Related papers: Community Notes vs. Snoping: How the Crowd Selects…
Online Social Media represent a pervasive source of information able to reach a huge audience. Sadly, recent studies show how online social bots (automated, often malicious accounts, populating social networks and mimicking genuine users)…
Online misinformation poses a global risk with harmful implications for society. Ordinary social media users are known to actively reply to misinformation posts with counter-misinformation messages, which is shown to be effective in…
Are users who comment on a variety of matters more likely to achieve high influence than those who delve into one focused field? Do general Twitter hashtags, such as #lol, tend to be more popular than novel ones, such as #instantlyinlove?…
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, large volumes of biomedical information concerning this new disease have been published on social media. Some of this information can pose a real danger to people's health, particularly when false…
Understanding how political attention is divided and over what subjects is crucial for research on areas such as agenda setting, framing, and political rhetoric. Existing methods for measuring attention, such as manual labeling according to…
Social media, especially Twitter, is being increasingly used for research with predictive analytics. In social media studies, natural language processing (NLP) techniques are used in conjunction with expert-based, manual and qualitative…
The discourse around conspiracy theories is currently thriving amidst the rampant misinformation in online environments. Research in this field has been focused on detecting conspiracy theories on social media, often relying on limited…
Stopping the malicious spread and production of false and misleading news has become a top priority for researchers. Due to this prevalence, many automated methods for detecting low quality information have been introduced. The majority of…
The reporting and the analysis of current events around the globe has expanded from professional, editor-lead journalism all the way to citizen journalism. Nowadays, politicians and other key players enjoy direct access to their audiences…
A great deal of empirical research has examined who falls for misinformation and why. Here, we introduce a formal game-theoretic model of engagement with news stories that captures the strategic interplay between (mis)information consumers…
Community structure is of paramount importance for the understanding of complex networks. Consequently, there is a tremendous effort in order to develop efficient community detection algorithms. Unfortunately, the issue of a fair assessment…
Detecting whether a news article is fake or genuine is a crucial task in today's digital world where it's easy to create and spread a misleading news article. This is especially true of news stories shared on social media since they don't…
Social networks play a fundamental role in the diffusion of information. However, there are two different ways of how information reaches a person in a network. Information reaches us through connections in our social networks, as well as…
In Twitter, and other microblogging services, the generation of new content by the crowd is often biased towards immediacy: what is happening now. Prompted by the propagation of commentary and information through multiple mediums, users on…
Community Notes (formerly known as Birdwatch) is the first large-scale crowdsourced content moderation initiative that was launched by X (formerly known as Twitter) in January 2021. As the Community Notes model gains momentum across other…
A very large number of people use Online Social Networks daily. Such platforms thus become attractive targets for agents that seek to gain access to the attention of large audiences, and influence perceptions or opinions. Botnets,…
We can often detect from a person's utterances whether he/she is in favor of or against a given target entity -- their stance towards the target. However, a person may express the same stance towards a target by using negative or positive…
Online social networking services (SNSs) involve communication activities between large number of individuals over the public Internet and their crawled records are often regarded as proxies of real (i.e., offline) interaction structure.…
We investigate how users perceive social media account verification, how those perceptions compare to platform practices, and what happens when a gap emerges. We use recent changes in Twitter's verification process as a natural experiment,…
This thesis addresses two paradoxes: (1) why empirical studies find that fake news represent only a small share of the information consulted and shared on social media despite the absence of editorial control or journalistic norms, and (2)…