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Social media is often criticized for amplifying toxic discourse and discouraging constructive conversations. But designing social media platforms to promote better conversations is inherently challenging. This paper asks whether simulating…
Social media discourse involves people from different backgrounds, beliefs, and motives. Thus, often such discourse can devolve into toxic interactions. Generative Models, such as Llama and ChatGPT, have recently exploded in popularity due…
Social media has expanded in its use, and reach, since the inception of early social networks in the early 2000s. Increasingly, users turn to social media for keeping up to date with current affairs and information. However, social media is…
Online social platforms are beset with hateful speech - content that expresses hatred for a person or group of people. Such content can frighten, intimidate, or silence platform users, and some of it can inspire other users to commit…
Social media platforms have been widely linked to societal harms, including rising polarization and the erosion of constructive debate. Can these problems be mitigated through prosocial interventions? We address this question using a novel…
We live in the era of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). Deepfakes and Large Language Models (LLMs) are two examples of GenAI. Deepfakes, in particular, pose an alarming threat to society as they are capable of spreading…
Communication on social media platforms is not only culturally and politically relevant, it is also increasingly widespread across societies. Users not only communicate via social media platforms, but also search specifically for…
The habilitation thesis presents two main directions: 1. Exploiting data from social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc.) - creating resources for text and image processing (classification, retrieval, credibility, diversification,…
Social Engineering is the act of manipulating individuals to perform actions or reveal information. Social engineering tactics are widely recognized as a significant risk to information security. The increasing digital environment has…
Users online tend to consume information adhering to their system of beliefs and to ignore dissenting information. During the COVID-19 pandemic, users get exposed to a massive amount of information about a new topic having a high level of…
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and LLaMA, have significantly transformed Natural Language Processing (NLP) with their outstanding abilities in text generation, summarization, and classification.…
Toxic and uncivil politics is widely seen as a growing threat to democratic values and governance, yet our understanding of the drivers and evolution of political incivility remains limited. Leveraging a novel dataset of nearly 18 million…
ChatGPT has become a global sensation. As ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs) emerge, concerns of misusing them in various ways increase, such as disseminating fake news, plagiarism, manipulating public opinion, cheating, and…
Worldwide, a large number of people interact with each other by means of online chatting. There has been a significant rise in the number of platforms, both social and professional, such as WhatsApp, Facebook,and Twitter, which allow people…
In the digital age, hate speech poses a threat to the functioning of social media platforms as spaces for public discourse. Top-down approaches to moderate hate speech encounter difficulties due to conflicts with freedom of expression and…
Social bots are currently regarded an influential but also somewhat mysterious factor in public discourse and opinion making. They are considered to be capable of massively distributing propaganda in social and online media and their…
Large Language Models have intensified the scale and strategic manipulation of political discourse on social media, leading to conflict escalation. The existing literature largely focuses on platform-led moderation as a countermeasure. In…
Othering, the act of portraying outgroups as fundamentally different from the ingroup, often escalates into framing them as existential threats--fueling intergroup conflict and justifying exclusion and violence. These dynamics are…
The amount of information available to the general public is enormous, and it is challenging to extract meaningful and reliable content. The availability of news sources and their trustability are the biggest problems for selecting the…
Social media platforms offer numerous benefits and allow people to come together for various causes. Many communities, academia, government agencies, institutions, healthcare, entertainment, and businesses are on social media platforms.…