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The Covid-19 pandemic has had a deep impact on the lives of the entire world population, inducing a participated societal debate. As in other contexts, the debate has been the subject of several d/misinformation campaigns; in a quite…
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted on every human activity and, because of the urgency of finding the proper responses to such an unprecedented emergency, it generated a diffused societal debate. The online version of this discussion was…
Social media platforms have become essential spaces for public discourse. While political polarisation and limited communication across different groups are widely acknowledged, the connection between social network fragmentation and the…
We investigate networks formed by keywords in tweets and study their community structure. Based on datasets of tweets mined from over seven hundred political figures in the U.S. and Canada, we hypothesize that such Twitter keyword networks…
In this work we study how pervasive is the presence of disinformation in the Italian debate around immigration on Twitter and the role of automated accounts in the diffusion of such content. By characterising the Twitter users with an…
How do European publics debate a geopolitical crisis on social media, and do they inhabit a shared informational reality? We analyze over 38 million geolocated tweets from 20 European countries during the first eight months of the Russian…
The advent of social media changed the way we consume content favoring a disintermediated access and production. This scenario has been matter of critical discussion about its impact on society. Magnified in the case of Arab Spring or…
The rise of a trending topic on Twitter or Facebook leads to the temporal emergence of a set of users currently interested in that topic. Given the temporary nature of the links between these users, being able to dynamically identify…
Social media platforms offer users multiple ways to engage with content--likes, retweets, and comments--creating a complex signaling system within the attention economy. While previous research has examined factors driving overall…
We address a challenging problem of identifying main sources of hate speech on Twitter. On one hand, we carefully annotate a large set of tweets for hate speech, and deploy advanced deep learning to produce high quality hate speech…
Even though the Internet and social media have increased the amount of news and information people can consume, most users are only exposed to content that reinforces their positions and isolates them from other ideological communities.…
Social media platforms promise to enable rich and vibrant conversations online; however, their potential is often hindered by antisocial behaviors. In this paper, we study the relationship between structure and toxicity in conversations on…
The rise of misinformation and fake news in online political discourse poses significant challenges to democratic processes and public engagement. While debunking efforts aim to counteract misinformation and foster fact-based dialogue,…
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…
Individuals engaging on social media often tend to establish online communities where interactions predominantly occur among like-minded peers. While considerable efforts have been devoted to studying and delineating these communities,…
As the novel coronavirus spreads across the world, concerns regarding the spreading of misinformation about it are also growing. Here we estimate the prevalence of links to low-credibility information on Twitter during the outbreak, and the…
Polarization, declining trust, and wavering support for democratic norms are pressing threats to U.S. democracy. Exposure to verified and quality news may lower individual susceptibility to these threats and make citizens more resilient to…
Online discussions are often characterized by strong behavioral asymmetries: a relatively small fraction of users actively produces content, while the majority primarily consumes and redistributes it. Here we propose a community-detection…
Conventional topic models are ineffective for topic extraction from microblog messages, because the data sparseness exhibited in short messages lacking structure and contexts results in poor message-level word co-occurrence patterns. To…
In recent years, malicious information had an explosive growth in social media, with serious social and political backlashes. Recent important studies, featuring large-scale analyses, have produced deeper knowledge about this phenomenon,…