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In the context of Twitter, social capitalists are specific users trying to increase their number of followers and interactions by any means. These users are not healthy for the Twitter network since they flaw notions of influence and…
Electoral prediction from Twitter data is an appealing research topic. It seems relatively straightforward and the prevailing view is overly optimistic. This is problematic because while simple approaches are assumed to be good enough, core…
This paper studies users' perception regarding a controversial product, namely self-driving (autonomous) cars. To find people's opinion regarding this new technology, we used an annotated Twitter dataset, and extracted the topics in…
Social networking and micro-blogging services, such as Twitter, play an important role in sharing digital information. Despite the popularity and usefulness of social media, they are regularly abused by corrupt users. One of these nefarious…
According to the classical definition, propaganda is the management of collective attitudes by manipulation of significant symbols. However this definition has changed to computational propaganda, the way manipulation takes place in digital…
On daily basis, millions of Twitter accounts post a vast number of tweets including numerous Twitter entities (mentions, replies, hashtags, photos, URLs). Many of these entities are used in common by many accounts. The more common entities…
Parody is a figurative device used to imitate an entity for comedic or critical purposes and represents a widespread phenomenon in social media through many popular parody accounts. In this paper, we present the first computational study of…
This exploratory study used the R Statistical Software to perform Monte Carlo simulation of time maps, which characterize events based on the elapsed time since the last event and the time that will transpire until the next event, and…
This paper replicates, extends, and refutes conclusions made in a study published in PLoS ONE ("Even Good Bots Fight"), which claimed to identify substantial levels of conflict between automated software agents (or bots) in Wikipedia using…
Participation on social media platforms has many benefits but also poses substantial threats. Users often face an unintended loss of privacy, are bombarded with mis-/disinformation, or are trapped in filter bubbles due to over-personalized…
In the past few years, IRC bots, malicious programs which are remotely controlled by the attacker through IRC servers, have become a major threat to the Internet and users. These bots can be used in different malicious ways such as issuing…
Social networking and micro-blogging services, such as Twitter, play an important role in sharing digital information. Despite the popularity and usefulness of social media, there have been many instances where corrupted users found ways to…
This paper describes the implementation of the Aesthetic Bot, an automated Twitter account that posts images of small game maps that are either user-made or generated from an evolutionary system. The bot then prompts users to vote via a…
On the morning of November 9th 2016, the world woke up to the shocking outcome of the US Presidential elections: Donald Trump was the 45th President of the United States of America. An unexpected event that still has tremendous consequences…
Consider a person trying to spread an important message on a social network. He/she can spend hours trying to craft the message. Does it actually matter? While there has been extensive prior work looking into predicting popularity of…
The discourse around conspiracy theories is currently thriving amidst the rampant misinformation in online environments. Research in this field has been focused on detecting conspiracy theories on social media, often relying on limited…
During the 2016 US elections Twitter experienced unprecedented levels of propaganda and fake news through the collaboration of bots and hired persons, the ramifications of which are still being debated. This work proposes an approach to…
It has recently become possible to study the dynamics of information diffusion in techno-social systems at scale, due to the emergence of online platforms, such as Twitter, with millions of users. One question that systematically recurs is…
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,…
Large-scale databases of human activity in social media have captured scientific and policy attention, producing a flood of research and discussion. This paper considers methodological and conceptual challenges for this emergent field, with…