Related papers: Analyzing Social Media Activities at Bellingcat
X (formerly Twitter) has evolved into a contemporary agora, offering a platform for individuals to express opinions and viewpoints on current events. The majority of the topics discussed on Twitter are directly related to ongoing events,…
Social networks offer a ready channel for fake and misleading news to spread and exert influence. This paper examines the performance of different reputation algorithms when applied to a large and statistically significant portion of the…
Global events like wars and pandemics can intensify online discussions, fostering information sharing and connection among individuals. However, the divisive nature of such events may lead to polarization within online communities, shaping…
During Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Telegram became an essential social media platform for Kremlin-sponsored propaganda dissemination. Over time, Anti-Kremlin Russian opposition channels have also emerged as a prominent…
The inclusion of social media posts---tweets, in particular---in digital news stories, both as commentary and increasingly as news sources, has become commonplace in recent years. In order to study this phenomenon with sufficient depth,…
Scheming, the covert pursuit of misaligned goals by AI systems, represents a potentially catastrophic risk, yet scheming research suffers from significant limitations. In particular, scheming evaluations demonstrate behaviours that may not…
Social networks are widely used for information consumption and dissemination, especially during time-critical events such as natural disasters. Despite its significantly large volume, social media content is often too noisy for direct use…
Social botnets have become an important phenomenon on social media. There are many ways in which social bots can disrupt or influence online discourse, such as, spam hashtags, scam twitter users, and astroturfing. In this paper we…
The ongoing Russia-Ukraine war has been extensively discussed on social media. One commonly observed problem in such discussions is the emergence of echo chambers, where users are rarely exposed to opinions outside their worldview. Prior…
During the summer of 2019-20, while Australia suffered unprecedented bushfires across the country, false narratives regarding arson and limited backburning spread quickly on Twitter, particularly using the hashtag #ArsonEmergency.…
Multiple countries have recently experienced extreme political polarization, which in some cases led to escalation of hate crime, violence and political instability. Beside the much discussed presidential elections in the United States and…
The war in Ukraine seems to have positively changed the attitude toward the critical societal topic of migration in Europe -- at least towards refugees from Ukraine. We investigate whether this impression is substantiated by how the topic…
In the recent political climate, the topic of news quality has drawn attention both from the public and the academic communities. The growing distrust of traditional news media makes it harder to find a common base of accepted truth. In…
Twitter is now an established and a widely popular news medium. Be it normal banter or a discussion on high impact events like Boston marathon blasts, February 2014 US Icestorm, etc., people use Twitter to get updates. Twitter bots have…
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…
Bluesky has recently emerged as a lively competitor to Twitter/X for a platform for public discourse and news sharing. Most of the research on Bluesky so far has focused on characterizing its adoption due to migration. There has been less…
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…
Social media have the potential to provide timely information about emergency situations and sudden events. However, finding relevant information among millions of posts being posted every day can be difficult, and developing a data…
In February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This event had global repercussions, especially on the political decisions of European countries. As expected, the role of Italy in the conflict became a major campaign…
Twitter, as one of the most popular social networks, provides a platform for communication and online discourse. Unfortunately, it has also become a target for bots and fake accounts, resulting in the spread of false information and…