Related papers: Censorship in Democracy
The advent of WWW changed the way we can produce and access information. Recent studies showed that users tend to select information that is consistent with their system of beliefs, forming polarized groups of like-minded people around…
The massive spread of digital misinformation has been identified as a major global risk and has been alleged to influence elections and threaten democracies. Communication, cognitive, social, and computer scientists are engaged in efforts…
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 paper proposes an advanced approach for identifying disinformation on Telegram channels related to the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, utilizing state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep learning techniques and transfer learning. Traditional methods of…
This study provides a large-scale mapping of the French media space using digital methods to estimate political polarization and to study information circuits. We collect data about the production and circulation of online news stories in…
Following the 2016 US presidential election, there has been an increased focus on politically-motivated manipulation of mass-user behavior on social media platforms. Since a large volume of political discussion occurs on these platforms,…
The COVID-19 pandemic brought upon a massive wave of disinformation, exacerbating polarization in the increasingly divided landscape of online discourse. In this context, popular social media users play a major role, as they have the…
Social media platforms employ various content moderation techniques to remove harmful, offensive, and hate speech content. The moderation level varies across platforms; even over time, it can evolve in a platform. For example, Parler, a…
What kinds of social media users read junk news? We examine the distribution of the most significant sources of junk news in the three months before President Donald Trump first State of the Union Address. Drawing on a list of sources that…
Biased news contributes to societal polarization and is often reinforced by hostile reader comments, constituting a vital yet often overlooked aspect of news dissemination. Our study reveals that offensive comments support biased content,…
Amidst growing concern over media manipulation, NLP attention has focused on overt strategies like censorship and "fake news'". Here, we draw on two concepts from the political science literature to explore subtler strategies for government…
We provide an NLP framework to uncover four linguistic dimensions of political polarization in social media: topic choice, framing, affect and illocutionary force. We quantify these aspects with existing lexical methods, and propose…
Recently, social media platforms have introduced several measures to counter misleading information. Among these measures are state media labels which help users identify and evaluate the credibility of state-backed news. YouTube was the…
The existence of polarization and echo chambers has been noted in social media discussions of public concern such as the Covid-19 pandemic, foreign election interference, and regional conflicts. However, measuring polarization and assessing…
The Digital Services Act (DSA) requires large social media platforms in the EU to provide clear and specific information whenever they remove or restrict access to certain content. These "Statements of Reasons" (SoRs) are collected in the…
In the last decade, online social media has become the primary platform for protesters to organize and express their agenda in various parts of the world. Nevertheless, scholars still debate whether online tools induce offline protests or…
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,…
State-sponsored influence operations (SIOs) have become a pervasive and complex challenge in the digital age, particularly on social media platforms where information spreads rapidly and with minimal oversight. These operations are…
State-sponsored organizations are increasingly linked to efforts aimed to exploit social media for information warfare and manipulating public opinion. Typically, their activities rely on a number of social network accounts they control,…
As more people flock to social media to connect with others and form virtual communities, it is important to research how members of these groups interact to understand human behavior on the Web. In response to an increase in hate speech,…