Related papers: Hatemongers ride on echo chambers to escalate hate…
Recent studies suggest that social media usage -- while linked to an increased diversity of information and perspectives for users -- has exacerbated user polarization on many issues. A popular theory for this phenomenon centers on the…
The proliferation of harmful content on online platforms is a major societal problem, which comes in many different forms including hate speech, offensive language, bullying and harassment, misinformation, spam, violence, graphic content,…
Online communities play a critical role in shaping societal discourse and influencing collective behavior in the real world. The tendency for people to connect with others who share similar characteristics and views, known as homophily,…
Recent advancements have showcased the capabilities of Large Language Models like GPT4 and Llama2 in tasks such as summarization, translation, and content review. However, their widespread use raises concerns, particularly around the…
Many online hate groups exist to disparage others based on race, gender identity, sex, or other characteristics. The accessibility of these communities allows users to join multiple types of hate groups (e.g., a racist community and a…
With the rise of computational social science, many scholars utilize data analysis and natural language processing tools to analyze social media, news articles, and other accessible data sources for examining political and social discourse.…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have raised increasing concerns about their misuse in generating hate speech. Among all the efforts to address this issue, hate speech detectors play a crucial role. However, the effectiveness of different…
Social media have become the main vehicle of information production and consumption online. Millions of users every day log on their Facebook or Twitter accounts to get updates and news, read about their topics of interest, and become…
Online social networks provide a medium for citizens to form opinions on different societal issues, and a forum for public discussion. They also expose users to viral content, such as breaking news articles. In this paper, we study the…
Affective polarization, or, inter-party hostility, is increasingly recognized as a pervasive issue in democracies worldwide, posing a threat to social cohesion. The digital media ecosystem, now widely accessible and ever-present, has often…
The use of social media platforms has been gradually increasing and fake news spreading is becoming an alarming issue nowadays. The spreading of fake news means disseminating false, confusing, and spurious information which hurts families,…
The rapid growth of social media in recent years has fed into some highly undesirable phenomena such as proliferation of abusive and offensive language on the Internet. Previous research suggests that such hateful content tends to come from…
The increased use of online social networks for the dissemination of information comes with the misuse of the internet for cyberbullying, cybercrime, spam, vandalism, amongst other things. To proactively identify abuse in the networks, we…
Members of different political groups not only disagree about issues but also dislike and distrust each other. While social media can amplify this emotional divide -- called affective polarization by political scientists -- there is a lack…
Most current approaches to characterize and detect hate speech focus on \textit{content} posted in Online Social Networks. They face shortcomings to collect and annotate hateful speech due to the incompleteness and noisiness of OSN text and…
Social media platforms often foster environments where users primarily engage with content that aligns with their existing beliefs, thereby reinforcing their views and limiting exposure to opposing viewpoints. In this paper, we analyze X…
Characterising the spreading of ideas within echo chambers is essential for understanding polarisation. In this paper, we explore the characteristics of popular and viral content in climate change discussions on Twitter around the 2019…
Automated hate speech detection is an important tool in combating the spread of hate speech, particularly in social media. Numerous methods have been developed for the task, including a recent proliferation of deep-learning based…
Counterspeech, i.e., responses to counteract potential harms of hateful speech, has become an increasingly popular solution to address online hate speech without censorship. However, properly countering hateful language requires countering…
Hateful and offensive content detection has been extensively explored in a single modality such as text. However, such toxic information could also be communicated via multimodal content such as online memes. Therefore, detecting multimodal…