Related papers: More than Memes: A Multimodal Topic Modeling Appro…
Topic modeling is frequently being used for analysing large text corpora such as news articles or social media data. BERTopic, consisting of sentence embedding, dimension reduction, clustering, and topic extraction, is the newest and…
The proliferation of social media has given rise to a new form of communication: memes. Memes are multimodal and often contain a combination of text and visual elements that convey meaning, humor, and cultural significance. While meme…
Sociality borne by language, as is the predominant digital trace on text-based social media platforms, harbours the raw material for exploring a multitude of social phenomena. Distinctively, the messaging service Telegram provides…
The automated detection of conspiracy theories online typically relies on supervised learning. However, creating respective training data requires expertise, time and mental resilience, given the often harmful content. Moreover, available…
The BERTopic framework leverages transformer embeddings and hierarchical clustering to extract latent topics from unstructured text corpora. While effective, it often struggles with social media data, which tends to be noisy and sparse,…
Since traditional social media platforms continue to ban actors spreading hate speech or other forms of abusive languages (a process known as deplatforming), these actors migrate to alternative platforms that do not moderate users content.…
Conspiracy theories have long drawn public attention, but their explosive growth on platforms like Telegram during the COVID-19 pandemic raises pressing questions about their impact on societal trust, democracy, and public health. We…
Connectivity and message propagation are central, yet often underutilized, sources of information in misinformation detection -- especially on poorly moderated platforms such as Telegram, which has become a critical channel for…
The paper presents the outcomes of AI-COVID19, our project aimed at better understanding of misinformation flow about COVID-19 across social media platforms. The specific focus of the study reported in this paper is on collecting data from…
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…
Social media constitutes a rich and influential source of information for qualitative researchers. Although computational techniques like topic modelling assist with managing the volume and diversity of social media content, qualitative…
Much work in the space of NLP has used computational methods to explore sociolinguistic variation in text. In this paper, we argue that memes, as multimodal forms of language comprised of visual templates and text, also exhibit meaningful…
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, existing conspiracy theories were refreshed and new ones were created, often interwoven with antisemitic narratives, stereotypes and codes. The sheer volume of antisemitic and conspiracy theory…
Cyberattacks pose a serious threat to modern sociotechnical systems, often resulting in severe technical and societal consequences. Attackers commonly target systems and infrastructure through methods such as malware, ransomware, or other…
As a leading online platform with a vast global audience, YouTube's extensive reach also makes it susceptible to hosting harmful content, including disinformation and conspiracy theories. This study explores the use of open-weight Large…
Telegram is a globally popular instant messaging platform known for its strong emphasis on security, privacy, and unique social networking features. It has recently emerged as the host for various cross-domain analysis and research works,…
This study applies BERTopic, a transformer-based topic modeling technique, to the lmsys-chat-1m dataset, a multilingual conversational corpus built from head-to-head evaluations of large language models (LLMs). Each user prompt is paired…
Internet memes are a central element of online culture, blending images and text. While substantial research has focused on either the visual or textual components of memes, little attention has been given to their interplay. This gap…
Memes are one of the most popular types of content used to spread information online. They can influence a large number of people through rhetorical and psychological techniques. The task, Detection of Persuasion Techniques in Texts and…
This paper presents a multidisciplinary approach to analyzing data from Telegram for early warning information regarding cyber threats. With the proliferation of hacktivist groups utilizing Telegram to disseminate information regarding…