Related papers: Characterizing, Detecting, and Predicting Online B…

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…

The ubiquity of user accounts in websites and online services makes account hijacking a serious security concern. Although previous research has studied various techniques through which an attacker can gain access to a victim's account,…

Exploring online behavior change is imperative for societal progress in the context of 21st-century challenges. We analyze 148 articles (2000-2023) focusing on behavior change in the digital space and build a map that categorizes behaviors,…

Social Media are evolving as a pervasive source of news able to reach a larger audience through their spreading power. The main drawback is given by the presence of malicious accounts, known as social bots, which are often used to diffuse…

Many cyberattacks start with disseminating phishing URLs. When clicking these phishing URLs, the victim's private information is leaked to the attacker. There have been proposed several machine learning methods to detect phishing URLs.…

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 popularity of social media platforms such as Twitter has led to the proliferation of automated bots, creating both opportunities and challenges in information dissemination, user engagements, and quality of services. Past works on…

An essential topic in online social network security is how to accurately detect bot accounts and relieve their harmful impacts (e.g., misinformation, rumor, and spam) on genuine users. Based on a real-world data set, we construct…

Hate speech, offensive language, sexism, racism and other types of abusive behavior have become a common phenomenon in many online social media platforms. In recent years, such diverse abusive behaviors have been manifesting with increased…

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are attracting the attention of people all over the world. Regardless the platform, numbers of registrants for online courses are impressive but in the same time, completion rates are disappointing.…

For the past 20 years, China has increasingly restricted the access of minors to online games using addiction prevention systems (APSes). At the same time, and through different means, i.e., the Great Firewall of China (GFW), it also…

Social media platforms, particularly Twitter, have become pivotal arenas for influence campaigns, often orchestrated by state-sponsored information operations (IOs). This paper delves into the detection of key players driving IOs by…

While extensive popularity of online social media platforms has made information dissemination faster, it has also resulted in widespread online abuse of different types like hate speech, offensive language, sexist and racist opinions, etc.…

A core problem in the development and maintenance of crowd-sourced filter lists is that their maintainers cannot confidently predict whether (and where) a new filter list rule will break websites. This is a result of enormity of the Web,…

Dark patterns in user interfaces represent deceptive design practices intended to manipulate users' behavior, often leading to unintended consequences such as coerced purchases, involuntary data disclosures, or user frustration. Detecting…

Community-level bans are a common tool against groups that enable online harassment and harmful speech. Unfortunately, the efficacy of community bans has only been partially studied and with mixed results. Here, we provide a flexible…

Malicious websites are a major cyber attack vector, and effective detection of them is an important cyber defense task. The main defense paradigm in this regard is that the defender uses some kind of machine learning algorithms to train a…

Donations to charity-based crowdfunding environments have been on the rise in the last few years. Unsurprisingly, deception and fraud in such platforms have also increased, but have not been thoroughly studied to understand what…

Online social networks (OSNs) are increasingly threatened by social bots which are software-controlled OSN accounts that mimic human users with malicious intentions. A social botnet refers to a group of social bots under the control of a…

One of the main challenges online social systems face is the prevalence of antisocial behavior, such as harassment and personal attacks. In this work, we introduce the task of predicting from the very start of a conversation whether it will…