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Hate speech online targets individuals or groups based on identity attributes and spreads rapidly, posing serious social risks. Memes, which combine images and text, have emerged as a nuanced vehicle for disseminating hate speech, often…
The online trend of the manosphere and feminist discourse on social networks requires a holistic measure of the level of sexism in an online community. This indicator is important for policymakers and moderators of online communities (e.g.,…
The rapid growth of social media platforms has raised significant concerns regarding online content toxicity. When Large Language Models (LLMs) are used for toxicity detection, two key challenges emerge: 1) the absence of domain-specific…
Following the Russian Federation's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a multitude of information narratives emerged within both pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian communities online. As the conflict progresses, so too do the…
Targeted online advertising is on the forefront of political communication, allowing hyper-local advertising campaigns around elections and issues. In this study, we employ a new resource for political ad monitoring -- Facebook Ads Library…
This study examines how Russian far-right communities on Telegram shape perceptions of political figures through memes and visual narratives. Far from passive spectators, these actors co-produce propaganda, blending state-aligned messages…
Ad hominem attacks are those that target some feature of a person's character instead of the position the person is maintaining. These attacks are harmful because they propagate implicit biases and diminish a person's credibility. Since…
According to the Eurobarometer report about EU media use of May 2018, the number of European citizens who consult on-line social networks for accessing information is considerably increasing. In this work we analyze approximately $10^6$…
Conspiracy theories, particularly those focused on anti-vaccine narratives and the promotion of off-label medications such as MMS and CDS, have proliferated on Telegram, including in Brazil, finding fertile ground among communities that…
Hate speech represents a pervasive and detrimental form of online discourse, often manifested through an array of slurs, from hateful tweets to defamatory posts. As such speech proliferates, it connects people globally and poses significant…
The prevalence of digital media and evolving sociopolitical dynamics have significantly amplified the dissemination of hateful content. Existing studies mainly focus on classifying texts into binary categories, often overlooking the…
Understanding toxicity in user conversations is undoubtedly an important problem. Addressing "covert" or implicit cases of toxicity is particularly hard and requires context. Very few previous studies have analysed the influence of…
In the dynamic field of artificial intelligence (AI), the development and application of Large Language Models (LLMs) for text analysis are of significant academic interest. Despite the promising capabilities of various LLMs in conducting…
Despite the valuable social interactions that online media promote, these systems provide space for speech that would be potentially detrimental to different groups of people. The moderation of content imposed by many social media has…
The emergence of politically driven divisions in online discussion networks has attracted a wealth of literature, but also one which has thus far been largely limited to single country studies. Hence whilst there is good evidence that these…
Toxicity detection algorithms, originally designed with reactive content moderation in mind, are increasingly being deployed into proactive end-user interventions to moderate content. Through a socio-technical lens and focusing on contexts…
Suicide is a critical global public health challenge, causing approximately 720,000 deaths each year and calling for timely, effective prevention strategies. Existing computational studies primarily focus on post-based social media…
Large language models (LLMs) excel in many diverse applications beyond language generation, e.g., translation, summarization, and sentiment analysis. One intriguing application is in text classification. This becomes pertinent in the realm…
Background: Online toxicity, encompassing behaviors such as harassment, bullying, hate speech, and the dissemination of misinformation, has become a pressing social concern in the digital age. The 2022 Mpox outbreak, initially termed…
Social media is a modern person's digital voice to project and engage with new ideas and mobilise communities $\unicode{x2013}$ a power shared with extremists. Given the societal risks of unvetted content-moderating algorithms for…