Related papers: Bots, Disinformation, and the First Trump Impeachm…
Social media, once hailed as a vehicle for democratization and the promotion of positive social change across the globe, are under attack for becoming a tool of political manipulation and spread of disinformation. A case in point is the…
The QAnon conspiracy posits that Satan-worshiping Democrats operate a covert child sex-trafficking operation, which Donald Trump is destined to expose and annihilate. Emblematic of the ease with which political misconceptions can spread…
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,…
2018 started with massive protests in Iran, bringing back the impressions of the so called "Arab Spring" and it's revolutionary impact for the Maghreb states, Syria and Egypt. Many reports and scientific examinations considered online…
Malicious Twitter bots are detrimental to public discourse on social media. Past studies have looked at spammers, fake followers, and astroturfing bots, but retweet bots, which artificially inflate content, are not well understood. In this…
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…
It is a widely accepted fact that state-sponsored Twitter accounts operated during the 2016 US presidential election spreading millions of tweets with misinformation and inflammatory political content. Whether these social media campaigns…
Bots are social media accounts that automate interaction with other users, and they are active on the StrongerIn-Brexit conversation happening over Twitter. These automated scripts generate content through these platforms and then interact…
Societies are complex systems which tend to polarize into sub-groups of individuals with dramatically opposite perspectives. This phenomenon is reflected -- and often amplified -- in online social networks where, however, humans are no more…
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was accompanied by practices of information warfare, yet existing evidence is largely anecdotal while large-scale empirical evidence is lacking. Here, we analyze the spread of pro-Russian…
For more than a decade now, academicians and online platform administrators have been studying solutions to the problem of bot detection. Bots are computer algorithms whose use is far from being benign: malicious bots are purposely created…
On the morning of November 9th 2016, the world woke up to the shocking outcome of the US Presidential elections: Donald Trump was the 45th President of the United States of America. An unexpected event that still has tremendous consequences…
Social media provide a fertile ground where conspiracy theories and radical ideas can flourish, reach broad audiences, and sometimes lead to hate or violence beyond the online world itself. QAnon represents a notable example of a political…
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…
Online social networks are often subject to influence campaigns by malicious actors through the use of automated accounts known as bots. We consider the problem of detecting bots in online social networks and assessing their impact on the…
Social media platforms have witnessed a substantial increase in social bot activity, significantly affecting online discourse. Our study explores the dynamic nature of bot engagement related to Extinction Rebellion climate change protests…
Over the past couple of years, the topic of "fake news" and its influence over people's opinions has become a growing cause for concern. Although the spread of disinformation on the Internet is not a new phenomenon, the widespread use of…
For more than a decade scholars have been investigating the disinformation flow on social media contextually to societal events, like, e.g., elections. In this paper, we analyze the Twitter traffic related to the US 2020 pre-election debate…
Chatter on social media is 20% bots and 80% humans. Chatter by bots and humans is consistently different: bots tend to use linguistic cues that can be easily automated while humans use cues that require dialogue understanding. Bots use…
Social media platforms have been exploited to conduct election interference in recent years. In particular, the Russian-backed Internet Research Agency (IRA) has been identified as a key source of misinformation spread on Twitter prior to…