Related papers: Censorship in Democracy
On 24 February 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine, starting one of the largest military conflicts in Europe in recent years. In this paper we present preliminary findings about the impact of the conflict on the Internet performance in Ukraine and…
The proliferation of harmful content and misinformation on social networks necessitates content moderation policies to maintain platform health. One such policy is shadow banning, which limits content visibility. The danger of shadow…
Online social networks such as Twitter and Weibo play an important role in how people stay informed and exchange reactions. Each crisis encompasses a new opportunity to study the portability of models for various tasks (e.g., information…
Using individual-level data from Gallup World Poll and the Levada Center, we provide an in-depth analysis of how Russia's invasion of Ukraine has affected sentiments in the Russian population. Our results show that after the invasion, a…
Online platforms rely on moderation interventions to curb harmful behavior such hate speech, toxicity, and the spread of mis- and disinformation. Yet research on the effects and possible biases of such interventions faces multiple…
In this work we study how pervasive is the presence of disinformation in the Italian debate around immigration on Twitter and the role of automated accounts in the diffusion of such content. By characterising the Twitter users with an…
It is often said that constraints affect creative production, both in terms of form and quality. Online social media platforms frequently impose constraints on the content that users can produce, limiting the range of possible…
We present DNIPRO, a corpus of 246K news articles from the Russo-Ukrainian war (Feb 2022 -- Aug 2024) spanning eleven outlets across five nation-states (Russia, Ukraine, U.S., U.K., China) and three languages. The corpus features…
Despite their drawbacks and unintended consequences, social media networks have recently emerged as a crucial resource for individuals in distress, particularly during times of crisis. These platforms serve as a means to seek assistance and…
Social media are decentralized, interactive, and transformative, empowering users to produce and spread information to influence others. This has changed the dynamics of political communication that were previously dominated by traditional…
Coordinated information operations remain a persistent challenge on social media, despite platform efforts to curb them. While previous research has primarily focused on identifying these operations within individual platforms, this study…
Trolling and social bots have been proven as powerful tactics for manipulating the public opinion and sowing discord among Twitter users. This effort requires substantial content fabrication and account coordination to evade Twitter's…
Identifying and characterizing disinformation in political discourse on social media is critical to ensure the integrity of elections and democratic processes around the world. Persistent manipulation of social media has resulted in…
Many under-resourced languages require high-quality datasets for specific tasks such as offensive language detection, disinformation, or misinformation identification. However, the intricacies of the content may have a detrimental effect on…
The 21st century has redefined the way we communicate, our concept of individual and group privacy, and the dynamics of acceptable behavioral norms. The messaging dynamics on Twitter, an internet social network, has opened new ways/modes of…
The analysis of social networks enables the understanding of social interactions, polarisation of ideas, and the spread of information and therefore plays an important role in society. We use Twitter data - as it is a popular venue for the…
The spread of misinformation, conspiracy, and questionable content and information manipulation by foreign adversaries on social media has surged along with the COVID-19 pandemic. Such malicious cyber-enabled actions may cause increasing…
Cyberbullying and cyberaggression are increasingly worrisome phenomena affecting people across all demographics. More than half of young social media users worldwide have been exposed to such prolonged and/or coordinated digital harassment.…
It has been suggested that online search and retrieval contributes to the intellectual isolation of users within their preexisting ideologies, where people's prior views are strengthened and alternative viewpoints are infrequently…
The Web has become the main source for news acquisition. At the same time, news discussion has become more social: users can post comments on news articles or discuss news articles on other platforms like Reddit. These features empower and…