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Conspiracy theories have long drawn public attention, but their explosive growth on platforms like Telegram during the COVID-19 pandemic raises pressing questions about their impact on societal trust, democracy, and public health. We…
Following the Russian Federation's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a multitude of information narratives emerged within both pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian communities online. As the conflict progresses, so too do the…
In recent years, mass-broadcast messaging platforms like Telegram have gained prominence for both, serving as a harbor for private communication and enabling large-scale disinformation campaigns. The encrypted and networked nature of these…
Telegram has grown into a significant platform for news and information sharing, favored for its anonymity and minimal moderation. This openness, however, makes it vulnerable to misinformation and conspiracy theories. In this study, we…
In recent years, major social media platforms have implemented increasingly strict moderation policies, resulting in bans and restrictions on conspiracy theory-related content. To circumvent these restrictions, conspiracy theorists are…
Narratives are key interpretative devices by which humans make sense of political reality. In this work, we show how the analysis of conflicting narratives, i.e. conflicting interpretive lenses through which political reality is experienced…
This study investigates the spread of conspiracy theories in Arabic digital spaces through computational analysis of online content. By combining Named Entity Recognition and Topic Modeling techniques, specifically the Top2Vec algorithm, we…
Political discourse has grown increasingly fragmented across different social platforms, making it challenging to trace how narratives spread and evolve within such a fragmented information ecosystem. Reconstructing social graphs and…
Conspiracy theories are anti-authoritarian narratives that lead to social conflict, impacting how people perceive political information. To help in understanding this issue, we introduce the Conspiracy Frame: a fine-grained semantic…
The current prevalence of conspiracy theories on the internet is a significant issue, tackled by many computational approaches. However, these approaches fail to recognize the relevance of distinguishing between texts which contain 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…
Polarisation research has demonstrated how people cluster in homogeneous groups with opposing opinions. However, this effect emerges not only through interaction between people, limiting communication between groups, but also between…
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, existing conspiracy theories were refreshed and new ones were created, often interwoven with antisemitic narratives, stereotypes and codes. The sheer volume of antisemitic and conspiracy theory…
Narrative is a foundation of human cognition and decision making. Because narratives play a crucial role in societal discourses and spread of misinformation and because of the pervasive use of social media, the narrative dynamics on social…
Conspiracy theories, as a type of misinformation, are narratives that explains an event or situation in an irrational or malicious manner. While most previous work examined conspiracy theory in social media short texts, limited attention…
This paper presents a multidisciplinary approach to analyzing data from Telegram for early warning information regarding cyber threats. With the proliferation of hacktivist groups utilizing Telegram to disseminate information regarding…
The wide availability of user-provided content in online social media facilitates the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and narratives. Despite the enthusiastic rhetoric on the part of some that this process…
Conspiracy theories erode public trust in science and institutions while resisting debunking by evolving and absorbing counter-evidence. As AI-generated misinformation becomes increasingly sophisticated, understanding rhetorical patterns in…
Conspiracy theories related to climate change denial and anti-science have found fertile ground on Telegram, particularly among Brazilian communities that distrust scientific institutions and oppose global environmental policies. This study…
The daily exposure of social media users to propaganda and disinformation campaigns has reinvigorated the need to investigate the local and global patterns of diffusion of different (mis)information content on social media. Echo chambers…