Related papers: Coordinated Reply Attacks in Influence Operations:…
Coordinated online behaviors are an essential part of information and influence operations, as they allow a more effective disinformation's spread. Most studies on coordinated behaviors involved manual investigations, and the few existing…
This paper explores ways in which the harmful effects of cyber hate may be mitigated through mechanisms for enhancing the self governance of new digital spaces. We report findings from a mixed methods study of responses to cyber hate posts,…
Coordination is a fundamental aspect of life. The advent of social media has made it integral also to online human interactions, such as those that characterize thriving online communities and social movements. At the same time,…
Recent events have led to a burgeoning awareness on the misuse of social media sites to affect political events, sway public opinion, and confuse the voters. Such serious, hostile mass manipulation has motivated a large body of works on…
Online misinformation has been a serious threat to public health and society. Social media users are known to reply to misinformation posts with counter-misinformation messages, which have been shown to be effective in curbing the spread of…
The rapid growth of social media presents a unique opportunity to study coordinated agent behavior in an unfiltered environment. Online processes often exhibit complex structures that reflect the nature of the user behavior, whether it is…
Social media platforms have become key tools for coordinated influence operations, enabling state actors to manipulate public opinion through strategic, collective actions. While previous research has suggested collaboration between states,…
In recent years, bullying and aggression against users on social media have grown significantly, causing serious consequences to victims of all demographics. In particular, cyberbullying affects more than half of young social media users…
Most Americans agree that misinformation, hate speech and harassment are harmful and inadequately curbed on social media through current moderation practices. In this paper, we aim to understand the discursive strategies employed by people…
The proliferation of misinformation and disinformation on social media networks has become increasingly concerning. With a significant portion of the population using social media on a regular basis, there are growing efforts by malicious…
Hateful rhetoric is plaguing online discourse, fostering extreme societal movements and possibly giving rise to real-world violence. A potential solution to this growing global problem is citizen-generated counter speech where citizens…
We report the first, to the best of our knowledge, hand-in-hand collaboration between human rights activists and machine learners, leveraging crowd-sourcing to study online abuse against women on Twitter. On a technical front, we carefully…
We consider the problem of identifying coordinated influence campaigns conducted by automated agents or bots in a social network. We study several different Twitter datasets which contain such campaigns and find that the bots exhibit…
The increased use of online social networks for the dissemination of information comes with the misuse of the internet for cyberbullying, cybercrime, spam, vandalism, amongst other things. To proactively identify abuse in the networks, we…
When reading news articles on social networking services and news sites, readers can view comments marked by other people on these articles. By reading these comments, a reader can understand the public opinion about the news, and it is…
Adversarial interactions against politicians on social media such as Twitter have significant impact on society. In particular they disrupt substantive political discussions online, and may discourage people from seeking public office. In…
Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered recommender systems play a crucial role in determining the content that users are exposed to on social media platforms. However, the behavioural patterns of these systems are often opaque, complicating…
Online Social Media represent a pervasive source of information able to reach a huge audience. Sadly, recent studies show how online social bots (automated, often malicious accounts, populating social networks and mimicking genuine users)…
In this paper, we investigate the issue of detecting the real-life influence of people based on their Twitter account. We propose an overview of common Twitter features used to characterize such accounts and their activity, and show that…
Social media feeds typically favor posts according to user engagement. The most ubiquitous type of engagement (and the type we study) is *likes*. Users customarily take engagement metrics such as likes as a neutral proxy for quality and…