Related papers: Softening online extremes organically and at scale
Social media platforms employ various content moderation techniques to remove harmful, offensive, and hate speech content. The moderation level varies across platforms; even over time, it can evolve in a platform. For example, Parler, a…
Social media provide a fertile ground where conspiracy theories and radical ideas can flourish, reach broad audiences, and sometimes lead to hate or violence beyond the online world itself. QAnon represents a notable example of a political…
The global spread of the novel coronavirus is affected by the spread of related misinformation -- the so-called COVID-19 Infodemic -- that makes populations more vulnerable to the disease through resistance to mitigation efforts. Here we…
Twitter, prompted by the rapid spread of alternative narratives, started actively warning users about the spread of COVID-19 misinformation. This form of soft moderation comes in two forms: as a warning cover before the Tweet is displayed…
Wildfires are increasing in frequency and size across the western U.S., with some of the deadliest fires in recorded history occurring in the last few years. The public, as well as elected officials, use social media to convey opinions and…
Social media are used as main discussion channels by millions of individuals every day. The content individuals produce in daily social-media-based micro-communications, and the emotions therein expressed, may impact the emotional states of…
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 sudden emergence of large-scale riots in otherwise unconnected cities across the UK in summer 2024 came as a shock for both government officials and citizens. Irrespective of these riots' specific trigger, a key question is how the…
As the last few years have seen an increase in online hostility and polarization both, we need to move beyond the fack-checking reflex or the praise for better moderation on social networking sites (SNS) and investigate their impact on…
The proliferation of harmful and offensive content is a problem that many online platforms face today. One of the most common approaches for moderating offensive content online is via the identification and removal after it has been posted,…
Understanding how misinformation affects the spread of disease is crucial for public health, especially given recent research indicating that misinformation can increase vaccine hesitancy and discourage vaccine uptake. However, it is…
The spreading of virus infection is here simulated over artificial human networks. The real-space urban life of people is modeled as a modified scale-free network with constraints. A scale-free network has been adopted in several studies…
This paper aims to shed light on alternative news media ecosystems that are believed to have influenced opinions and beliefs by false and/or biased news reporting during the 2016 US Presidential Elections. We examine a large, professionally…
Social media, seen by some as the modern public square, is vulnerable to manipulation. By controlling inauthentic accounts impersonating humans, malicious actors can amplify disinformation within target communities. The consequences of such…
We investigate the impact of free speech and the relaxation of moderation on online social media platforms using Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter as a case study. By curating a dataset of over 10 million tweets, our study employs a novel…
As our reliance on social media platforms and web services increase day by day, exploiters view these platforms as an opportunity to manipulate our thoughts ad actions. These platforms have become an open playground for social bot accounts.…
The proliferation of harmful content and misinformation on social networks necessitates content moderation policies to maintain platform health. One such policy is shadow banning, which limits content visibility. The danger of shadow…
As civil discourse increasingly takes place online, misinformation and the polarization of news shared in online communities have become ever more relevant concerns with real world harms across our society. Studying online news sharing at…
Trolling and social bots have been proven as powerful tactics for manipulating the public opinion and sowing discord among Twitter users. This effort requires substantial content fabrication and account coordination to evade Twitter's…
Information cocoons are frequently cited in the literature on whether and how social media might lead to ideological segregation and political polarization. From the behavioural and communication perspectives, this paper first examines why…