Related papers: Mapping the Italian Telegram Ecosystem: Communitie…
Telegram has grown into a significant platform for news and information sharing, favored for its anonymity and minimal moderation. This openness, however, makes it vulnerable to misinformation and conspiracy theories. In this study, we…
Since traditional social media platforms continue to ban actors spreading hate speech or other forms of abusive languages (a process known as deplatforming), these actors migrate to alternative platforms that do not moderate users content.…
Toxic and antisocial user behavior on social media platforms has received considerable scholarly attention due to its detrimental effects on society. This study takes a holistic perspective on the phenomenon of online toxicity by…
Resistance to progressive policies and hate speech have been consolidating on Brazilian Telegram, with anti-woke communities rejecting diversity and promoting a worldview that sees these social changes as a threat. Therefore, this study…
Although Telegram is currently one of the most popular instant messaging apps in the world, previous studies have mainly focused on analysing discussions on specific angles and topics. In this paper, we present a broad analysis of publicly…
Online political hostility is pervasive, yet it remains unclear how toxicity varies across campaign issues and political ideology, and what psychosocial signals and framing accompany toxic expression online. In this work, we present a…
Social media platforms have become essential spaces for public discourse. While political polarisation and limited communication across different groups are widely acknowledged, the connection between social network fragmentation and the…
The huge amount of data made available by the massive usage of social media has opened up the unprecedented possibility to carry out a data-driven study of political processes. While particular attention has been paid to phenomena like…
With its lenient moderation policies and long-standing associations with potentially unlawful activities, Telegram has become an incubator for problematic content, frequently featuring conspiratorial, hyper-partisan, and fringe narratives.…
Conspiracy theories have long drawn public attention, but their explosive growth on platforms like Telegram during the COVID-19 pandemic raises pressing questions about their impact on societal trust, democracy, and public health. We…
We examined four case studies in the context of hate speech on Twitter in Italian from 2019 to 2020, aiming at comparing the classification of the 3,600 tweets made by expert pedagogists with the automatic classification made by machine…
Telegram is a globally popular instant messaging platform known for its strong emphasis on security, privacy, and unique social networking features. It has recently emerged as the host for various cross-domain analysis and research works,…
Toxic language remains an ongoing challenge on social media platforms, presenting significant issues for users and communities. This paper provides a cross-topic and cross-lingual analysis of toxicity in Reddit conversations. We collect 1.5…
The Covid-19 pandemic has had a deep impact on the lives of the entire world population, inducing a participated societal debate. As in other contexts, the debate has been the subject of several d/misinformation campaigns; in a quite…
Telegram, initially a messaging app, has evolved into a platform where users can interact with various services through programmable applications, bots. Bots provide a wide range of uses, from moderating groups, helping with online…
Social media play a key role in shaping citizens' political opinion. According to the Eurobarometer, the percentage of EU citizens employing online social networks on a daily basis has increased from 18% in 2010 to 48% in 2019. The…
In the digital age, hate speech poses a threat to the functioning of social media platforms as spaces for public discourse. Top-down approaches to moderate hate speech encounter difficulties due to conflicts with freedom of expression and…
Instant messaging platforms such as Telegram became one of the main means of communication used by people all over the world. Most of them are home of several groups and channels that connect thousands of people focused on political topics.…
Toxic and uncivil politics is widely seen as a growing threat to democratic values and governance, yet our understanding of the drivers and evolution of political incivility remains limited. Leveraging a novel dataset of nearly 18 million…
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, existing conspiracy theories were refreshed and new ones were created, often interwoven with antisemitic narratives, stereotypes and codes. The sheer volume of antisemitic and conspiracy theory…