the past, created fabricated content to provoke or silence people to share their opinion on social…

Social media, once hailed as a vehicle for democratization and the promotion of positive social change across the globe, are under attack for becoming a tool of political manipulation and spread of disinformation. A case in point is the…

Hate speech and toxic comments are a common concern of social media platform users. Although these comments are, fortunately, the minority in these platforms, they are still capable of causing harm. Therefore, identifying these comments is…

Instant messaging platforms such as Telegram became one of the main means of communication used by people all over the world. Most of them are home of several groups and channels that connect thousands of people focused on political topics.…

Trolling and social bots have been proven as powerful tactics for manipulating the public opinion and sowing discord among Twitter users. This effort requires substantial content fabrication and account coordination to evade Twitter's…

2018's Brazilian presidential elections highlighted the influence of alternative media and social networks, such as Twitter. In this work, we perform an analysis covering politically motivated discourses related to the second round in…

Unraveling the role of opinion leaders in the digital realm, this study investigates the influence of key actors on Telegram, a hybrid platform that combines messaging app features with social network dynamics, where channel administrators…

In the contemporary world, a significant number of people use social networking services for a variety of purposes, including, but not limited to, communicating, exchanging messages and searching for information. A popular social network in…

Politics in different countries show diverse degrees of polarization, which tends to be stronger on social media, given how easy it became to connect and engage with like-minded individuals on the web. A way of reducing polarization would…

Twitter is increasingly used for political, advertising and marketing campaigns, where the main aim is to influence users to support specific causes, individuals or groups. We propose a novel methodology for mining and analyzing Twitter…

The web plays an important role in people's social lives since the emergence of Web 2.0. It facilitates the interaction between users, gives them the possibility to freely interact, share and collaborate through social networks, online…

This paper considers the problem of automatically characterizing overall attitudes and biases that may be associated with emerging information operations via artificial intelligence. Accurate analysis of these emerging topics usually…

In today's media landscape, where news outlets play a pivotal role in shaping public opinion, it is imperative to address the issue of sentiment manipulation within news text. News writers often inject their own biases and emotional…

We describe a case study in the use of the Structured Process for Information Campaign Enhancement (SP!CE, version 2.1) to evaluate influence campaigns present in the 2nd round of the Brazilian presidential election in 2022 October. SP!CE…