Related papers: Coordinated Reply Attacks in Influence Operations:…
User engagement refers to the amount of interaction an instance (e.g., tweet, news, and forum post) achieves. Ranking the items in social media websites based on the amount of user participation in them, can be used in different…
According to the classical definition, propaganda is the management of collective attitudes by manipulation of significant symbols. However this definition has changed to computational propaganda, the way manipulation takes place in digital…
The proliferation of harmful and offensive content is a problem that many online platforms face today. One of the most common approaches for moderating offensive content online is via the identification and removal after it has been posted,…
Influential node detection is a central research topic in social network analysis. Many existing methods rely on the assumption that the network structure is completely known \textit{a priori}. However, in many applications, network…
Twitter has been heavily used as an important channel for communicating and discussing about events in real-time. In such major events, many uninformative tweets are also published rapidly by many users, making it hard to follow the events.…
Targeted training-set attacks inject malicious instances into the training set to cause a trained model to mislabel one or more specific test instances. This work proposes the task of target identification, which determines whether a…
Social media platforms have become a hub for political activities and discussions, democratizing participation in these endeavors. However, they have also become an incubator for manipulation campaigns, like information operations (IOs).…
During the onset of a disaster event, filtering relevant information from the social web data is challenging due to its sparse availability and practical limitations in labeling datasets of an ongoing crisis. In this paper, we hypothesize…
Federated learning is particularly susceptible to model poisoning and backdoor attacks because individual users have direct control over the training data and model updates. At the same time, the attack power of an individual user is…
This paper envisions a multi-agent system for detecting the presence of hate speech in online social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. We introduce a novel framework employing deep learning techniques to coordinate the channels…
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…
Coordinated groups of user accounts working together in online social media can be used to manipulate the online discourse and thus is an important area of study. In this study, we work towards a general theory of coordination. There are…
Nowadays, with the rise of Internet access and mobile devices around the globe, more people are using social networks for collaboration and receiving real-time information. Twitter, the microblogging that is becoming a critical source of…
U.S. Federal Regulators receive over one million comment letters each year from businesses, interest groups, and members of the public, all advocating for changes to proposed regulations. These comments are believed to have wide-ranging…
Twitter bots are automatic programs operated by malicious actors to manipulate public opinion and spread misinformation. Research efforts have been made to automatically identify bots based on texts and networks on social media. Existing…
Influence estimation tools -- such as memorization scores -- are widely used to understand model behavior, attribute training data, and inform dataset curation. However, recent applications in data valuation and responsible machine learning…
Social media is being increasingly weaponized by state-backed actors to elicit reactions, push narratives and sway public opinion. These are known as Information Operations (IO). The covert nature of IO makes their detection difficult. This…
Influencers are key to the nature and networks of information propagation on social media. Influencers are particularly important in political discourse through their engagement with issues, and may derive their legitimacy either solely or…
In this work, we present a novel quantification of conflict in online discussion. Unlike previous studies on conflict dynamics, which model conflict as a binary phenomenon, our measure is continuous-valued, which we validate with manually…
The Internet Research Agency (IRA) influences online political conversations in the United States, exacerbating existing partisan divides and sowing discord. In this paper we investigate the IRA's communication strategies by analyzing…