Related papers: Personalization of Web Search During the 2020 US E…
People search is an important topic in information retrieval. Many previous studies on this topic employed social networks to boost search performance by incorporating either local network features (e.g. the common connections between the…
Several elections run in the last years have been characterized by attempts to manipulate the result of the election through the diffusion of fake or malicious news over social networks. This problem has been recognized as a critical issue…
US voters shared large volumes of polarizing political news and information in the form of links to content from Russian, WikiLeaks and junk news sources. Was this low quality political information distributed evenly around the country, or…
Amidst widespread reports of digital influence operations during major elections, policymakers, scholars, and journalists have become increasingly interested in the political impact of social media 'bots.' Most recently, platform companies…
The 2016 US election was a watershed event where an electoral intervention by an adversarial state made extensive use of networks of software robots and data driven communications which transformed the interference into a goal driven…
Recent research brought awareness of the issue of bots on social media and the significant risks of mass manipulation of public opinion in the context of political discussion. In this work, we leverage Twitter to study the discourse during…
This paper presents an approach to identify efficient techniques used in Web Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Understanding SEO factors which can influence page ranking in search engine is significant for webmasters who wish to attract…
Social media broadly refers to digital platforms and applications that simulate social interactions online. This study investigates the impact of social media platforms and their algorithms on political interest among users. As social media…
The objective of this research was to find out how the two search engines Google and Bing perform when users work freely on pre-defined tasks, and judge the relevance of the results immediately after finishing their search session. In a…
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…
Online political advertising has become the cornerstone of political campaigns. The budget spent solely on political advertising in the U.S. has increased by more than 100% from \$700 million during the 2017-2018 U.S. election cycle to…
Websites with hyper-partisan, left or right-leaning focus offer content that is typically biased towards the expectations of their target audience. Such content often polarizes users, who are repeatedly primed to specific (extreme) content,…
Polarization, declining trust, and wavering support for democratic norms are pressing threats to U.S. democracy. Exposure to verified and quality news may lower individual susceptibility to these threats and make citizens more resilient to…
The power of digital platforms is at the center of major ongoing policy and regulatory efforts. To advance existing debates, we designed and executed an experiment to measure the performative power of online search providers. Instantiated…
Users rely on search engines for information in critical contexts, such as public health emergencies. Understanding how users evaluate the trustworthiness of search results is therefore essential. Research has identified rank and the…
Search engines have vast technical capabilities to retain Internet search logs for each user and thus present major privacy vulnerabilities to both individuals and organizations in revealing user intent. Additionally, many of the web search…
Search engines, often viewed as reliable gateways to information, tailor search results using customization algorithms based on user preferences, location, and more. While this can be useful for routine queries, it raises concerns when the…
Voter fraud in the United States is rare and the vote-counting system is robust against tampering, but there remains widespread distrust in the security of election infrastructure among the public. We consider statistical means of detecting…
People use web search engines to find information before forming opinions, which can lead to practical decisions with different levels of impact. The cognitive effort of search can leave opinionated users vulnerable to cognitive biases,…
This report aims to report my thesis progress so far. My work attempts to show the differences in the perspectives of two search engines, Bing and Google on several selected controversial topics. In this work, we try to make a distinction…