Related papers: Bots, Disinformation, and the First Trump Impeachm…
Bots, social media accounts controlled by software rather than by humans, have recently been under the spotlight for their association with various forms of online manipulation. To date, much work has focused on social bot detection, but…
The wide spread of unfounded election fraud claims surrounding the U.S. 2020 election had resulted in undermining of trust in the election, culminating in violence inside the U.S. capitol. Under these circumstances, it is critical to…
In recent years, there has been a huge increase in the number of bots online, varying from Web crawlers for search engines, to chatbots for online customer service, spambots on social media, and content-editing bots in online collaboration…
Misinformation is a global problem in modern social media platforms with few solutions known to be effective. Social media platforms have offered tools to raise awareness of information, but these are closed systems that have not been…
Online social networks (OSN) like Twitter or Facebook are popular and powerful since they allow reaching millions of users online. They are also a popular target for socialbot attacks. Without a deep understanding of the impact of such…
Online fringe communities offer fertile grounds for users seeking and sharing ideas fueling suspicion of mainstream news and conspiracy theories. Among these, the QAnon conspiracy theory emerged in 2017 on 4chan, broadly supporting the idea…
Widespread conspiracy theories may significantly impact our society. This paper focuses on the QAnon conspiracy theory, a consequential conspiracy theory that started on and disseminated successfully through social media. Our work…
Misinformation entails the dissemination of falsehoods that leads to the slow fracturing of society via decreased trust in democratic processes, institutions, and science. The public has grown aware of the role of social media as a…
This paper investigates inauthentic duplication on social media, where multiple accounts share identical misinformation tweets. Leveraging a dataset of misinformation verified by AltNews, an Indian fact-checking organization, we analyze…
Chatbots, or bots for short, are multi-modal collaborative assistants that can help people complete useful tasks. Usually, when chatbots are referenced in connection with elections, they often draw negative reactions due to the fear of…
The illusion of consensus occurs when people believe there is consensus across multiple sources, but the sources are the same and thus there is no "true" consensus. We explore this phenomenon in the context of an AI-based intelligent agent…
This paper presents a quantitative study of Twitter, one of the most popular micro-blogging services, from the perspective of user influence. We crawl several datasets from the most active communities on Twitter and obtain 20.5 million user…
The diffusion of opinions in Social Networks is a relevant process for adopting positions and attracting potential voters in political campaigns. Opinion polarization, bias, targeted diffusion, and the radicalization of postures are key…
Social networks offer a ready channel for fake and misleading news to spread and exert influence. This paper examines the performance of different reputation algorithms when applied to a large and statistically significant portion of the…
Fake news in social media has quickly become one of the most discussed topics in today's society. With false information proliferating and causing a significant impact in the political, economical, and social domains, research efforts to…
The growing prominence of social media in public discourse has led to a greater scrutiny of the quality of online information and the role it plays in amplifying political polarization. However, studies of polarization on social media…
From 2018 to 2023, Brazil experienced its most fiercely contested elections in history, resulting in the election of far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro followed by the left-wing, Lula da Silva. This period was marked by a murder attempt, a…
Online hate speech, particularly over microblogging platforms like Twitter, has emerged as arguably the most severe issue of the past decade. Several countries have reported a steep rise in hate crimes infuriated by malicious hate…
According to the classical definition, propaganda is the management of collective attitudes by manipulation of significant symbols. However this definition has changed to computational propaganda, the way manipulation takes place in digital…
Politics is one of the most prevalent topics discussed on social media platforms, particularly during major election cycles, where users engage in conversations about candidates and electoral processes. Malicious actors may use this…