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The rise of misinformation and fake news in online political discourse poses significant challenges to democratic processes and public engagement. While debunking efforts aim to counteract misinformation and foster fact-based dialogue,…
Online debates are often characterised by extreme polarisation and heated discussions among users. The presence of hate speech online is becoming increasingly problematic, making necessary the development of appropriate countermeasures. In…
Social media platforms promise to enable rich and vibrant conversations online; however, their potential is often hindered by antisocial behaviors. In this paper, we study the relationship between structure and toxicity in conversations on…
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted on every human activity and, because of the urgency of finding the proper responses to such an unprecedented emergency, it generated a diffused societal debate. The online version of this discussion was…
Negative campaigning is a central feature of political competition, yet empirical research has been limited by the high cost and limited scalability of existing classification methods. This study makes two key contributions. First, it…
This study explores real-world human interactions with large language models (LLMs) in diverse, unconstrained settings in contrast to most prior research focusing on ethically trimmed models like ChatGPT for specific tasks. We aim to…
Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms in the country, but pre-pandemic vaccination debate has been shown to be polarized and siloed into echo chambers. It is thus imperative to understand the nature of this discourse,…
The argument for persistent social media influence campaigns, often funded by malicious entities, is gaining traction. These entities utilize instrumented profiles to disseminate divisive content and disinformation, shaping public…
Not all topics are equally "flammable" in terms of toxicity: a calm discussion of turtles or fishing less often fuels inappropriate toxic dialogues than a discussion of politics or sexual minorities. We define a set of sensitive topics that…
Hate speech is harmful content that directly attacks or promotes hatred against members of groups or individuals based on actual or perceived aspects of identity, such as racism, religion, or sexual orientation. This can affect social life…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown incredible capabilities and transcended the natural language processing (NLP) community, with adoption throughout many services like healthcare, therapy, education, and customer service. Since users…
Toxicity is an increasingly common and severe issue in online spaces. Consequently, a rich line of machine learning research over the past decade has focused on computationally detecting and mitigating online toxicity. These efforts…
Toxicity is endemic to online social networks including Twitter. It follows a Pareto like distribution where most of the toxicity is generated by a very small number of profiles and as such, analyzing and characterizing these toxic profiles…
Online discussions are often characterized by strong behavioral asymmetries: a relatively small fraction of users actively produces content, while the majority primarily consumes and redistributes it. Here we propose a community-detection…
Toxic interactions in Open Source Software (OSS) communities reduce contributor engagement and threaten project sustainability. Preventing such toxicity before it emerges requires a clear understanding of how harmful conversations unfold.…
Online hate messaging is a pervasive issue plaguing the well-being of social media users. This research empirically investigates a novel theory positing that online hate may be driven primarily by the pursuit of social approval rather than…
Automatic identification of hateful and abusive content is vital in combating the spread of harmful online content and its damaging effects. Most existing works evaluate models by examining the generalization error on train-test splits on…
The proliferation of ideological movements into extremist factions via social media has become a global concern. While radicalization has been studied extensively within the context of specific ideologies, our ability to accurately…
In the analysis of Twitter debate, the recent literature focused on discursive communities, i.e. clusters of accounts interacting among themselves via retweets. In the present work, we studied discursive communities in 8 different thematic…
The evolution of digital communication systems and the designs of online platforms have inadvertently facilitated the subconscious propagation of toxic behavior. Giving rise to reactive responses to toxic behavior. Toxicity in online…