Related papers: Evaluating Twitter's Algorithmic Amplification of …
$\textit{Fake followers}$ are those Twitter accounts specifically created to inflate the number of followers of a target account. Fake followers are dangerous for the social platform and beyond, since they may alter concepts like popularity…
The daily exposure of social media users to propaganda and disinformation campaigns has reinvigorated the need to investigate the local and global patterns of diffusion of different (mis)information content on social media. Echo chambers…
Misinformation about climate change poses a significant threat to societal well-being, prompting the urgent need for effective mitigation strategies. However, the rapid proliferation of online misinformation on social media platforms…
Information spread in social media depends on a number of factors, including how the site displays information, how users navigate it to find items of interest, users' tastes, and the `virality' of information, i.e., its propensity to be…
Trolling and social bots have been proven as powerful tactics for manipulating the public opinion and sowing discord among Twitter users. This effort requires substantial content fabrication and account coordination to evade Twitter's…
Content polluters, or bots that hijack a conversation for political or advertising purposes are a known problem for event prediction, election forecasting and when distinguishing real news from fake news in social media data. Identifying…
Social media platforms can expose influential trends in many aspects of everyday life. However, the movements they represent can be contaminated by disinformation. Social bots are one of the significant sources of disinformation in social…
Real-time social media data can provide useful information on evolving hazards. Alongside traditional methods of disaster detection, the integration of social media data can considerably enhance disaster management. In this paper, we…
Misbehavior in online social networks (OSN) is an ever-growing phenomenon. The research to date tends to focus on the deployment of machine learning to identify and classify types of misbehavior such as bullying, aggression, and racism to…
Social media plays a significant role in disaster management by providing valuable data about affected people, donations and help requests. Recent studies highlight the need to filter information on social media into fine-grained content…
The rapid growth of social media presents a unique opportunity to study coordinated agent behavior in an unfiltered environment. Online processes often exhibit complex structures that reflect the nature of the user behavior, whether it is…
To curb the problem of false information, social media platforms like Twitter started adding warning labels to content discussing debunked narratives, with the goal of providing more context to their audiences. Unfortunately, these labels…
The proliferation of harmful and offensive content is a problem that many online platforms face today. One of the most common approaches for moderating offensive content online is via the identification and removal after it has been posted,…
The rise of misinformation and fake news in online political discourse poses significant challenges to democratic processes and public engagement. While debunking efforts aim to counteract misinformation and foster fact-based dialogue,…
Social media posts may go viral and reach large numbers of people within a short period of time. Such posts may threaten the public dialogue if they contain misleading content, making their early detection highly crucial. Previous works…
The explosive growth of social media has not only revolutionized communication but also brought challenges such as political polarization, misinformation, hate speech, and echo chambers. This dissertation employs computational social…
Russian Internet Trolls use fake personas to spread disinformation through multiple social media streams. Given the increased frequency of this threat across social media platforms, understanding those operations is paramount in combating…
Social media platforms are often blamed for exacerbating political polarization and worsening public dialogue. Many claim that hyperpartisan users post pernicious content, slanted to their political views, inciting contentious and toxic…
The micro-blogging platform Twitter allows its nearly 320 million monthly active users to build a network of follower connections to other Twitter users (i.e., followees) in order to subscribe to content posted by these users. With this…
With the spread of false and misleading information in current news, many algorithmic tools have been introduced with the aim of assessing bias and reliability in written content. However, there has been little work exploring how effective…