Related papers: Censorship in Democracy
Open-source journalism emerged as a new phenomenon in the media ecosystem, which uses crowdsourcing to fact-check and generate investigative reports for world events using open sources (e.g., social media). A particularly prominent example…
With the shift of public discourse to social media, we see simultaneously an expansion of civic engagement as the bar to enter the conversation is lowered, and the reaction by both state and non-state adversaries of free speech to silence…
Discussion about the social network Twitter often concerns its role in political discourse, involving the question of when an expression of opinion becomes offensive, immoral, and/or illegal, and how to deal with it. Given the growing…
Online hate speech is associated with substantial social harms, yet it remains unclear how consistently platforms enforce hate speech policies or whether enforcement is feasible at scale. We address these questions through a global audit of…
Social media platforms have been exploited to conduct election interference in recent years. In particular, the Russian-backed Internet Research Agency (IRA) has been identified as a key source of misinformation spread on Twitter prior to…
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…
Polarization is an increasingly worrying phenomenon within social media. Recent work has made it possible to detect and even quantify polarization. Nevertheless, the few existing metrics, although defined in a continuous space, often lead…
This work introduces EUvsDisinfo, a multilingual dataset of disinformation articles originating from pro-Kremlin outlets, along with trustworthy articles from credible / less biased sources. It is sourced directly from the debunk articles…
The fifty-eighth American presidential election in 2016 still arouse fierce controversyat present. A portion of politicians as well as medium and voters believe that theRussian government interfered with the election of 2016 by controlling…
The spread of election misinformation and harmful political content conveys misleading narratives and poses a serious threat to democratic integrity. Detecting harmful content at early stages is essential for understanding and potentially…
Social botnets have become an important phenomenon on social media. There are many ways in which social bots can disrupt or influence online discourse, such as, spam hashtags, scam twitter users, and astroturfing. In this paper we…
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…
The growing political polarization of the American electorate over the last several decades has been widely studied and documented. During the administration of President Donald Trump, charges of "fake news" made social and news media not…
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…
We study the evolution of long-lived controversial debates as manifested on Twitter from 2011 to 2016. Specifically, we explore how the structure of interactions and content of discussion varies with the level of collective attention, as…
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…
Quantifying how individuals react to social influence is crucial for tackling collective political behavior online. While many studies of opinion in public forums focus on social feedback, they often overlook the potential for human…
The Internet and social media have transformed news availability and accessibility, reshaping information consumption and production. However, they can also facilitate the rapid spread of misinformation, posing significant societal…
The online hate speech is proliferating with several organization and countries implementing laws to ban such harmful speech. While these restrictions might reduce the amount of such hateful content, it does so by restricting freedom of…
Given the fundamental role of the Internet in our lives, a better understanding of its operational status during war times is crucial. In this paper, we analyze the Ukrainian Internet during the first months of war after the Russian…