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Conversations on social media (SM) are increasingly being used to investigate social issues on the web, such as online harassment and rumor spread. For such issues, a common thread of research uses adversarial reactions, e.g., replies…
People are shifting from traditional news sources to online news at an incredibly fast rate. However, the technology behind online news consumption promotes content that confirms the users' existing point of view. This phenomenon has led to…
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…
To analyse large numbers of texts, social science researchers are increasingly confronting the challenge of text classification. When manual labeling is not possible and researchers have to find automatized ways to classify texts, computer…
Over the past decade, fake news and misinformation have turned into a major problem that has impacted different aspects of our lives, including politics and public health. Inspired by natural human behavior, we present an approach that…
Estimating the political leanings of social media users is a challenging and ever more pressing problem given the increase in social media consumption. We introduce Retweet-BERT, a simple and scalable model to estimate the political…
As a leading online platform with a vast global audience, YouTube's extensive reach also makes it susceptible to hosting harmful content, including disinformation and conspiracy theories. This study explores the use of open-weight Large…
Social media platforms utilize Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered recommendation algorithms to maximize user engagement, which can result in inadvertent exposure to harmful content. Current moderation efforts,…
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…
Crowdsourcing is a popular means to obtain labeled data at moderate costs, for example for tweets, which can then be used in text mining tasks. To alleviate the problem of low-quality labels in this context, multiple human factors have been…
Online hate on social media ranges from overt slurs and threats (\emph{hard hate speech}) to \emph{soft hate speech}: discourse that appears reasonable on the surface but uses framing and value-based arguments to steer audiences toward…
During sudden onset crisis events, the presence of spam, rumors and fake content on Twitter reduces the value of information contained on its messages (or "tweets"). A possible solution to this problem is to use machine learning to…
Opinion mining and demographic attribute inference have many applications in social science. In this paper, we propose models to infer daily joint probabilities of multiple latent attributes from Twitter data, such as political sentiment…
Social media communications are becoming increasingly prevalent; some useful, some false, whether unwittingly or maliciously. An increasing number of rumours daily flood the social networks. Determining their veracity in an autonomous way…
Social media platforms enable the rapid dissemination and consumption of information. However, users instantly consume such content regardless of the reliability of the shared data. Consequently, the latter crowdsourcing model is exposed to…
WARNING: This paper contains examples of offensive materials. To address the proliferation of toxic content on social media, we introduce SMARTER, we introduce SMARTER, a data-efficient two-stage framework for explainable content moderation…
Fake news poses a significant threat to public opinion and social stability in modern society. This study presents a comparative evaluation of BERT-like encoder-only models and autoregressive decoder-only large language models (LLMs) for…
Automatic fake news detection with machine learning can prevent the dissemination of false statements before they gain many views. Several datasets labeling statements as legitimate or false have been created since the 2016 United States…
Semantic sentence embeddings are usually supervisedly built minimizing distances between pairs of embeddings of sentences labelled as semantically similar by annotators. Since big labelled datasets are rare, in particular for non-English…
Twitter and, in general, social media has become an indispensable communication channel in times of emergency. The ubiquitousness of smartphone gadgets enables people to declare an emergency observed in real-time. As a result, more agencies…