Related papers: Throwaway Accounts and Moderation on Reddit
Bots are automated social media users that can be used to amplify (mis)information and sow harmful discourse. In order to effectively influence users, bots can be generated to reproduce human user behavior. Indeed, people tend to trust…
The Fediverse, a group of interconnected servers providing a variety of interoperable services (e.g. micro-blogging in Mastodon) has gained rapid popularity. This sudden growth, partly driven by Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, has…
Online communities have gained considerable importance in recent years due to the increasing number of people connected to the Internet. Moderating user content in online communities is mainly performed manually, and reducing the workload…
Research into community content moderation often assumes that moderation teams govern with a single, unified voice. However, recent work has found that moderators disagree with one another at modest, but concerning rates. The problem is not…
Online platforms have enacted various policies to maintain a safe and trustworthy advertising environment. However, the extent to which these policies are adhered to and enforced remains a subject of interest and concern. In this work, we…
The issue of quantifying and characterizing various forms of social media manipulation and abuse has been at the forefront of the computational social science research community for over a decade. In this paper, I provide a…
Deplatforming, or banning malicious accounts from social media, is a key tool for moderating online harms. However, the consequences of deplatforming for the wider social media ecosystem have been largely overlooked so far, due to the…
Since September 2023, the Digital Services Act (DSA) obliges large online platforms to submit detailed data on each moderation action they take within the European Union (EU) to the DSA Transparency Database. From its inception, this…
When people experience harassment online, from individual threats or invective to coordinated campaigns of harassment, they have the option to report the harassers and content to the platform where the harassment has occurred. Platforms…
Decentralising the Web is a desirable but challenging goal. One particular challenge is achieving decentralised content moderation in the face of various adversaries (e.g. trolls). To overcome this challenge, many Decentralised Web (DW)…
Twitter accounts are public by default, but Twitter gives the option to create protected accounts, where only approved followers can see their tweets. The publicly visible information changes based on the account type and the visibility of…
We present the first large-scale comparative analysis of Truth Social and the most popular conservative Reddit communities, r/Conservative, r/conservatives, and r/Republican. Using topic modeling with FASTopic and LLM-assisted refinement,…
Personalized recommendation systems often drive users towards more extreme content, exacerbating opinion polarization. While (content-aware) moderation has been proposed to mitigate these effects, such approaches risk curtailing the freedom…
Harassing and hateful speech in online spaces has become a common problem for platform maintainers and their users. The toxicity created by such content can discourage user participation and engagement. Therefore, it is crucial for and a…
Advice forums are a crowdsourced way to reinforce cultural norms and moral behavior. Sites like Reddit contain massive amounts of natural language human interaction, with rules and norms unique to each individual subreddit community. To…
Moderators and automated methods enforce bans on malicious users who engage in disruptive behavior. However, malicious users can easily create a new account to evade such bans. Previous research has focused on other forms of online…
Bots, simply defined as accounts controlled by automation, can be used as a weapon for online manipulation and pose a threat to the health of platforms. Researchers have studied online platforms to detect, estimate, and characterize bot…
Microblogging platforms constitute a popular means of real-time communication and information sharing. They involve such a large volume of user-generated content that their users suffer from an information deluge. To address it, numerous…
Online communities are constantly growing, with dozens of platforms housing millions of users. Large and small communities alike rely on volunteer moderators to maintain order. Despite their key role, moderators are given a toolbox of…
In the current landscape of online abuses and harms, effective content moderation is necessary to cultivate safe and inclusive online spaces. Yet, the effectiveness of many moderation interventions is still unclear. Here, we assess the…