Related papers: Unifying the Extremes: Developing a Unified Model …
In the online public sphere, discussions about immigration often become increasingly fractious, marked by toxic language and polarization. Drawing on 4 million X posts over six months, we combine a user- and topic-centric approach to study…
The rapid expansion of cyberspace has greatly facilitated the strategic shift of traditional crimes to online platforms. This has included malicious actors, such as extremist organisations, making use of online networks to disseminate…
We provide an NLP framework to uncover four linguistic dimensions of political polarization in social media: topic choice, framing, affect and illocutionary force. We quantify these aspects with existing lexical methods, and propose…
Social animals, including humans, have a broad range of personality traits, which can be used to predict individual behavioral responses and decisions. Current methods to quantify individual personality traits in humans rely on self-report…
Online forums provide a unique opportunity for online users to share comments and exchange information on a particular topic. Understanding user behaviour is valuable to organizations and has applications for social and security strategies,…
The United States has experienced a significant increase in violent extremism, prompting the need for automated tools to detect and limit the spread of extremist ideology online. This study evaluates the performance of Bidirectional Encoder…
Web 2.0 helps to expand the range and depth of conversation on many issues and facilitates the formation of online communities. Online communities draw various individuals together based on their common opinions on a core set of issues.…
Networks, representing attitudinal survey data, expose the structure of opinion-based groups. We make use of these network projections to identify the groups reliably through community detection algorithms and to examine…
This study investigates the dynamics of extreme opinions on social media during the 2023 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, utilising a comprehensive dataset of over 450,000 posts from four Reddit subreddits (r/Palestine, r/Judaism,…
The proliferation of social media platforms and online communities has inadvertently catalyzed the spread of cyberbullying, hate speech, and other forms of online toxicity, making the effective governance of such harm a critical societal…
Cyberbullying is a pervasive problem in online communities. To identify cyberbullying cases in large-scale social networks, content moderators depend on machine learning classifiers for automatic cyberbullying detection. However, existing…
We propose to extend the current binary understanding of terrorism (versus non-terrorism) with a Dynamic Matrix of Extremisms and Terrorism (DMET). DMET considers the whole ecosystem of content and actors that can contribute to a continuum…
Radicalization is the process by which people come to adopt increasingly extreme political or religious ideologies. While radical thinking is by no means problematic in itself, it becomes a threat to national security when it leads to…
Echo chambers and opinion polarization recently quantified in several sociopolitical contexts and across different social media, raise concerns on their potential impact on the spread of misinformation and on openness of debates. Despite…
Abuse on the Internet is an important societal problem of our time. Millions of Internet users face harassment, racism, personal attacks, and other types of abuse across various platforms. The psychological effects of abuse on individuals…
Support for extremist entities - whether from the far right, or far left - often manages to survive globally online despite significant external pressure, and may ultimately inspire violent acts by individuals having no obvious prior…
Online social networks have dramatically altered the landscape of public discourse, creating both opportunities for enhanced civic participation and risks of deepening social divisions. Prevalent approaches to studying online polarization…
Detecting and characterizing emerging topics of discussion and consumer trends through analysis of Internet data is of great interest to businesses. This paper considers the problem of monitoring the Web to spot emerging memes - distinctive…
Recent terrorist attacks carried out on behalf of ISIS on American and European soil by lone wolf attackers or sleeper cells remind us of the importance of understanding the dynamics of radicalization mediated by social media communication…
Online communities of involuntary celibates (incels) are a prominent source of misogynist hate speech. In this paper, we use quantitative text and network analysis approaches to examine how identity groups are discussed on incels-dot-is,…