Related papers: U.S. Election Hardens Hate Universe
We report our recent simulations on the social processes which -- in our opinion -- lie at the bottom of hate. First simulation deals with the so-called Heider balance where initial purely random preferences split the community into two…
With growing role of social media in shaping public opinions and beliefs across the world, there has been an increased attention to identify and counter the problem of hate speech on social media. Hate speech on online spaces has serious…
The proliferation of social media platforms has led to an increase in the spread of hate speech, particularly targeting vulnerable communities. Unfortunately, existing methods for automatically identifying and blocking toxic language rely…
The micro-blogging platform Twitter allows its nearly 320 million monthly active users to build a network of follower connections to other Twitter users (i.e., followees) in order to subscribe to content posted by these users. With this…
Social media has emerged as a popular platform for sports fans to express their opinions regarding athletes' performance. Fans consistently hold high expectations for athletes, anticipating exceptional performances week after week. This…
Legislators and policymakers worldwide are debating options for suppressing illegal, harmful and undesirable material online. Drawing on several quantitative data sources, we show that deplatforming an active community to suppress online…
Online toxic content has grown into a pervasive phenomenon, intensifying during times of crisis, elections, and social unrest. A significant amount of research has been focused on detecting or analyzing toxic content using machine-learning…
Online social networks are used to diffuse opinions and ideas among users, enabling a faster communication and a wider audience. The way in which opinions are conditioned by social interactions is usually called social influence. Social…
Acts of political violence in the continental United States have increased dramatically in the last decade. For this rise in political violence, we are interested in where and when such incidents occur: how are the locations and times of…
Social media has become extremely influential when it comes to policy making in modern societies, especially in the western world, where platforms such as Twitter allow users to follow politicians, thus making citizens more involved in…
This study investigates adversarial attacks conducted to distort voter model dynamics in complex networks. Specifically, a simple adversarial attack method is proposed to hold the state of opinions of an individual closer to the target…
In recent years, scholars have raised concerns on the effects that unreliable news, or "fake news," has on our political sphere, and our democracy as a whole. For example, the propagation of fake news on social media is widely believed to…
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…
In the digital age, hate speech poses a threat to the functioning of social media platforms as spaces for public discourse. Top-down approaches to moderate hate speech encounter difficulties due to conflicts with freedom of expression and…
According to the World Economic Forum, the diffusion of unsubstantiated rumors on online social media is one of the main threats for our society. The disintermediated paradigm of content production and consumption on online social media…
Internet memes have become a dominant method of communication; at the same time, however, they are also increasingly being used to advocate extremism and foster derogatory beliefs. Nonetheless, we do not have a firm understanding as to…
The proliferation of harmful content shared online poses a threat to online information integrity and the integrity of discussion across platforms. Despite various moderation interventions adopted by social media platforms, researchers and…
In this paper, the influence of the social media on the opinion formation process is modeled during an election campaign. In the proposed model, peer- to-peer interactions and targeted online propaganda messages are assumed to be the…
The damaging effects of hate speech on social media are evident during the last few years, and several organizations, researchers and social media platforms tried to harness them in various ways. Despite these efforts, social media users…
Sentiment analysis of textual content has become a well-established solution for analyzing social media data. However, with the rise of images and videos as primary modes of expression, more information on social media is conveyed visually.…