Related papers: Exploiting the Right: Inferring Ideological Alignm…

The weaponization of digital communications and social media to conduct disinformation campaigns at immense scale, speed, and reach presents new challenges to identify and counter hostile influence operations (IOs). This paper presents an…

News sharing on digital platforms shapes the digital spaces millions of users navigate. Trace data from these platforms also enables researchers to study online news circulation. In this context, research on the types of news shared by…

The dynamics and influence of fake news on Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election remains to be clarified. Here, we use a dataset of 171 million tweets in the five months preceding the election day to identify 30 million tweets,…

World leaders have been increasingly using social media platforms as a tool for political communication. However, despite the growing research on governmental accounts on social media, virtually nothing is known about interactions among…

Members of different political groups not only disagree about issues but also dislike and distrust each other. While social media can amplify this emotional divide -- called affective polarization by political scientists -- there is a lack…

The rapid expansion of cyberspace has greatly facilitated the strategic shift of traditional crimes to online platforms. This has included malicious actors, such as extremist organisations, making use of online networks to disseminate…

The proliferation of political memes in modern information campaigns calls for efficient solutions for image classification by ideological affiliation. While significant advances have recently been made on text classification in modern…

Social media are now a routine part of political campaigns all over the world. However, studies of the impact of campaigning on social platform have thus far been limited to cross-sectional datasets from one election period which are…

The adaptive social learning paradigm helps model how networked agents are able to form opinions on a state of nature and track its drifts in a changing environment. In this framework, the agents repeatedly update their beliefs based on…

Social media platforms provide users with a profile description field, commonly known as a ``bio," where they can present themselves to the world. A growing literature shows that text in these bios can improve our understanding of online…

Twitter is a common site of offensive language. Prior literature has shown that the emotional content of tweets can heavily impact their diffusion when discussing political topics. We extend prior work to look at offensive tweets that link…

Following the 2016 US presidential election and the now overwhelming evidence of Russian interference, there has been an explosion of interest in the phenomenon of "fake news". To date, research on false news has centered around detecting…

An important challenge in the process of tracking and detecting the dissemination of misinformation is to understand the political gap between people that engage with the so called "fake news". A possible factor responsible for this gap is…

Social media has played an important role in shaping political discourse over the last decade. At the same time, it is often perceived to have increased political polarization, thanks to the scale of discussions and their public nature. In…

Estimating influence on social media networks is an important practical and theoretical problem, especially because this new medium is widely exploited as a platform for disinformation and propaganda. This paper introduces a novel approach…

The prevalence of state-sponsored propaganda on the Internet has become a cause for concern in the recent years. While much effort has been made to identify state-sponsored Internet propaganda, the problem remains far from being solved…

Social media broadly refers to digital platforms and applications that simulate social interactions online. This study investigates the impact of social media platforms and their algorithms on political interest among users. As social media…

Social media platforms attempting to curb abuse and misinformation have been accused of political bias. We deploy neutral social bots who start following different news sources on Twitter, and track them to probe distinct biases emerging…

The massive spread of digital misinformation has been identified as a major global risk and has been alleged to influence elections and threaten democracies. Communication, cognitive, social, and computer scientists are engaged in efforts…

Selective exposure, individuals' inclination to seek out information that supports their beliefs while avoiding information that contradicts them, plays an important role in the emergence of polarization and echo chambers. In the political…