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The proliferation of mobile money in Uganda has been a cornerstone of financial inclusion, yet its security mechanisms remain a critical concern. This study investigates a significant public response to perceived security failures: the…

The spread of propaganda, misinformation, and biased narratives from autocratic regimes, especially on social media, is a growing concern in many democracies. Can censorship be an effective tool to curb the spread of such slanted…

Many governments impose traditional censorship methods on social media platforms. Instead of removing it completely, many social media companies, including Twitter, only withhold the content from the requesting country. This makes such…

Black Lives Matter has been a major force for social change in the US since 2014, with social media playing a core role in the development and proliferation of the movement. The largest protests in US history occurred in late May and early…

The COVID-19 crisis represents the most dangerous threat to public health since the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 1918. So far, the disease due to the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been countered with extreme measures at national level that attempt to…

The aftermath of the 2020 US Presidential Election witnessed an unprecedented attack on the democratic values of the country through the violent insurrection at Capitol Hill on January 6th, 2021. The attack was fueled by the proliferation…

Deplatforming, or banning malicious accounts from social media, is a key tool for moderating online harms. However, the consequences of deplatforming for the wider social media ecosystem have been largely overlooked so far, due to the…

During Australia's unprecedented bushfires in 2019-2020, misinformation blaming arson resurfaced on Twitter using #ArsonEmergency. The extent to which bots were responsible for disseminating and amplifying this misinformation has received…

Viewing social apps as sociotechnical systems makes clear that they are not mere pieces of technology but mediate human interaction and may unintentionally enable harmful behaviors like online harassment. As more users interact through…

News media serves a crucial role in disseminating information and shaping public perception, especially during periods of political unrest. Using over 50,0000 YouTube comments on news coverage from July 16 to August 6, 2024, we investigate…

Hurricane Sandy was one of the deadliest and costliest of hurricanes over the past few decades. Many states experienced significant power outage, however many people used social media to communicate while having limited or no access to…

Online government petitions represent a new data-rich mode of political participation. This work examines the thus far understudied dynamics of sharing petitions on social media in order to garner signatures and, ultimately, a government…

Recent studies suggest social media activity can function as a proxy for measures of state-level public health, detectable through natural language processing. We present results of our efforts to apply this approach to estimate…

The rise of right-wing populism in Europe has brought to the forefront the significance of analysing social media discourse to understand the dissemination of extremist ideologies and their impact on political outcomes. Twitter, as a…

Hate and extremism cannot be controlled globally without understanding how they operate at scale. Both have escalated dramatically during the Israel-Hamas and Ukraine-Russia wars. Here we show how the online hate-extremism system is now…

This study examines the complex relationship between social media, polarization, and conflict, with a focus on digital peacebuilding and women's participation, using the Northern Ethiopia War as a case study. Using a qualitative exploratory…

Sentiment analysis (SA) is the automated process of detecting and understanding the emotions conveyed through written text. Over the past decade, SA has gained significant popularity in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). With…

We introduce the well-established social scientific concept of social solidarity and its contestation, anti-solidarity, as a new problem setting to supervised machine learning in NLP to assess how European solidarity discourses changed…

There is an unprecedented increase in cybercrime globally observed over the last years. One of the regions driving this increase is Africa, where significant financial losses are reported. Yet, citizens of African countries are not aware of…

How can we induce social media users to be discerning when sharing information during a pandemic? An experiment on Facebook Messenger with users from Kenya (n = 7,498) and Nigeria (n = 7,794) tested interventions designed to decrease…