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The importance of collective social action in current events is manifest in the Arab Spring and Occupy movements. Electronic social media have become a pervasive channel for social interactions, and a basis of collective social response to…
The spread of misinformation through online social media platforms has had substantial societal consequences. As a result, platforms have introduced measures to alert users of news content that may be misleading or contain inaccuracies as a…
We provide an NLP framework to uncover four linguistic dimensions of political polarization in social media: topic choice, framing, affect and illocutionary force. We quantify these aspects with existing lexical methods, and propose…
Computer users are generally faced with difficulties in making correct security decisions. While an increasingly fewer number of people are trying or willing to take formal security training, online sources including news, security blogs,…
As the rate of content production grows, we must make a staggering number of daily decisions about what information is worth acting on. For any flourishing online social media system, users can barely keep up with the new content shared by…
With public information becoming widely accessible and shared on today's web, greater insights are possible into crowd actions by citizens and non-state actors such as large protests and cyber activism. We present efforts to predict the…
Climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of natural disasters worldwide. Media coverage of these events may be vital to generate empathy and mobilize global populations to address the common threat posed by climate change.…
Many extreme right groups have had an online presence for some time through the use of dedicated websites. This has been accompanied by increased activity in social media platforms in recent years, enabling the dissemination of extreme…
Social media has become an important tool to share information about crisis events such as natural disasters and mass attacks. Detecting actionable posts that contain useful information requires rapid analysis of huge volume of data in…
In a stylized voting model, we establish that increasing the share of critical thinkers -- individuals who are aware of the ambivalent nature of a certain issue -- in the population increases the efficiency of surveys (elections) but might…
One of the most pressing challenges in the digital media landscape is understanding the impact of biases on the news sources that people rely on for information. Biased news can have significant and far-reaching consequences, influencing…
How do European publics debate a geopolitical crisis on social media, and do they inhabit a shared informational reality? We analyze over 38 million geolocated tweets from 20 European countries during the first eight months of the Russian…
Using a dataset of over 1.9 million messages posted on Twitter by about 25,000 ISIS members, we explore how ISIS makes use of social media to spread its propaganda and to recruit militants from the Arab world and across the globe. By…
Members of different political groups not only disagree about issues but also dislike and distrust each other. While social media can amplify this emotional divide -- called affective polarization by political scientists -- there is a lack…
In this work we study, on a sample of 2.3 million individuals, how Facebook users consumed different information at the edge of political discussion and news during the last Italian electoral competition. Pages are categorized, according to…
Computational modelling of political discourse tasks has become an increasingly important area of research in natural language processing. Populist rhetoric has risen across the political sphere in recent years; however, computational…
Online Radicalization (also called Cyber-Terrorism or Extremism or Cyber-Racism or Cyber- Hate) is widespread and has become a major and growing concern to the society, governments and law enforcement agencies around the world. Research…
The boundaries between physical and social networks have narrowed with the advent of the Internet and its pervasive platforms. This has given rise to a complex adaptive information ecosystem where individuals and machines compete for…
Online users discuss and converse about all sorts of topics on social networks. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit are among many other networks where users can have this freedom of information sharing. The abundance of information shared over these…
We aim to study through an agent-based model the cultural conditions leading to a decrease or an increase of discrimination between groups after a major cultural threat such as a terrorist attack. We propose an agent-based model of cultural…