Related papers: Detecting Propagators of Disinformation on Twitter…
This thesis develops a continuous scale measurement of similarity to disinformation narratives that can serve to detect disinformation and capture the nuanced, partial truths that are characteristic of it. To do so, two tools are developed…
Social media sites are becoming a key factor in politics. These platforms are easy to manipulate for the purpose of distorting information space to confuse and distract voters. Past works to identify disruptive patterns are mostly focused…
The reports of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections brought into the center of public attention concerns related to the ability of foreign actors to increase social discord and take advantage of personal user data for…
As social media has permeated large parts of the population it simultaneously has become a way to reach many people e.g. with political messages. One way to efficiently reach those people is the application of automated computer programs…
Fake news has emerged as a pervasive problem within Online Social Networks, leading to a surge of research interest in this area. Understanding the dissemination mechanisms of fake news is crucial in comprehending the propagation of…
We investigate the political roles of "Internet trolls" in social media. Political trolls, such as the ones linked to the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA), have recently gained enormous attention for their ability to sway public…
Social networks play a fundamental role in propagation of information and news. Characterizing the content of the messages becomes vital for different tasks, like breaking news detection, personalized message recommendation, fake users…
The characterization and detection of bots with their presumed ability to manipulate society on social media platforms have been subject to many research endeavors over the last decade. In the absence of ground truth data (i.e., accounts…
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…
This paper presents a study on the growing threat of "sleeper social bots," AI-driven social bots in the political landscape, created to spread disinformation and manipulate public opinion. We based the name sleeper social bots on their…
Twitter has been a focus of research in political science for a few years now as it provides the opportunity to make direct observations on the spread of political information in different communities. Here we will be studying the phenomena…
The popularity of social media platforms such as Twitter has led to the proliferation of automated bots, creating both opportunities and challenges in information dissemination, user engagements, and quality of services. Past works on…
Recent studies have confirmed a growing trend, especially among youngsters, of using Online Social Media as favourite information platform at the expense of traditional mass media. Indeed, they can easily reach a wide audience at a high…
Many recent political events, like the 2016 US Presidential elections or the 2018 Brazilian elections have raised the attention of institutions and of the general public on the role of Internet and social media in influencing the outcome of…
We propose a novel training and inference method for detecting political bias in long text content such as newspaper opinion articles. Obtaining long text data and annotations at sufficient scale for training is difficult, but it is…
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…
User-generated content (e.g., tweets and profile descriptions) and shared content between users (e.g., news articles) reflect a user's online identity. This paper investigates whether correlations between user-generated and user-shared…
News media has long been an ecosystem of creation, reproduction, and critique, where news outlets report on current events and add commentary to ongoing stories. Understanding the dynamics of news information creation and dispersion is…
The advent of social media changed the way we consume content favoring a disintermediated access and production. This scenario has been matter of critical discussion about its impact on society. Magnified in the case of Arab Spring or…
Online social media represent an oftentimes unique source of information, and having access to reliable and unbiased content is crucial, especially during crises and contentious events. We study the spread of propaganda and misinformation…