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Large language model behavior is shaped by the language of those with whom they interact. This capacity and their increasing prevalence online portend that they will intentionally or unintentionally "program" one another and form emergent…
We are in the midst of a transformation of the digital news ecosystem. The expansion of online social networks, the influence of recommender systems, increased automation, and new generative artificial intelligence tools are rapidly…
With the remarkable capability to reach the public instantly, social media has become integral in sharing scholarly articles to measure public response. Since spamming by bots on social media can steer the conversation and present a false…
The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has great potential to reshape the landscape of many social media platforms. While this can bring promising opportunities, it also raises many threats, such as biases and privacy concerns, and…
Individuals of modern societies share ideas and participate in collective processes within a pervasive, variable, and mostly hidden ecosystem of content filtering technologies that determine what information we see online. Despite the…
The problem of detecting bots, automated social media accounts governed by software but disguising as human users, has strong implications. For example, bots have been used to sway political elections by distorting online discourse, to…
Societies can become a conspiratorial society where there is a majority of humans that believe, and therefore spread, conspiracy theories. Artificial intelligence gave rise to social media bots that can spread conspiracies in an automated…
Social media platforms provide an ideal environment to spread misinformation, where social bots can accelerate the spread. This paper explores the interplay between social bots and misinformation on the Sina Weibo platform. We construct a…
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…
Online social networks are often subject to influence campaigns by malicious actors through the use of automated accounts known as bots. We consider the problem of detecting bots in online social networks and assessing their impact on the…
Online social networks have dramatically altered the landscape of public discourse, creating both opportunities for enhanced civic participation and risks of deepening social divisions. Prevalent approaches to studying online polarization…
In recent years, there has been a huge increase in the number of bots online, varying from Web crawlers for search engines, to chatbots for online customer service, spambots on social media, and content-editing bots in online collaboration…
Bots are, for many Web and social media users, the source of many dangerous attacks or the carrier of unwanted messages, such as spam. Nevertheless, crawlers and software agents are a precious tool for analysts, and they are continuously…
People navigate complex environments using cues, heuristics, and other strategies, which are often adaptive in stable settings. However, as AI increasingly permeates society's information environments, those become more adaptive and…
Although not all bots are malicious, the vast majority of them are responsible for spreading misinformation and manipulating the public opinion about several issues, i.e., elections and many more. Therefore, the early detection of bots is…
Recent research has demonstrated the potential of reinforcement learning in effective multi-robot collaboration, particularly in social dilemmas where robots face a trade-off between self-interest and collective benefits. However,…
The rise of social media has fundamentally transformed how people engage in public discourse and form opinions. While these platforms offer unprecedented opportunities for democratic engagement, they have been implicated in increasing…
While most online social media accounts are controlled by humans, these platforms also host automated agents called social bots or sybil accounts. Recent literature reported on cases of social bots imitating humans to manipulate…
Chatter on social media is 20% bots and 80% humans. Chatter by bots and humans is consistently different: bots tend to use linguistic cues that can be easily automated while humans use cues that require dialogue understanding. Bots use…
In this work we study how pervasive is the presence of disinformation in the Italian debate around immigration on Twitter and the role of automated accounts in the diffusion of such content. By characterising the Twitter users with an…