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An increasing fraction of today social interactions occur using online social media as communication channels. Recent worldwide events, such as social movements in Spain or revolts in the Middle East, highlight their capacity to boost…
The ability to detect coordinated activity in communication networks is an ongoing challenge. Prior approaches emphasize considering any activity exceeding a specific threshold of similarity to be coordinated. However, identifying such a…
Opinion dynamics is an important and very active area of research that delves into the complex processes through which individuals form and modify their opinions within a social context. The ability to comprehend and unravel the mechanisms…
The broad adoption of the web as a communication medium has made it possible to study social behavior at a new scale. With social media networks such as Twitter, we can collect large data sets of online discourse. Social science researchers…
Social media is nearly ubiquitous in modern life, raising concerns about its societal impacts -- from mental health and polarization to violence and democratic disruption. Yet research on its causal effects is still inconclusive: Various…
Social media is often viewed as a sensor into various societal events such as disease outbreaks, protests, and elections. We describe the use of social media as a crowdsourced sensor to gain insight into ongoing cyber-attacks. Our approach…
We collect and analyse messages exchanged in Twitter using two of the platform's publicly available APIs (the search and stream specifications). We assess the differences between the two samples, and compare the networks of communication…
Online social networks are increasingly being utilized for collective sense making and information processing in disasters. However, the underlying mechanisms that shape the dynamics of collective intelligence in online social networks…
The proliferation of social media such as real time microblogging and online reputation systems facilitate real time sensing of social patterns and behavior. In the last decade, sensing and decision making in social networks have witnessed…
During the 2016 US elections Twitter experienced unprecedented levels of propaganda and fake news through the collaboration of bots and hired persons, the ramifications of which are still being debated. This work proposes an approach to…
Online social media are key platforms for the public to discuss political issues. As a result, researchers have used data from these platforms to analyze public opinions and forecast election results. Recent studies reveal the existence of…
In recent years, statistical physics' methodologies have proven extremely successful in offering insights into the mechanisms that govern social interactions. However, the question of whether these models are able to capture trends observed…
Understanding true influence in social media requires distinguishing correlation from causation--particularly when analyzing misinformation spread. While existing approaches focus on exposure metrics and network structures, they often fail…
The discourse around conspiracy theories is currently thriving amidst the rampant misinformation in online environments. Research in this field has been focused on detecting conspiracy theories on social media, often relying on limited…
Online social media such as Twitter are widely used for mining public opinions and sentiments on various issues and topics. The sheer volume of the data generated and the eager adoption by the online-savvy public are helping to raise the…
Social media sites are becoming a key factor in politics. These platforms are easy to manipulate for the purpose of distorting information space to confuse and distract voters. Past works to identify disruptive patterns are mostly focused…
Influencer marketing involves a wide range of strategies in which brands collaborate with popular content creators (i.e., influencers) to leverage their reach, trust, and impact on their audience to promote and endorse products or services.…
Online manipulation is a pressing concern for democracies, but the actions and strategies of coordinated inauthentic accounts, which have been used to interfere in elections, are not well understood. We analyze a five million-tweet…
Many time-evolving systems in nature, society and technology leave traces of the interactions within them. These interactions form temporal networks that reflect the states of the systems. In this work, we pursue a coarse-grained…
Information diffusion on social media platforms is often assumed to occur primarily through explicit social connections, such as follower or friend ties. However, information frequently propagates beyond these observable ties -- through…