Related papers: The influence of coordinated behavior on toxicity
Social media has become a crucial conduit for the swift dissemination of information during global crises. However, this also paves the way for the manipulation of narratives by malicious actors. This research delves into the interaction…
Coordination is a fundamental aspect of life. The advent of social media has made it integral also to online human interactions, such as those that characterize thriving online communities and social movements. At the same time,…
Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered recommender systems play a crucial role in determining the content that users are exposed to on social media platforms. However, the behavioural patterns of these systems are often opaque, complicating…
Current network-based methods for detecting coordinated inauthentic behaviour on social media focus primarily on inferring links between accounts based on common "behavioural traces" [19], such as retweeting the same tweet or posting the…
There is an ongoing debate about how to moderate toxic speech on social media and the impact of content moderation on online discourse. This paper proposes and validates a methodology for measuring the content-moderation-induced distortions…
Citizen-generated counter speech is a promising way to fight hate speech and promote peaceful, non-polarized discourse. However, there is a lack of large-scale longitudinal studies of its effectiveness for reducing hate speech. To this end,…
Online harassment and abusive language continue to be a growing concern on social media platforms. In this study, we explore the power of group dynamics to shape the toxicity of Twitter conversations. First, we examine how the presence of…
Following the 2016 US presidential election, there has been an increased focus on politically-motivated manipulation of mass-user behavior on social media platforms. Since a large volume of political discussion occurs on these platforms,…
Political discourse on social media has grown increasingly toxic, with electoral periods amplifying partisan hostility and cross-group attacks. Yet it remains unclear whether toxicity in online political speech reflects how partisans…
State-sponsored information operations (IOs) increasingly influence global discourse on social media platforms, yet their emotional and rhetorical strategies remain inadequately characterized in scientific literature. This study presents…
Online Social Networks represent a novel opportunity for political campaigns, revolutionising the paradigm of political communication. Nevertheless, many studies uncovered the presence of d/misinformation campaigns or of malicious…
Social media feeds typically favor posts according to user engagement. The most ubiquitous type of engagement (and the type we study) is *likes*. Users customarily take engagement metrics such as likes as a neutral proxy for quality and…
The argument for persistent social media influence campaigns, often funded by malicious entities, is gaining traction. These entities utilize instrumented profiles to disseminate divisive content and disinformation, shaping public…
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…
The rise of social media has been accompanied by a dark side with the ease of creating fake accounts and disseminating misinformation through coordinated attacks. Existing methods to identify such attacks often rely on thematic similarities…
Social media sites are becoming a key factor in politics. These platforms are easy to manipulate for the purpose of distorting information space to confuse and distract voters. Past works to identify disruptive patterns are mostly focused…
Hate speech on online platforms has been credibly linked to multiple instances of real world violence. This calls for an urgent need to understand how toxic content spreads and how it might be mitigated on online social networks, and…
Toxic and antisocial user behavior on social media platforms has received considerable scholarly attention due to its detrimental effects on society. This study takes a holistic perspective on the phenomenon of online toxicity by…
Coordinated information operations remain a persistent challenge on social media, despite platform efforts to curb them. While previous research has primarily focused on identifying these operations within individual platforms, this study…
Understanding the dynamics of language toxicity on social media is important for us to investigate the propagation of misinformation and the development of echo chambers for political scenarios such as U.S. presidential elections. Recent…