Related papers: Finding Qs: Profiling QAnon Supporters on Parler
Polarized topics often spark discussion and debate on social media. Recent studies have shown that polarized debates have a specific clustered structure in the endorsement net- work, which indicates that users direct their endorsements…
Social media sites are becoming a key factor in politics. These platforms are easy to manipulate for the purpose of distorting information space to confuse and distract voters. Past works to identify disruptive patterns are mostly focused…
The discussion-board site 4chan has been part of the Internet's dark underbelly since its inception, and recent political events have put it increasingly in the spotlight. In particular, /pol/, the "Politically Incorrect" board, has been a…
Knowledge of slang is a desirable feature of LLMs in the context of user interaction, as slang often reflects an individual's social identity. Several works on informal language processing have defined and curated benchmarks for tasks such…
Recent advances in NLP have improved our ability to understand the nuanced worldviews of online communities. Existing research focused on probing ideological stances treats liberals and conservatives as separate groups. However, this fails…
As political attitudes have diverged ideologically in the United States, political speech has diverged lingusitically. The ever-widening polarization between the US political parties is accelerated by an erosion of mutual understanding…
Background: Social media chatter in 2020 has been largely dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Existing research shows that COVID-19 discourse is highly politicized, with political preferences linked to beliefs and disbeliefs about the…
All societies have been much more bipolar over the past few years, particularly after the emergence of online social networks and media. In fact, the gap between the two ends of social spectrum is going to be even deeper after the spread of…
Priority users (e.g., verified profiles on Twitter) are social media users whose content is promoted by recommendation algorithms. However, the impact of this heterogeneous user influence on opinion dynamics, such as polarization phenomena,…
For Iranians and the Iranian diaspora, the Farsi Twittersphere provides an important alternative to state media and an outlet for political discourse. But this understudied online space has become an opinion manipulation battleground, with…
Social media provides a critical communication platform for political figures, but also makes them easy targets for harassment. In this paper, we characterize users who adversarially interact with political figures on Twitter using…
The Internet Research Agency (IRA) influences online political conversations in the United States, exacerbating existing partisan divides and sowing discord. In this paper we investigate the IRA's communication strategies by analyzing…
Social media broadly refers to digital platforms and applications that simulate social interactions online. This study investigates the impact of social media platforms and their algorithms on political interest among users. As social media…
Far-right actors are often purveyors of Islamophobic hate speech online, using social media to spread divisive and prejudiced messages which can stir up intergroup tensions and conflict. Hateful content can inflict harm on targeted victims,…
The increasing consumption of news online in the 21st century coincided with increased publication of disinformation, biased reporting, hate speech and other unwanted Web content. We describe BiasScanner, an application that aims to…
Social bots-automated accounts that generate and spread content on social media-are exploiting vulnerabilities in these platforms to manipulate public perception and disseminate disinformation. This has prompted the development of public…
This paper presents TrollHunter2020, a real-time detection mechanism we used to hunt for trolling narratives on Twitter during the 2020 U.S. elections. Trolling narratives form on Twitter as alternative explanations of polarizing events…
Web 2.0 helps to expand the range and depth of conversation on many issues and facilitates the formation of online communities. Online communities draw various individuals together based on their common opinions on a core set of issues.…
In this paper, we propose a web-centered framework to infer voter preferences for the 2016 U.S. presidential primaries. Using Twitter data collected from Sept. 2015 to March 2016, we first uncover the tweeting tactics of the candidates and…
The rise of fake news in the past decade has brought with it a host of consequences, from swaying opinions on elections to generating uncertainty during a pandemic. A majority of methods developed to combat disinformation either focus on…