Related papers: Analyzing Social Media Activities at Bellingcat
The increased use of online social networks for the dissemination of information comes with the misuse of the internet for cyberbullying, cybercrime, spam, vandalism, amongst other things. To proactively identify abuse in the networks, we…
Thanks to platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, people can know facts and events that otherwise would have been silenced. However, social media significantly contribute also to fast spreading biased and false news while targeting specific…
Hate and extremism cannot be controlled globally without understanding how they operate at scale. Both have escalated dramatically during the Israel-Hamas and Ukraine-Russia wars. Here we show how the online hate-extremism system is now…
Societies are complex systems which tend to polarize into sub-groups of individuals with dramatically opposite perspectives. This phenomenon is reflected -- and often amplified -- in online social networks where, however, humans are no more…
This study analyses the publication activity and migration patterns of Ukrainian scholars in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) during the initial two years of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Focusing on scholars who published at least three…
Telegram is a globally popular instant messaging platform known for its strong emphasis on security, privacy, and unique social networking features. It has recently emerged as the host for various cross-domain analysis and research works,…
Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered recommender systems play a crucial role in determining the content that users are exposed to on social media platforms. However, the behavioural patterns of these systems are often opaque, complicating…
The widespread use of social media necessitates reliable and efficient detection of offensive content to mitigate harmful effects. Although sophisticated models perform well on individual datasets, they often fail to generalize due to…
The Internet and social media have transformed news availability and accessibility, reshaping information consumption and production. However, they can also facilitate the rapid spread of misinformation, posing significant societal…
The rise of misinformation and fake news in online political discourse poses significant challenges to democratic processes and public engagement. While debunking efforts aim to counteract misinformation and foster fact-based dialogue,…
Data extracted from social networks like Twitter are increasingly being used to build applications and services that mine and summarize public reactions to events, such as traffic monitoring platforms, identification of epidemic outbreaks,…
In recent years, social media has been criticized for yielding polarization. Identifying emerging disagreements and growing polarization is important for journalists to create alerts and provide more balanced coverage. While recent studies…
Phishing attacks are an increasingly potent web-based threat, with nearly 1.5 million websites created on a monthly basis. In this work, we present the first study towards identifying such attacks through phishing reports shared by users on…
Social media has become a crucial conduit for the swift dissemination of information during global crises. However, this also paves the way for the manipulation of narratives by malicious actors. This research delves into the interaction…
Political bias in media plays a critical role in shaping public opinion, voter behaviour, and broader democratic discourse. Subjective opinions and political bias can be found in media sources, such as newspapers, depending on their funding…
Fact-checking is the task of verifying the factuality of a given claim by examining the available evidence. High-quality evidence plays a vital role in enhancing fact-checking systems and facilitating the generation of explanations that are…
Social media platforms contain a great wealth of information which provides opportunities for us to explore hidden patterns or unknown correlations, and understand people's satisfaction with what they are discussing. As one showcase, in…
Social media posts are frequently identified as a valuable source of open-source intelligence for disaster response, and pre-LLM NLP techniques have been evaluated on datasets of crisis tweets. We assess three commercial large language…
Social media provides political news and information for both active duty military personnel and veterans. We analyze the subgroups of Twitter and Facebook users who spend time consuming junk news from websites that target US military…
State-sponsored information operations (IOs) increasingly influence global discourse on social media platforms, yet their emotional and rhetorical strategies remain inadequately characterized in scientific literature. This study presents…