Related papers: Censorship in Democracy
How do European publics debate a geopolitical crisis on social media, and do they inhabit a shared informational reality? We analyze over 38 million geolocated tweets from 20 European countries during the first eight months of the Russian…
The digital landscape provides a dynamic platform for political discourse crucial for understanding shifts in public opinion and engagement especially under authoritarian governments This study examines YouTube user behavior during the…
The emergence of social media has largely eased the way people receive information and participate in public discussions. However, in countries with strict regulations on discussions in the public space, social media is no exception. To…
Online social media enables mass-level, transparent, and democratized discussion on numerous socio-political issues. Due to such openness, these platforms often endure manipulation and misinformation - leading to negative impacts. To…
This paper presents one of the top-performing solutions to the UNLP 2025 Shared Task on Detecting Manipulation in Social Media. The task focuses on detecting and classifying rhetorical and stylistic manipulation techniques used to influence…
Social media moderation policies are often at the center of public debate, and their implementation and enactment are sometimes surrounded by a veil of mystery. Unsurprisingly, due to limited platform transparency and data access,…
This paper presents a few observations about pro-Kremlin propaganda between 2015 and early 2021 with a dataset from the East Stratcom Task Force (ESTF), which is affiliated with the European Union (EU) but working independently from it.…
The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has seen an intensification in the use of social media by governmental actors in cyber warfare. Wartime communication via memes has been a successful strategy used not only by independent accounts such…
Unlike the more observable phenomenon of group opinion reinforcement, self-censorship online has received comparatively less attention. Our goal in this work is to dissect the phenomena of self-censorship and to examine the implications of…
In the paper, different approaches for the analysis of news trends on Twitter has been considered. For the analysis and case study, informational trends on Twitter caused by Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 year have been studied. A deep…
With Twitter's growth and popularity, a huge number of views are shared by users on various topics, making this platform a valuable information source on various political, social, and economic issues. This paper investigates English tweets…
In 2022 the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. It is known that Ukraine faced outages because of the damage to their infrastructure. It is also known that Russia was boycotted by the international community. However the impact on the…
Over the past couple of years, anecdotal evidence has emerged linking coordinated campaigns by state-sponsored actors with efforts to manipulate public opinion on the Web, often around major political events, through dedicated accounts, or…
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…
We investigate the impact of free speech and the relaxation of moderation on online social media platforms using Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter as a case study. By curating a dataset of over 10 million tweets, our study employs a novel…
The war in Ukraine seems to have positively changed the attitude toward the critical societal topic of migration in Europe -- at least towards refugees from Ukraine. We investigate whether this impression is substantiated by how the topic…
The full-scale conflict between the Russian Federation and Ukraine generated an unprecedented amount of news articles and social media data reflecting opposing ideologies and narratives. These polarized campaigns have led to mutual…
Multiple countries have recently experienced extreme political polarization, which in some cases led to escalation of hate crime, violence and political instability. Beside the much discussed presidential elections in the United States and…
The ongoing Russia-Ukraine war has been extensively discussed on social media. One commonly observed problem in such discussions is the emergence of echo chambers, where users are rarely exposed to opinions outside their worldview. Prior…
For many, social networks have become the primary source of news, although the correctness of the provided information and its trustworthiness are often unclear. The investigations of the 2016 US presidential elections have brought the…