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We study how legislation that restricts speech can induce online self-censorship and alter online discourse, using the recent Hong Kong national security law as a case study. We collect a dataset of 7 million historical Tweets from Hong…

The Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill protests in Hong Kong present a rich context for exploring information security practices among protesters due to their large-scale urban setting and highly digitalised nature. We conducted in-depth,…

With the expansion of mobile communications infrastructure, social media usage in the Global South is surging. Compared to the Global North, populations of the Global South have had less prior experience with social media from stationary…

The Internet Research Agency (IRA) influences online political conversations in the United States, exacerbating existing partisan divides and sowing discord. In this paper we investigate the IRA's communication strategies by analyzing…

Social media empowers citizens to raise the voice and expressed civil outrage leads to collective action to change the society. Since social media welcomes anyone regardless of the political ideology or perspectives, social media is where…

Studies on online hate speech have mostly focused on the automated detection of harmful messages. Little attention has been devoted so far to the development of effective strategies to fight hate speech, in particular through the creation…

Social media is often viewed as a sensor into various societal events such as disease outbreaks, protests, and elections. We describe the use of social media as a crowdsourced sensor to gain insight into ongoing cyber-attacks. Our approach…

With the increase in popularity of deep learning models for natural language processing (NLP) tasks, in the field of Pharmacovigilance, more specifically for the identification of Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs), there is an inherent need for…

Numerous successes have been achieved in combating the COVID-19 pandemic, initially using various precautionary measures like lockdowns, social distancing, and the use of face masks. More recently, various vaccinations have been developed…

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious respiratory disease that was first discovered in late December 2019, in Wuhan, China, and then spread worldwide causing a lot of panic and death. Users of social networking sites such as…

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, both voluntary changes in behavior and administrative restrictions on human interactions have occurred. These actions are intended to reduce the transmission rate of the severe acute respiratory…

Gang violence is a severe issue in major cities across the U.S. and recent studies [Patton et al. 2017] have found evidence of social media communications that can be linked to such violence in communities with high rates of exposure to…

Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are one of the leading causes of mortality in health care. Current ADR surveillance systems are often associated with a substantial time lag before such events are officially published. On the other hand,…

The huge amount of information shared in Twitter during disaster events are utilized by government agencies and humanitarian organizations to ensure quick crisis response and provide situational updates. However, the huge number of tweets…

The novel coronavirus, COVID-19, has impacted various aspects of the world from tourism, business, education, and many more. Like for every country, the global pandemic has imposed similar effects on Ghana. During this period, citizens of…

During natural disasters, people often use social media platforms such as Twitter to ask for help, to provide information about the disaster situation, or to express contempt about the unfolding event or public policies and guidelines. This…

We examine the impact of a new tool for suppressing the expression of dissent---a daily tax on social media use. Using a synthetic control framework, we estimate that the tax reduced the number of georeferenced Twitter users in Uganda by 13…

Online social media enables mass-level, transparent, and democratized discussion on numerous socio-political issues. Due to such openness, these platforms often endure manipulation and misinformation - leading to negative impacts. To…

Twitter has become a major social media platform since its launching in 2006, while complaints about bot accounts have increased recently. Although extensive research efforts have been made, the state-of-the-art bot detection methods fall…

Concerns have reached the mainstream about how social media are affecting political outcomes. One trajectory for this is the exposure of politicians to online abuse. In this paper we use 1.4 million tweets from the months before the 2015…