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Online social networks have become an important platform for people to communicate, share knowledge and disseminate information. Given the widespread usage of social media, individuals' ideas, preferences and behavior are often influenced…
Misleading newsletters can shape individuals' perceptions, and pose a threat to societies; as we witnessed by lowering the severity of follow-up stay-at-home orders and burdening a significant challenge to the fight against COVID-19. In…
Social media platforms have evolved rapidly in modernity without strong regulation. One clear obstacle faced by current users is that of toxicity. Toxicity on social media manifests through a number of forms, including harassment,…
Influence propagation in social networks is a subject of growing interest. A relevant issue in those networks involves the identification of key influencers. These players have an important role on viral marketing strategies and message…
Like other social systems, in collaborative filtering a small number of "influential" users may have a large impact on the recommendations of other users, thus affecting the overall behavior of the system. Identifying influential users and…
In June 2024, X/Twitter changed likes' visibility from public to private, offering a rare, platform-level opportunity to study how the visibility of engagement signals affects users' behavior. Here, we investigate whether hiding liker…
Social media are now a routine part of political campaigns all over the world. However, studies of the impact of campaigning on social platform have thus far been limited to cross-sectional datasets from one election period which are…
What if misinformation is not an information problem at all? To understand the role of news publishers in potentially unintentionally propagating misinformation, we examine how far-right and fringe online groups share and leverage…
Social media are decentralized, interactive, and transformative, empowering users to produce and spread information to influence others. This has changed the dynamics of political communication that were previously dominated by traditional…
Social media platforms have transformed global communication and interaction, with TikTok emerging as a critical tool for education, connection, and social impact, including in contexts where infrastructural resources are limited. Amid…
Online socio-technical systems can be studied as proxy of the real world to investigate human behavior and social interactions at scale. Here we focus on Instagram, a media-sharing online platform whose popularity has been rising up to…
Social media platforms offer flagging, a technical feature that empowers users to report inappropriate posts or bad actors to reduce online harm. The deceptively simple flagging interfaces on nearly all major social media platforms disguise…
With the rise of social media, political conversations now take place in more diffuse environments. In this context, it is not always clear why some actors, more than others, have greater influence on how discussions are shaped. To…
Identifying influencers in a given social network has become an important research problem for various applications, including accelerating the spread of information in viral marketing and preventing the spread of fake news and rumors. The…
Online social networks, such as Facebook and twitter, are a growing phenomenon in today's world, with various platforms providing capabilities for individuals to collaborate through messaging and chatting as well as sharing of content such…
This paper presents a quantitative study of Twitter, one of the most popular micro-blogging services, from the perspective of user influence. We crawl several datasets from the most active communities on Twitter and obtain 20.5 million user…
In the Social Web scenario, large amounts of User-Generated Content (UGC) are diffused through social media often without almost any form of traditional trusted intermediaries. Therefore, the risk of running into misinformation is not…
Online Social Media represent a pervasive source of information able to reach a huge audience. Sadly, recent studies show how online social bots (automated, often malicious accounts, populating social networks and mimicking genuine users)…
Social influence drives both offline and online human behaviour. It pervades cultural markets, and manifests itself in the adoption of scientific and technical innovations as well as the spread of social practices. Prior empirical work on…
Decentralized social media protocols enable users in independent, user-hosted servers (i.e., instances) to interact with each other while they self-govern. This community-based model of social media governance opens up new opportunities for…