Related papers: Toxicity in the Decentralized Web and the Potentia…

In this paper, we consider the general scenario of resource sharing in a decentralized system when the resource rewards/qualities are time-varying and unknown to the users, and using the same resource by multiple users leads to reduced…

Mental health forums are online communities where people express their issues and seek help from moderators and other users. In such forums, there are often posts with severe content indicating that the user is in acute distress and there…

Agent-based models of opinion dynamics allow one to examine the spread of opinions between entities and to study phenomena such as consensus, polarization, and fragmentation. By studying a model of opinion dynamics on a social network, one…

Accurately estimating how users respond to moderation interventions is paramount for developing effective and user-centred moderation strategies. However, this requires a clear understanding of which user characteristics are associated with…

Online communities serve as essential support channels for People Who Use Drugs (PWUD), providing access to peer support and harm reduction information. The moderation of these communities involves consequential decisions affecting member…

Community-level blocklists are key to content moderation practices in decentralized social media. These blocklists enable moderators to prevent other communities, such as those acting in bad faith, from interacting with their own -- and, if…

Machine learning (ML) is widely used to moderate online content. Despite its scalability relative to human moderation, the use of ML introduces unique challenges to content moderation. One such challenge is predictive multiplicity: multiple…

Cyberaggression has been studied in various contexts and online social platforms, and modeled on different data using state-of-the-art machine and deep learning algorithms to enable automatic detection and blocking of this behavior. Users…

As the Distributed Collection Manager's work on building tools to support users maintaining collections of changing web-based resources has progressed, questions about the characteristics of people's collections of web pages have arisen.…

Real-time toxicity detection in online environments poses a significant challenge, due to the increasing prevalence of social media and gaming platforms. We introduce ToxBuster, a simple and scalable model that reliably detects toxic…

News recommender systems are hindered by the brief lifespan of articles, as they undergo rapid relevance decay. Recent studies have demonstrated the potential of content-based neural techniques in tackling this problem. However, these…

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), one in four people will be affected by mental disorders at some point in their lives. However, in many parts of the world, patients do not actively seek professional diagnosis because of…

Automated cyber threat detection in computer networks is a major challenge in cybersecurity. The cyber domain has inherent challenges that make traditional machine learning techniques problematic, specifically the need to learn continually…

Mainstream social media platforms function as "walled garden" ecosystems that restrict user agency, control, and data portability. They have demonstrated a lack of transparency that contributes to a multitude of online harms. Our research…

Open-source large language models are becoming increasingly available and popular among researchers and practitioners. While significant progress has been made on open-weight models, open training data is a practice yet to be adopted by the…

Mining social media content for tasks such as detecting personal experiences or events, suffer from lexical sparsity, insufficient training data, and inventive lexicons. To reduce the burden of creating extensive labeled data and improve…

Topic models are popular models for analyzing a collection of text documents. The models assert that documents are distributions over latent topics and latent topics are distributions over words. A nested document collection is where…

Moderation layers are increasingly a core component of many products built on user- or model-generated content. However, drafting and maintaining domain-specific safety policies remains costly. We present Deep Policy Research (DPR), a…

Social media platforms have become critical spaces for discussing mental health concerns, including eating disorders. While these platforms can provide valuable support networks, they may also amplify harmful content that glorifies…

The rapid growth of audio-centric platforms and applications such as WhatsApp and Twitter has transformed the way people communicate and share audio content in modern society. However, these platforms are increasingly misused to disseminate…