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Human activities can be seen as sequences of events, which are crucial to understanding societies. Disproportional event distribution for different demographic groups can manifest and amplify social stereotypes, and potentially jeopardize…
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,…
Social media platforms significantly influence ideological divisions by enabling users to select information that aligns with their beliefs and avoid opposing viewpoints. Analyzing approximately 47 million Facebook posts, this study…
Technological systems increasingly mediate human information exchange, spanning interactions among humans as well as between humans and artificial agents. The unprecedented scale and reliance on information disseminated through these…
Online extremists in social networks pose a new form of threat to the general public. These extremists range from cyberbullies who harass innocent users to terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) that use…
This study extends classical models of spreading epidemics to describe the phenomenon of contagious public outrage, which eventually leads to the spread of violence following a disclosure of some unpopular political decisions and/or…
Recent years have brought a significant growth in the volume of research in sentiment analysis, mostly on highly subjective text types (movie or product reviews). The main difference these texts have with news articles is that their target…
Online platforms have become an increasingly prominent means of communication. Despite the obvious benefits to the expanded distribution of content, the last decade has resulted in disturbing toxic communication, such as cyberbullying and…
Understanding the dynamics of international politics is important yet challenging for civilians. In this work, we explore unsupervised neural models to infer relations between nations from news articles. We extend existing models by…
In recent years, malicious information had an explosive growth in social media, with serious social and political backlashes. Recent important studies, featuring large-scale analyses, have produced deeper knowledge about this phenomenon,…
The intensification of affective polarization worldwide has raised new questions about how social media platforms might be further fracturing an already-divided public sphere. As opposed to ideological polarization, affective polarization…
As the number and the diversity of news outlets on the Web grow, so does the opportunity for "alternative" sources of information to emerge. Using large social networks like Twitter and Facebook, misleading, false, or agenda-driven…
Social media conversations frequently suffer from toxicity, creating significant issues for users, moderators, and entire communities. Events in the real world, like elections or conflicts, can initiate and escalate toxic behavior online.…
Individuals experiencing unexpected distressing events, shocks, often rely on their social network for support. While prior work has shown how social networks respond to shocks, these studies usually treat all ties equally, despite…
The interaction between fringe subcultures and mainstream online communities poses significant challenges for understanding discourse on social media. In this work, we investigate whether users active in conspiracy-focused communities…
The ability to accurately predict cyber-attacks would enable organizations to mitigate their growing threat and avert the financial losses and disruptions they cause. But how predictable are cyber-attacks? Researchers have attempted to…
A model for terrorism is presented using the theory of percolation. Terrorism power is related to the spontaneous formation of random backbones of people who are sympathetic to terrorism but without being directly involved in it. They just…
Online misinformation has been a serious threat to public health and society. Social media users are known to reply to misinformation posts with counter-misinformation messages, which have been shown to be effective in curbing the spread of…
We hear it all too often in the media: an organization is attacked, its data, often containing personally identifying information, is made public, and a hacking group emerges to claim credit. In this excerpt, we discuss how such groups…
The presence of toxic content has become a major problem for many online communities. Moderators try to limit this problem by implementing more and more refined comment filters, but toxic users are constantly finding new ways to circumvent…