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Coordinated information operations remain a persistent challenge on social media, despite platform efforts to curb them. While previous research has primarily focused on identifying these operations within individual platforms, this study…
The present study argues that political communication on social media is mediated by a platform's digital architecture, defined as the technical protocols that enable, constrain, and shape user behavior in a virtual space. A framework for…
Social media have great potential to support diverse information sharing, but there is widespread concern that platforms like Twitter do not result in communication between those who hold contradictory viewpoints. Because users can choose…
The present work proposes the use of social media as a tool for better understanding the relationship between a journalists' social network and the content they produce. Specifically, we ask: what is the relationship between the ideological…
Increased sharing of untrustworthy information on social media platforms is one of the main challenges of our modern information society. Because information disseminated by political elites is known to shape citizen and media discourse, it…
Following the 2016 US presidential election, there has been an increased focus on politically-motivated manipulation of mass-user behavior on social media platforms. Since a large volume of political discussion occurs on these platforms,…
Large-scale manipulations on social media have two important characteristics: (i) use of propaganda to influence others, and (ii) adoption of coordinated behavior to spread it and to amplify its impact. Despite the connection between them,…
Polarization in American politics has been extensively documented and analyzed for decades, and the phenomenon became all the more apparent during the 2016 presidential election, where Trump and Clinton depicted two radically different…
The importance of collective social action in current events is manifest in the Arab Spring and Occupy movements. Electronic social media have become a pervasive channel for social interactions, and a basis of collective social response to…
The 2016 United States presidential election has been characterized as a period of extreme divisiveness that was exacerbated on social media by the influence of fake news, trolls, and social bots. However, the extent to which the public…
The prevalence of coordinated information campaigns in social media platforms has significant negative consequences across various domains, including social, political, and economic processes. This paper proposes a multifaceted framework…
Recent years have seen a marked increase in the spread of misinformation, a phenomenon which has been accelerated and amplified by social media such as Facebook and Twitter. While some actors spread misinformation to push a specific agenda,…
Social media platforms play a pivotal role in shaping public opinion and amplifying political discourse, particularly during elections. However, the same dynamics that foster democratic engagement can also exacerbate polarization. To better…
Studies of online influence operations, coordinated efforts to disseminate and amplify disinformation, focus on forensic analysis of social networks or of publicly available datasets of trolls and bot accounts. However, little is known…
User-generated content (e.g., tweets and profile descriptions) and shared content between users (e.g., news articles) reflect a user's online identity. This paper investigates whether correlations between user-generated and user-shared…
Studying political activity on social media often requires defining and measuring political stances of users or content. Relevant examples include the study of opinion polarization, or the study of political diversity in online content…
This paper investigates the usage patterns of Facebook among different demographics in the United States, focusing on the consumption of political information and its variability across age, gender, and ethnicity. Employing a novel data…
Understanding political polarization on social platforms is important as public opinions may become increasingly extreme when they are circulated in homogeneous communities, thus potentially causing damage in the real world. Automatically…
In the past decade, social media platforms have been used for information dissemination and consumption. While a major portion of the content is posted to promote citizen journalism and public awareness, some content is posted to mislead…
The recent past has highlighted the influential role of social networks and online media in shaping public debate on current affairs and political issues. This paper is focused on studying the role of politically-motivated actors and their…