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Social Media are nowadays the privileged channel for information spreading and news checking. Unexpectedly for most of the users, automated accounts, also known as social bots, contribute more and more to this process of news spreading.…
With the explosive growth of the Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19), misinformation on social media has developed into a global phenomenon with widespread and detrimental societal effects. Despite recent progress and efforts in detecting…
Democrats and Republicans have seemed to grow apart in the past three decades. Since the United States as we know it today is undeniably bipartisan, this phenomenon would not appear as a surprise to most. However, there are triggers which…
Conspiracy theories can threaten society by spreading misinformation, deepening polarization, and eroding trust in democratic institutions. Social media often fuels the spread of conspiracies, primarily driven by two key actors:…
A rapidly increasing amount of human conversation occurs online. But divisiveness and conflict can fester in text-based interactions on social media platforms, in messaging apps, and on other digital forums. Such toxicity increases…
COVID-19 represents the most severe global crisis to date whose public conversation can be studied in real time. To do so, we use a data set of over 350 million tweets and retweets posted by over 26 million English speaking Twitter users…
We explore how the polarization around controversial topics evolves on Twitter - over a long period of time (2011 to 2016), and also as a response to major external events that lead to increased related activity. We find that increased…
Propaganda, disinformation, manipulation, and polarization are the modern illnesses of a society increasingly dependent on social media as a source of news. In this paper, we explore the disinformation campaign, sponsored by Russia and…
Social media platforms have transformed the dynamics of collective opinion formation, enabling rapid, large-scale interactions while simultaneously exposing online discourse to polarization and manipulation. Traditional models of opinion…
Identifying and characterizing disinformation in political discourse on social media is critical to ensure the integrity of elections and democratic processes around the world. Persistent manipulation of social media has resulted in…
Social media are decentralized, interactive, and transformative, empowering users to produce and spread information to influence others. This has changed the dynamics of political communication that were previously dominated by traditional…
The spread of misinformation on social media is a pressing societal problem that platforms, policymakers, and researchers continue to grapple with. As a countermeasure, recent works have proposed to employ non-expert fact-checkers in the…
In this work we study, on a sample of 2.3 million individuals, how Facebook users consumed different information at the edge of political discussion and news during the last Italian electoral competition. Pages are categorized, according to…
Recent studies have confirmed a growing trend, especially among youngsters, of using Online Social Media as favourite information platform at the expense of traditional mass media. Indeed, they can easily reach a wide audience at a high…
Polarization is a troubling phenomenon that can lead to societal divisions and hurt the democratic process. It is therefore important to develop methods to reduce it. We propose an algorithmic solution to the problem of reducing…
Large-scale social networks are thought to contribute to polarization by amplifying people's biases. However, the complexity of these technologies makes it difficult to identify the mechanisms responsible and to evaluate mitigation…
The rising attention to the spreading of fake news and unsubstantiated rumors on online social media and the pivotal role played by confirmation bias led researchers to investigate different aspects of the phenomenon. Experimental evidence…
Twitter bot detection is vital in combating misinformation and safeguarding the integrity of social media discourse. While malicious bots are becoming more and more sophisticated and personalized, standard bot detection approaches are still…
The phenomenon of misinformation spreading in social media has developed a new form of active citizens who focus on tackling the problem by refuting posts that might contain misinformation. Automatically identifying and characterizing the…
Fake news has emerged as a pervasive problem within Online Social Networks, leading to a surge of research interest in this area. Understanding the dissemination mechanisms of fake news is crucial in comprehending the propagation of…