Related papers: Understanding Community-Level Blocklists in Decent…
The increasing harms caused by hate, harassment, and other forms of abuse online have motivated major platforms to explore hierarchical governance. The idea is to allow communities to have designated members take on moderation and…
Centralized social media platforms are currently experiencing a shift in user engagement, drawing attention to alternative paradigms like Decentralized Online Social Networks (DOSNs). The rising popularity of DOSNs finds its root in the…
Personalized recommendation systems often drive users towards more extreme content, exacerbating opinion polarization. While (content-aware) moderation has been proposed to mitigate these effects, such approaches risk curtailing the freedom…
The "Decentralised Web" (DW) is an evolving concept, which encompasses technologies aimed at providing greater transparency and openness on the web. The DW relies on independent servers (aka instances) that mesh together in a peer-to-peer…
Most existing community-related studies focus on detection, which aim to find the community membership for each user from user friendship links. However, membership alone, without a complete profile of what a community is and how it…
Decentralized online social networks have evolved from experimental stages to operating at unprecedented scale, with broader adoption and more active use than ever before. Platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, Hive, and Nostr have seen notable…
By filtering the content that users see, social media platforms have the ability to influence users' perceptions and decisions, from their dining choices to their voting preferences. This influence has drawn scrutiny, with many calling for…
Social bots have recently gained attention in the context of public opinion manipulation on social media platforms. While a lot of research effort has been put into the classification and detection of such (semi-)automated programs, it is…
Information cocoons are frequently cited in the literature on whether and how social media might lead to ideological segregation and political polarization. From the behavioural and communication perspectives, this paper first examines why…
Ever since social activity on the Internet began migrating from the wilds of the open web to the walled gardens erected by so-called platforms, debates have raged about the responsibilities that these platforms ought to bear. And yet,…
We consider the problem of community detection from observed interactions between individuals, in the context where multiple types of interaction are possible. We use labelled stochastic block models to represent the observed data, where…
Decentralized communication is becoming an important use case within Web3. On Ethereum, users can repurpose the transaction input data field to embed natural-language messages, commonly known as Input Data Messages (IDMs). However, as IDMs…
Real-world networks usually have community structure, that is, nodes are grouped into densely connected communities. Community detection is one of the most popular and best-studied research topics in network science and has attracted…
In recent years, Decentralized Online Social Networks (DOSNs) have been attracting the attention of many users because they reduce the risk of censorship, surveillance, and information leakage from the service provider. In contrast to the…
As social media has become a predominant mode of communication globally, the rise of abusive content threatens to undermine civil discourse. Recognizing the critical nature of this issue, a significant body of research has been dedicated to…
The pitfalls of centralized social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter/X, have led to concerns about control, transparency, and accountability. Decentralized social networks have emerged as a result with the goal of empowering users.…
The proliferation of social media platforms and online communities has inadvertently catalyzed the spread of cyberbullying, hate speech, and other forms of online toxicity, making the effective governance of such harm a critical societal…
While recent research has focused on developing safeguards for generative AI (GAI) model-level content safety, little is known about how content moderation to prevent malicious content performs for end-users in real-world GAI products. To…
Crowdsourcing-based content moderation is a platform that hosts content moderation tasks for crowd workers to review user submissions (e.g. text, images and videos) and make decisions regarding the admissibility of the posted content, along…
Social media platforms curate access to information and opportunities, and so play a critical role in shaping public discourse today. The opaque nature of the algorithms these platforms use to curate content raises societal questions. Prior…