Related papers: Did the Musk Takeover Boost Contentious Actors on …

The global public sphere has changed dramatically over the past decades: a significant part of public discourse now takes place on algorithmically driven platforms owned by a handful of private companies. Despite its growing importance,…

With the 2022 US midterm elections approaching, conspiratorial claims about the 2020 presidential elections continue to threaten users' trust in the electoral process. To regulate election misinformation, YouTube introduced policies to…

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…

Social media platforms have been exploited to disseminate misinformation in recent years. The widespread online misinformation has been shown to affect users' beliefs and is connected to social impact such as polarization. In this work, we…

Crowdsourced moderation systems like Twitter/X's Community Notes program have been proposed as scalable alternatives to professional fact-checkers for combating online misinformation. While prior research has examined the effectiveness of…

Online manipulation is a pressing concern for democracies, but the actions and strategies of coordinated inauthentic accounts, which have been used to interfere in elections, are not well understood. We analyze a five million-tweet…

Coordinated campaigns on social media play a critical role in shaping crisis information environments, particularly during the onset of conflicts when uncertainty is high and verified information is scarce. We study the interplay between…

Background: Online toxicity, encompassing behaviors such as harassment, bullying, hate speech, and the dissemination of misinformation, has become a pressing social concern in the digital age. The 2022 Mpox outbreak, initially termed…

In recent years, the proliferation of misinformation on social media platforms has become a significant concern. Initially designed for sharing information and fostering social connections, platforms like Twitter (now rebranded as X) have…

The spread of online misinformation on social media is increasingly perceived as a problem for societal cohesion and democracy. The role of political leaders in this process has attracted less research attention, even though politicians who…

In this work we study how pervasive is the presence of disinformation in the Italian debate around immigration on Twitter and the role of automated accounts in the diffusion of such content. By characterising the Twitter users with an…

Health misinformation has been found to be prevalent on social media, particularly in new public health crises in which there is limited scientific information. However, social media can also play a role in limiting and refuting health…

Social media, once hailed as a vehicle for democratization and the promotion of positive social change across the globe, are under attack for becoming a tool of political manipulation and spread of disinformation. A case in point is the…

Social media platforms have traditionally relied on internal moderation teams and partnerships with independent fact-checking organizations to identify and flag misleading content. Recently, however, platforms including X (formerly Twitter)…

Linguistic uncertainty is a common feature of social media discourse, yet its relationship with user engagement remains underexplored, particularly in non-English contexts. Using a dataset of 16,695 Arabic-language tweets about Lebanon…

There is an ongoing debate about how to moderate toxic speech on social media and the impact of content moderation on online discourse. This paper proposes and validates a methodology for measuring the content-moderation-induced distortions…

Serious concerns have been raised about the role of 'socialbots' in manipulating public opinion and influencing the outcome of elections by retweeting partisan content to increase its reach. Here we analyze the role and influence of…

After Twitter's ownership change and policy shifts, many users reconsidered their go-to social media outlets and platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads became attractive alternatives in the battle for users. Based on the data from…

The massive spread of digital misinformation has been identified as a major global risk and has been alleged to influence elections and threaten democracies. Communication, cognitive, social, and computer scientists are engaged in efforts…

In the intricate landscape of social media, genuine content dissemination may be altered by a number of threats. Coordinated Behavior (CB), defined as orchestrated efforts by entities to deceive or mislead users about their identity and…