Related papers: The influence of coordinated behavior on toxicity

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…

Dangerous speech on social media platforms can be framed as blatantly inflammatory, or be couched in innuendo. It is also centrally tied to who engages it - it can be driven by openly sectarian social media accounts, or through subtle…

Opinion dynamics models how the publicly expressed opinions of users in a social network coevolve according to their neighbors as well as their own intrinsic opinion. Motivated by the real-world manipulation of social networks during the…

Harmful or abusive online content has been increasing over time, raising concerns for social media platforms, government agencies, and policymakers. Such harmful or abusive content can have major negative impact on society, e.g.,…

Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress towards computational fake news detection. To mitigate its negative impact, we argue that it is critical to understand what user attributes potentially cause users to share fake news. The key…

Users organize themselves into communities on web platforms. These communities can interact with one another, often leading to conflicts and toxic interactions. However, little is known about the mechanisms of interactions between…

Coordinated inauthentic behavior is used as a tool on social media to shape public opinion by elevating or suppressing topics using systematic engagements -- e.g. through *likes* or similar reactions. In an honest world, reactions may be…

Social media platforms have become critical spaces for discussing mental health concerns, including eating disorders. While these platforms can provide valuable support networks, they may also amplify harmful content that glorifies…

YouTube is a major social media platform that plays a significant role in digital culture, with content creators at its core. These creators often engage in controversial behaviour to drive engagement, which can foster toxicity. This paper…

Despite the valuable social interactions that online media promote, these systems provide space for speech that would be potentially detrimental to different groups of people. The moderation of content imposed by many social media has…

In today's digital landscape, the proliferation of conspiracy theories within the disinformation ecosystem of online platforms represents a growing concern. This paper delves into the complexities of this phenomenon. We conducted a…

In recent years, offensive, abusive and hateful language, sexism, racism and other types of aggressive and cyberbullying behavior have been manifesting with increased frequency, and in many online social media platforms. In fact, past…

Nowadays, social media represent persuasive tools that have been progressively weaponized to affect people's beliefs, spread manipulative narratives, and sow conflicts along divergent factions. Software-controlled accounts (i.e., bots) are…

Climate change poses a global threat to public health, food security, and economic stability. Addressing it requires evidence-based policies and a nuanced understanding of how the threat is perceived by the public, particularly within…

Cyberbullying, identified as intended and repeated online bullying behavior, has become increasingly prevalent in the past few decades. Despite the significant progress made thus far, the focus of most existing work on cyberbullying…

This work is aimed at studying realistic social control strategies for social networks based on the introduction of random information into the state of selected driver agents. Deliberately exposing selected agents to random information is…

Social media provides a critical communication platform for political figures, but also makes them easy targets for harassment. In this paper, we characterize users who adversarially interact with political figures on Twitter using…

An increasing amount of attention has been devoted to the problem of "toxic" or antisocial behavior on social media. In this paper we analyze such behavior at very large scales: we analyze toxicity over a 14-year time span on nearly 500…

Background: Online toxicity, encompassing behaviors such as harassment, bullying, hate speech, and the dissemination of misinformation, has become a pressing social concern in the digital age. The 2022 Mpox outbreak, initially termed…

In the digital environment, human attention is frequently guided by cognitive heuristics rather than deliberate evaluation. Since low-credibility narratives often lack substantive factual evidence, their diffusion disproportionally relies…