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A growing body of evidence points to critical vulnerabilities of social media, such as the emergence of partisan echo chambers and the viral spread of misinformation. We show that these vulnerabilities are amplified by abusive behaviors…
Polarization in American politics has been extensively documented and analyzed for decades, and the phenomenon became all the more apparent during the 2016 presidential election, where Trump and Clinton depicted two radically different…
This study explores the dynamic relationship between online discourse, as observed in tweets, and physical hate crimes, focusing on marginalized groups. Leveraging natural language processing techniques, including keyword extraction and…
Social Media have been extensively used for commercial and political communication, besides their initial scope of providing an easy-to-use outlet to produce and consume user-generated content. Besides being a popular medium, Social Media…
The detection of events from online social networks is a recent, evolving field that attracts researchers from across a spectrum of disciplines and domains. Here we report a time-series analysis for predicting events. In particular, we…
The surge in political information, discourse, and interaction has been one of the most important developments in social media over the past several years. There is rich structure in the interaction among different viewpoints on the…
Social media platforms may provide potential space for discourses that contain hate speech, and even worse, can act as a propagation mechanism for hate crimes. The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program collects hate crime data and…
On 26 January 2021, India witnessed a national embarrassment from the demographic least expected from - farmers. People across the nation watched in horror as a pseudo-patriotic mob of farmers stormed capital Delhi and vandalized the…
The interaction between fringe subcultures and mainstream online communities poses significant challenges for understanding discourse on social media. In this work, we investigate whether users active in conspiracy-focused communities…
Many extreme right groups have had an online presence for some time through the use of dedicated websites. This has been accompanied by increased activity in social media platforms in recent years, enabling the dissemination of extreme…
The mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school on December 14, 2012 catalyzed a year of active debate and legislation on gun control in the United States. Social media hosted an active public discussion where people expressed their…
Coordinated campaigns are used to influence and manipulate social media platforms and their users, a critical challenge to the free exchange of information online. Here we introduce a general, unsupervised network-based methodology to…
Although multiple COVID-19 vaccines have been available for several months now, vaccine hesitancy continues to be at high levels in the United States. In part, the issue has also become politicized, especially since the presidential…
Online social media are key platforms for the public to discuss political issues. As a result, researchers have used data from these platforms to analyze public opinions and forecast election results. Recent studies reveal the existence of…
Acts of political violence in the continental United States have increased dramatically in the last decade. For this rise in political violence, we are interested in where and when such incidents occur: how are the locations and times of…
Since December 2019, COVID-19 has been spreading rapidly across the world. Not surprisingly, conversation about COVID-19 is also increasing. This article is a first look at the amount of conversation taking place on social media,…
Information Operations (IOs) pose a significant threat to the integrity of democratic processes, with the potential to influence election-related online discourse. In anticipation of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, we present a study…
The proliferation of harmful content shared online poses a threat to online information integrity and the integrity of discussion across platforms. Despite various moderation interventions adopted by social media platforms, researchers and…
Online hate is dynamic, adaptive -- and is now surging armed with AI/GPT tools. Its consequences include personal traumas, child sex abuse and violent mass attacks. Overcoming it will require knowing how it operates at scale. Here we…
Increased sharing of untrustworthy information on social media platforms is one of the main challenges of our modern information society. Because information disseminated by political elites is known to shape citizen and media discourse, it…