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How do European publics debate a geopolitical crisis on social media, and do they inhabit a shared informational reality? We analyze over 38 million geolocated tweets from 20 European countries during the first eight months of the Russian…

The proliferation of social media platforms and online communities has inadvertently catalyzed the spread of cyberbullying, hate speech, and other forms of online toxicity, making the effective governance of such harm a critical societal…

Social networks have triumphed in communicating people online, but they have also been exploited to launch influence operations for manipulating society. The deployment of software-controlled accounts (e.g., social bots) has proven to be…

This study presents a review of research on social media bot detection. Social media bots are used by political and criminal actors for mass distribution of political messages, as well as rumors, conspiracy theories, and other forms of…

This Chapter examines the dynamics of conflict and collaboration in human-machine systems, with a particular focus on large-scale, internet-based collaborative platforms. While these platforms represent successful examples of collective…

Serious concerns have been raised about the role of 'socialbots' in manipulating public opinion and influencing the outcome of elections by retweeting partisan content to increase its reach. Here we analyze the role and influence of…

The conflict in Ukraine has been not only characterised by military engagement but also by a significant information war, with social media platforms like X, formerly known as Twitter playing an important role in shaping public perception.…

In recent times, discussions on social media platforms have increasingly come under scrutiny due to the proliferation of science denial and fake news. Traditional solutions, such as regulatory actions, have been implemented to mitigate the…

This paper investigates how collaborative AI systems can enhance user agency in identifying and evaluating misinformation on social media platforms. Traditional methods, such as personal judgment or basic fact-checking, often fall short…

The diffusion of opinions in Social Networks is a relevant process for adopting positions and attracting potential voters in political campaigns. Opinion polarization, bias, targeted diffusion, and the radicalization of postures are key…

Crisis situations are characterised by their sudden occurrence and an unclear information situation. In that context, social media platforms have become a highly utilised resource for collective information gathering to fill these gaps.…

In order to combat the creation and spread of harmful content online, this paper defines and contextualizes the concept of inauthentic, societal-scale manipulation by malicious actors. We review the literature on societally harmful content…

Including diverse voices in political decision-making strengthens our democratic institutions. Within the Canadian political system, there is gender inequality across all levels of elected government. Online abuse, such as hateful tweets,…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities in generating realistic text across diverse subjects. Concerns have been raised that they could be utilized to produce fake content with a deceptive intention, although evidence…

During Australia's unprecedented bushfires in 2019-2020, misinformation blaming arson resurfaced on Twitter using #ArsonEmergency. The extent to which bots were responsible for disseminating and amplifying this misinformation has received…

Bots have become increasingly prevalent in the digital sphere and have taken up a proactive role in shaping democratic processes. While previous studies have focused on their influence at the individual level, their potential macro-level…

Social bots represent a new generation of bots that make use of online social networks (OSNs) as a command and control (C\&C) channel. Malicious social bots were responsible for launching large-scale spam campaigns, promoting low-cap…

Social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter play a key role in disseminating both reliable and unreliable information about climate change. This study analyses the topology of interactions in Twitter and their relation to cross-platform…

Antisocial behavior (ASB) on social media -- including hate speech, harassment, and cyberbullying -- poses growing risks to platform safety and societal well-being. Prior research has focused largely on networks such as X and Reddit, while…

The characterization and detection of bots with their presumed ability to manipulate society on social media platforms have been subject to many research endeavors over the last decade. In the absence of ground truth data (i.e., accounts…