Related papers: Tracking Fringe and Coordinated Activity on Twitte…
Using nationally representative data from the 2020 and 2024 American National Election Studies (ANES), this paper traces how the U.S. social media landscape has shifted across platforms, demographics, and politics. Overall platform use has…
Social media platforms heavily changed how users consume and digest information and, thus, how the popularity of topics evolves. In this paper, we explore the interplay between the virality of controversial topics and how they may trigger…
Social media moderation policies are often at the center of public debate, and their implementation and enactment are sometimes surrounded by a veil of mystery. Unsurprisingly, due to limited platform transparency and data access,…
Increasing levels of far-right extremist violence have generated public concern about the spread of radicalization in the United States. Previous research suggests that radicalized individuals are destabilized by various environmental (or…
Following the wave of misinterpreted, manipulated and malicious information growing on the Internet, the misinformation surrounding COVID-19 has become a paramount issue. In the context of the current COVID-19 pandemic, social media posts…
Massive amounts of fake news and conspiratorial content have spread over social media before and after the 2016 US Presidential Elections despite intense fact-checking efforts. How do the spread of misinformation and fact-checking compete?…
Online communities are groups of people who interact primarily via the Internet, often sharing common interests. Some of these groups, particularly supporters of Q who created the far-right conspiracy theory known as QAnon, are highly toxic…
Opinion dynamics have attracted the interest of researchers from different fields. Local interactions among individuals create interesting dynamics for the system as a whole. Such dynamics are important from a variety of perspectives. Group…
Our work represents another step into the detection and prevention of these ever-more present political manipulation efforts. We, therefore, start by focusing on understanding what the state-of-the-art approaches lack -- since the problem…
Social media are decentralized, interactive, and transformative, empowering users to produce and spread information to influence others. This has changed the dynamics of political communication that were previously dominated by traditional…
In recent years people have become increasingly reliant on social media to read news and get information, and some social media users post unsubstantiated information to gain attention. Such information is known as rumours. Nowadays, rumour…
US Presidential Election 2012 has been a very tight race between the two key candidates. There were intense battle between the two key candidates. The election reflects the sentiment of the electorate towards the achievements of the…
Recent years have seen a marked increase in the spread of misinformation, a phenomenon which has been accelerated and amplified by social media such as Facebook and Twitter. While some actors spread misinformation to push a specific agenda,…
Social media platforms have been exploited to conduct election interference in recent years. In particular, the Russian-backed Internet Research Agency (IRA) has been identified as a key source of misinformation spread on Twitter prior to…
Climate change and political polarisation are two of the 21st century's critical socio-political issues. Here, we investigate their intersection by studying the discussion around the UN Conference of The Parties on Climate Change (COP)…
Timely access to accurate information is crucial during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prompted by key stakeholders' cautioning against an "infodemic", we study information sharing on Twitter from January through May 2020. We observe an overall…
Twitter as a new form of social media potentially contains useful information that opens new opportunities for content analysis on tweets. This paper examines the predictive power of Twitter regarding the US presidential election of 2012.…
We report the first, to the best of our knowledge, hand-in-hand collaboration between human rights activists and machine learners, leveraging crowd-sourcing to study online abuse against women on Twitter. On a technical front, we carefully…
With people moving out of physical public spaces due to containment measures to tackle the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, online platforms become even more prominent tools to understand social discussion. Studying social media can…
Formally announced to the public following former President Donald Trump's bans and suspensions from mainstream social networks in early 2022 after his role in the January 6 Capitol Riots, Truth Social was launched as an "alternative"…