Related papers: Toxicity in State Sponsored Information Operations
Language is a fundamental aspect of human societies, continuously evolving in response to various stimuli, including societal changes and intercultural interactions. Technological advancements have profoundly transformed communication, with…
The Russia-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) carried out a broad information campaign in the U.S. before and after the 2016 presidential election. The organization created an expansive set of internet properties: web domains, Facebook…
An important part of online activities are intended to control the public opinion and behavior, being considered currently a global threat. This article identifies and conceptualizes seven online strategies employed in social media…
This study quantifies influence between media outlets by applying a novel methodology that uses causal effect estimation on networks and transformer language models. We demonstrate the obscured influence of state-controlled outlets over…
The detection of state-sponsored trolls operating in influence campaigns on social media is a critical and unsolved challenge for the research community, which has significant implications beyond the online realm. To address this challenge,…
Socio-linguistic indicators of affectively-relevant phenomena, such as emotion or sentiment, are often extracted from text to better understand features of human-computer interactions, including on social media. However, an indicator that…
The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine emphasises the role social media plays in modern-day warfare, with conflict occurring in both the physical and information environments. There is a large body of work on identifying malicious…
Online manipulation is a pressing concern for democracies, but the actions and strategies of coordinated inauthentic accounts, which have been used to interfere in elections, are not well understood. We analyze a five million-tweet…
A lack of demographic context in existing toxic speech datasets limits our understanding of how different age groups communicate online. In collaboration with funk, a German public service content network, this research introduces the first…
The recent past has highlighted the influential role of social networks and online media in shaping public debate on current affairs and political issues. This paper is focused on studying the role of politically-motivated actors and their…
This report provides an engagement analysis of counternarratives against online toxicity. Between February 2020 and July 2021, we observed over 15 million toxic messages on social media identified by our fine-grained, multilingual detection…
It is a widely accepted fact that state-sponsored Twitter accounts operated during the 2016 US presidential election spreading millions of tweets with misinformation and inflammatory political content. Whether these social media campaigns…
The weaponization of digital communications and social media to conduct disinformation campaigns at immense scale, speed, and reach presents new challenges to identify and counter hostile influence operations (IOs). This paper presents an…
In recent years, the opaque design and the limited public understanding of social networks' recommendation algorithms have raised concerns about potential manipulation of information exposure. Reducing content visibility, aka shadow…
The abundance of information on social media has reshaped public discussions, shifting attention to the mechanisms that drive online discourse. This study analyzes large-scale Twitter (now X) data from three global debates--Climate Change,…
This paper examines 3,517 Facebook ads created by Russia's Internet Research Agency (IRA) between June 2015 and August 2017 in its active measures disinformation campaign targeting the 2016 U.S. general election. We aimed to unearth the…
The Internet Research Agency (IRA) influences online political conversations in the United States, exacerbating existing partisan divides and sowing discord. In this paper we investigate the IRA's communication strategies by analyzing…
Online social media represent an oftentimes unique source of information, and having access to reliable and unbiased content is crucial, especially during crises and contentious events. We study the spread of propaganda and misinformation…
Detecting harmful content on social media, such as Twitter, is made difficult by the fact that the seemingly simple yes/no classification conceals a significant amount of complexity. Unfortunately, while several datasets have been collected…
Misbehavior in online social networks (OSN) is an ever-growing phenomenon. The research to date tends to focus on the deployment of machine learning to identify and classify types of misbehavior such as bullying, aggression, and racism to…