Related papers: Characterizing and Detecting Propaganda-Spreading …
With its lenient moderation policies and long-standing associations with potentially unlawful activities, Telegram has become an incubator for problematic content, frequently featuring conspiratorial, hyper-partisan, and fringe narratives.…
The present-day Russia-Ukraine military conflict has exposed the pivotal role of social media in enabling the transparent and unbridled sharing of information directly from the frontlines. In conflict zones where freedom of expression is…
Telegram is one of the most popular instant messaging apps in today's digital age. In addition to providing a private messaging service, Telegram, with its channels, represents a valid medium for rapidly broadcasting content to a large…
This study examines how Russian far-right communities on Telegram shape perceptions of political figures through memes and visual narratives. Far from passive spectators, these actors co-produce propaganda, blending state-aligned messages…
We present the first large-scale analysis of 339 cybercriminal activity channels (CACs). Followed by over 23.8 million users, these channels share a wide array of malicious and unethical content with their subscribers, including compromised…
Governments use propaganda, including through visual content -- or Politically Salient Image Patterns (PSIP) -- on social media, to influence and manipulate public opinion. In the present work, we collected Telegram post-history of from 989…
The prevalence of state-sponsored propaganda on the Internet has become a cause for concern in the recent years. While much effort has been made to identify state-sponsored Internet propaganda, the problem remains far from being solved…
The online new emerging suspicious users, that usually are called trolls, are one of the main sources of hate, fake, and deceptive online messages. Some agendas are utilizing these harmful users to spread incitement tweets, and as a…
Although Telegram is currently one of the most popular instant messaging apps in the world, previous studies have mainly focused on analysing discussions on specific angles and topics. In this paper, we present a broad analysis of publicly…
The move of propaganda and disinformation to the online environment is possible thanks to the fact that within the last decade, digital information channels radically increased in popularity as a news source. The main advantage of such…
Until recently, social media were seen to promote democratic discourse on social and political issues. However, this powerful communication ecosystem has come under scrutiny for allowing hostile actors to exploit online discussions in an…
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…
Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) enables organizations to anticipate, detect, and mitigate evolving cyber threats. Its effectiveness depends on high-quality datasets, which support model development, training, evaluation, and benchmarking.…
Social media platforms offer unprecedented opportunities for connectivity and exchange of ideas; however, they also serve as fertile grounds for the dissemination of disinformation. Over the years, there has been a rise in state-sponsored…
As the popularity of content sharing websites such as YouTube and Flickr has increased, they have become targets for spam, phishing and the distribution of malware. On YouTube, the facility for users to post comments can be used by spam…
Until recently, social media was seen to promote democratic discourse on social and political issues. However, this powerful communication platform has come under scrutiny for allowing hostile actors to exploit online discussions in an…
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains one of the most polarizing geopolitical issues, with the October 2023 escalation intensifying online debate. Social media platforms, particularly Telegram, have become central to real-time news…
Messaging platforms, especially those with a mobile focus, have become increasingly ubiquitous in society. These mobile messaging platforms can have deceivingly large user bases, and in addition to being a way for people to stay in touch,…
The daily exposure of social media users to propaganda and disinformation campaigns has reinvigorated the need to investigate the local and global patterns of diffusion of different (mis)information content on social media. Echo chambers…
In this study, we examine the role of Twitter as a first line of defense against misinformation by tracking the public engagement with, and the platforms response to, 500 tweets concerning the RussoUkrainian conflict which were identified…