Related papers: Toxicity in the Decentralized Web and the Potentia…
Moderation and blocking behavior, both closely related to the mitigation of abuse and misinformation on social platforms, are fundamental mechanisms for maintaining healthy online communities. However, while centralized platforms typically…
Lack of moderation in online communities enables participants to incur in personal aggression, harassment or cyberbullying, issues that have been accentuated by extremist radicalisation in the contemporary post-truth politics scenario. This…
Centralized content moderation paradigm both falls short and over-reaches: 1) it fails to account for the subjective nature of harm, and 2) it acts with blunt suppression in response to content deemed harmful, even when such content can be…
Online communities often overlap and coexist, despite incongruent norms and approaches to content moderation. When communities diverge, decentralized and federated communities may pursue group-level sanctions, including defederation…
We present a Federated Learning (FL) based solution for building a distributed classifier capable of detecting URLs containing GDPR-sensitive content related to categories such as health, sexual preference, political beliefs, etc. Although…
The volume of machine-generated content online has grown dramatically due to the widespread use of Large Language Models (LLMs), leading to new challenges for content moderation systems. Conventional content moderation classifiers, which…
We present a holistic approach to building a robust and useful natural language classification system for real-world content moderation. The success of such a system relies on a chain of carefully designed and executed steps, including the…
The argument for persistent social media influence campaigns, often funded by malicious entities, is gaining traction. These entities utilize instrumented profiles to disseminate divisive content and disinformation, shaping public…
Text detoxification is a conditional text generation task aiming to remove offensive content from toxic text. It is highly useful for online forums and social media, where offensive content is frequently encountered. Intuitively, there are…
Toxic sentiment analysis on Twitter (X) often focuses on specific topics and events such as politics and elections. Datasets of toxic users in such research are typically gathered through lexicon-based techniques, providing only a…
The censorship of toxic comments is often left to the judgment of imperfect models. Perspective API, a creation of Google technology incubator Jigsaw, is perhaps the most widely used toxicity classifier in industry; the model is employed by…
Mental illness affects a significant portion of the worldwide population. Online mental health forums can provide a supportive environment for those afflicted and also generate a large amount of data which can be mined to predict mental…
Online conversations can be toxic and subjected to threats, abuse, or harassment. To identify toxic text comments, several deep learning and machine learning models have been proposed throughout the years. However, recent studies…
Decentralized federated learning (DFL) enables devices to collaboratively train models over complex network topologies without relying on a central controller. In this setting, local data remains private, but its quality and quantity can…
Current content moderation follows a reactive, trial-and-error approach, where interventions are applied and their effects are only measured post-hoc. In contrast, we introduce a proactive, predictive approach that enables moderators to…
Harmful content detection models tend to have higher false positive rates for content from marginalized groups. In the context of marginal abuse modeling on Twitter, such disproportionate penalization poses the risk of reduced visibility,…
The Perspective API, a popular text toxicity assessment service by Google and Jigsaw, has found wide adoption in several application areas, notably content moderation, monitoring, and social media research. We examine its potentials and…
Decentralized content curation is the process through which uploaded posts are ranked and filtered based exclusively on users' feedback. Platforms such as the blockchain-based Steemit employ this type of curation while providing monetary…
The Internet and, in particular, Online Social Networks have changed the way that terrorist and extremist groups can influence and radicalise individuals. Recent reports show that the mode of operation of these groups starts by exposing a…
This study was motivated by the problem of identifying fake documents on the Internet. To explore possible solutions to this problem we introduce a model of a network community in which members submit documents with verifiable content.…