Related papers: U.S. Election Hardens Hate Universe
The expanding influence of social media platforms over the past decade has impacted the way people communicate. The level of obscurity provided by social media and easy accessibility of the internet has facilitated the spread of hate…
The storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 has led to the killing of 5 people and is widely regarded as an attack on democracy. The storming was largely coordinated through social media networks such as Parler. Yet little is known…
In the summer of 2021, users on the livestreaming platform Twitch were targeted by a wave of "hate raids," a form of attack that overwhelms a streamer's chatroom with hateful messages, often through the use of bots and automation. Using a…
Social media platforms shape users' experiences through the algorithmic systems they deploy. In this study, we examine to what extent Twitter's content recommender, in conjunction with a user's social network, impacts the topic, political…
The dynamics and influence of fake news on Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election remains to be clarified. Here, we use a dataset of 171 million tweets in the five months preceding the election day to identify 30 million tweets,…
Members of different political groups not only disagree about issues but also dislike and distrust each other. While social media can amplify this emotional divide -- called affective polarization by political scientists -- there is a lack…
Our perceptions are shaped by the social networks we are embedded in. Despite the acknowledged influence of close contacts on how we perceive the world, the role of the broader social environment remains opaque. Here, we leverage a unique…
The internet promised to democratize access to knowledge and make the world more open and understanding. The reality of today's internet, however, is far from this ideal. Misinformation, lies, and conspiracies dominate many social media…
Approximately 50% of tweets in X's user timelines are personalized recommendations from accounts they do not follow. This raises a critical question: What political content are users exposed to beyond their established networks, and what…
The advent of social media has led to an increased concern over its potential to propagate hate speech and misinformation, which, in addition to contributing to prejudice and discrimination, has been suspected of playing a role in…
Political trolls initiate online discord not only for the lulz (laughs) but also for ideological reasons, such as promoting their desired political candidates. Political troll groups recently gained spotlight because they were considered…
The 2016 US election was a watershed event where an electoral intervention by an adversarial state made extensive use of networks of software robots and data driven communications which transformed the interference into a goal driven…
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…
There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes…
In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the…
The detection of hate speech in political discourse is a critical issue, and this becomes even more challenging in low-resource languages. To address this issue, we introduce a new dataset named IEHate, which contains 11,457 manually…
Recently a simple military exercise on the Internet was perceived as the beginning of a new civil war in the US. Social media aggregate people around common interests eliciting a collective framing of narratives and worldviews. However, the…
Online hate speech can harmfully impact individuals and groups, specifically on non-moderated platforms such as 4chan where users can post anonymous content. This work focuses on analysing and measuring the prevalence of online hate on…
The spread of COVID-19 has sparked racism and hate on social media targeted towards Asian communities. However, little is known about how racial hate spreads during a pandemic and the role of counterspeech in mitigating this spread. In this…
Attitudes can have a profound impact on socially relevant behaviours, such as voting. However, this effect is not uniform across situations or individuals, and it is at present difficult to predict whether attitudes will predict behaviour…