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The Syria conflict has been described as the most socially mediated in history, with online social media playing a particularly important role. At the same time, the ever-changing landscape of the conflict leads to difficulties in applying…
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)…
The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) is a dominant insurgent group operating in Iraq and Syria that rose to prominence when it took over Mosul in June, 2014. In this paper, we present a data-driven approach to analyzing this group…
Social media users often hold several accounts in their effort to multiply the spread of their thoughts, ideas, and viewpoints. In the particular case of objectionable content, users tend to create multiple accounts to bypass the combating…
Following the 2016 US elections Twitter launched their Information Operations (IO) hub where they archive account activity connected to state linked information operations. In June 2020, Twitter took down and released a set of accounts…
A very large number of people use Online Social Networks daily. Such platforms thus become attractive targets for agents that seek to gain access to the attention of large audiences, and influence perceptions or opinions. Botnets,…
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…
Social media provides a critical communication platform for political figures, but also makes them easy targets for harassment. In this paper, we characterize users who adversarially interact with political figures on Twitter using…
Big data research is currently split on whether and to what extent Twitter can be characterised as an informational or social network. We contribute to this line of inquiry through an investigation of digital humanities scholars' uses and…
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…
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,…
Over the past years, political events and public opinion on the Web have been allegedly manipulated by accounts dedicated to spreading disinformation and performing malicious activities on social media. These accounts hereafter referred to…
Understanding the dynamics of social interactions is crucial to comprehend human behavior. The emergence of online social media has enabled access to data regarding people relationships at a large scale. Twitter, specifically, is an…
Data extracted from social networks like Twitter are increasingly being used to build applications and services that mine and summarize public reactions to events, such as traffic monitoring platforms, identification of epidemic outbreaks,…
Considering the raising socio-economic burden of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), timely and evidence-driven public policy decision making and communication of the latest guidelines pertaining to the treatment and management of the disorder…
This discussion paper demonstrates how longitudinal sentiment analyses can depict intertemporal dynamics on social media platforms, what challenges are inherent and how further research could benefit from a longitudinal perspective.…
The hacktivist group Anonymous is unusual in its public-facing nature. Unlike other cybercriminal groups, which rely on secrecy and privacy for protection, Anonymous is prevalent on the social media site, Twitter. In this paper we…
We explore the effects of coordinated users (i.e., users characterized by an unexpected, suspicious, or exceptional similarity) in information spreading on Twitter by quantifying the efficacy of their tactics in deceiving feed algorithms to…
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…
Radical right influencers routinely use social media to spread highly divisive, disruptive and anti-democratic messages. Assessing and countering the challenge that such content poses is crucial for ensuring that online spaces remain open,…