Related papers: Partial Mobilization: Tracking Multilingual Inform…
News articles covering policy issues are an essential source of information in the social sciences and are also frequently used for other use cases, e.g., to train NLP language models. To derive meaningful insights from the analysis of…
The Russia-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) carried out a broad information campaign in the U.S. before and after the 2016 presidential election. The organization created an expansive set of internet properties: web domains, Facebook…
Social media is currently one of the most important means of news communication. Since people are consuming a large fraction of their daily news through social media, most of the traditional news channels are using social media to catch the…
Among the vast information available on the web, social media streams capture what people currently pay attention to and how they feel about certain topics. Awareness of such trending topics plays a crucial role in multimedia systems such…
The article presents a study of some characteristics of post and comment publishing in the Russian segment of Facebook. A number of non-trivial results has been obtained. For example, a significant anomaly has been detected in the number of…
Social media platforms, particularly Telegram, play a pivotal role in shaping public perceptions and opinions on global and national issues. Unlike traditional news media, Telegram allows for the proliferation of user-generated content with…
Polarization, declining trust, and wavering support for democratic norms are pressing threats to U.S. democracy. Exposure to verified and quality news may lower individual susceptibility to these threats and make citizens more resilient to…
YouTube has emerged as a major platform for political communication and news dissemination, particularly during high-stakes electoral periods. In the context of the 2024 European Parliament and French legislative elections, this study…
In the recent political climate, the topic of news quality has drawn attention both from the public and the academic communities. The growing distrust of traditional news media makes it harder to find a common base of accepted truth. In…
We present the first large-scale analysis of 339 cybercriminal activity channels (CACs). Followed by over 23.8 million users, these channels share a wide array of malicious and unethical content with their subscribers, including compromised…
Reddit consists of sub-communities that cover a focused topic. This paper provides a list of relevant subreddits for the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian crisis. We perform an exhaustive subreddit exploration using keyword search and shortlist 12…
The rising popularity of social media has radically changed the way news content is propagated, including interactive attempts with new dimensions. To date, traditional news media such as newspapers, television and radio have already…
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused large scale destruction, significant loss of life, and the displacement of millions of people. Besides those fleeing direct conflict in Ukraine, many individuals in Russia are also thought to have…
The inclusion of social media posts---tweets, in particular---in digital news stories, both as commentary and increasingly as news sources, has become commonplace in recent years. In order to study this phenomenon with sufficient depth,…
Within the thriving mobile app ecosystem ecosystem, a subset of apps provides illicit services such as gambling and pornography to pursue economic gains, collectively referred to as "underground economy apps". While previous studies have…
In recent years, the opaque design and the limited public understanding of social networks' recommendation algorithms have raised concerns about potential manipulation of information exposure. Reducing content visibility, aka shadow…
This paper examines the role of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) on Twitter regarding the Russo-Ukrainian war, distinguishing between genuine OSINT and deceptive misinformation efforts, termed "BULLSHINT." Utilizing a dataset spanning from…
Propaganda, disinformation, manipulation, and polarization are the modern illnesses of a society increasingly dependent on social media as a source of news. In this paper, we explore the disinformation campaign, sponsored by Russia and…
Online narratives spread unevenly across platforms, with content emerging on one site often appearing on others, hours, days or weeks later. Existing cross-platform information diffusion models often treat platforms as isolated systems,…
This work advances investigations into the visual media shared by agents in disinformation campaigns by characterizing the images shared by accounts identified by Twitter as being part of such campaigns. Using images shared by US…