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$\textit{Fake followers}$ are those Twitter accounts specifically created to inflate the number of followers of a target account. Fake followers are dangerous for the social platform and beyond, since they may alter concepts like popularity…
Social media platforms enable the rapid dissemination and consumption of information. However, users instantly consume such content regardless of the reliability of the shared data. Consequently, the latter crowdsourcing model is exposed to…
In today's digital landscape, the proliferation of conspiracy theories within the disinformation ecosystem of online platforms represents a growing concern. This paper delves into the complexities of this phenomenon. We conducted a…
We introduce a stochastic model which describes diffusions of tweets on the Twitter network. By dividing the followers into generations, we describe the dynamics of the tweet diffusion as a random multiplicative process. We confirm our…
Within OSNs, many of our supposedly online friends may instead be fake accounts called social bots, part of large groups that purposely re-share targeted content. Here, we study retweeting behaviors on Twitter, with the ultimate goal of…
The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine was accompanied by a large-scale, pro-Russian propaganda campaign on social media. However, the strategy behind the dissemination of propaganda has remained unclear, particularly how the online discourse…
Misbehavior in online social networks (OSN) is an ever-growing phenomenon. The research to date tends to focus on the deployment of machine learning to identify and classify types of misbehavior such as bullying, aggression, and racism to…
Online trolls increase social costs and cause psychological damage to individuals. With the proliferation of automated accounts making use of bots for trolling, it is difficult for targeted individual users to handle the situation both…
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…
People use microblogging platforms like Twitter to involve with other users for a wide range of interests and practices. Twitter profiles run by different types of users such as humans, bots, spammers, businesses and professionals. This…
The importance of the ability of predict trends in social media has been growing rapidly in the past few years with the growing dominance of social media in our everyday's life. Whereas many works focus on the detection of anomalies in…
The Internet and, in particular, Online Social Networks have changed the way that terrorist and extremist groups can influence and radicalise individuals. Recent reports show that the mode of operation of these groups starts by exposing a…
Social media have become part of modern news reporting, used by journalists to spread information and find sources, or as a news source by individuals. The quest for prominence and recognition on social media sites like Twitter can…
For more than a decade now, academicians and online platform administrators have been studying solutions to the problem of bot detection. Bots are computer algorithms whose use is far from being benign: malicious bots are purposely created…
On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, starting what is now known as the Russo-Ukrainian War, initiating an online discourse on social media. Twitter as one of the most popular SNs, with an open and democratic character, enables a…
Most street gang members use Twitter to intimidate others, to present outrageous images and statements to the world, and to share recent illegal activities. Their tweets may thus be useful to law enforcement agencies to discover clues about…
Recently, Web forums have been invaded by opinion manipulation trolls. Some trolls try to influence the other users driven by their own convictions, while in other cases they can be organized and paid, e.g., by a political party or a PR…
Online extremists in social networks pose a new form of threat to the general public. These extremists range from cyberbullies who harass innocent users to terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) that use…
The adaptive social learning paradigm helps model how networked agents are able to form opinions on a state of nature and track its drifts in a changing environment. In this framework, the agents repeatedly update their beliefs based on…
Online social networks (OSNs) are increasingly threatened by social bots which are software-controlled OSN accounts that mimic human users with malicious intentions. A social botnet refers to a group of social bots under the control of a…