Related papers: Toxicity in State Sponsored Information Operations

In today's dynamic cybersecurity landscape, timely and accurate threat intelligence is essential for proactive defense. This study explores the potential of social media platforms as a valuable resource for extracting actionable Indicators…

In this paper, we present a dataset containing 9,973 tweets related to the MeToo movement that were manually annotated for five different linguistic aspects: relevance, stance, hate speech, sarcasm, and dialogue acts. We present a detailed…

Anthropomorphic social bots are engineered to emulate human verbal communication and generate toxic or inflammatory content across social networking services (SNSs). Bot-disseminated misinformation could subtly yet profoundly reshape…

In recent years, offensive, abusive and hateful language, sexism, racism and other types of aggressive and cyberbullying behavior have been manifesting with increased frequency, and in many online social media platforms. In fact, past…

The Russian Internet Research Agency's (IRA) online interference campaign in the 2016 U.S. presidential election represents a turning point in the trajectory of democratic elections in the digital age. What can we learn about how the IRA…

Now that AI-driven moderation has become pervasive in everyday life, we often hear claims that "the AI is biased". While this is often said jokingly, the light-hearted remark reflects a deeper concern. How can we be certain that an online…

The advent of social media changed the way we consume content favoring a disintermediated access and production. This scenario has been matter of critical discussion about its impact on society. Magnified in the case of Arab Spring or…

Adversarial interactions against politicians on social media such as Twitter have significant impact on society. In particular they disrupt substantive political discussions online, and may discourage people from seeking public office. In…

Gang violence is a severe issue in major cities across the U.S. and recent studies [Patton et al. 2017] have found evidence of social media communications that can be linked to such violence in communities with high rates of exposure to…

We investigate the political roles of "Internet trolls" in social media. Political trolls, such as the ones linked to the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA), have recently gained enormous attention for their ability to sway public…

This paper examines the role of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) on Twitter regarding the Russo-Ukrainian war, distinguishing between genuine OSINT and deceptive misinformation efforts, termed "BULLSHINT." Utilizing a dataset spanning from…

State-sponsored trolls, malicious actors who deploy sophisticated linguistic manipulation in coordinated information campaigns, posing threats to online discourse integrity. While Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on…

The purpose of this research paper is to critically explore the impact of state and state-sponsored actors on the cyber environment and the future of critical infrastructure, the majority of these attacks on the cyber environment have…

On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. In the days that followed, reports kept flooding in from layman to news anchors of a conflict quickly escalating into war. Russia faced immediate backlash and condemnation from the world at…

Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) refers to intelligence efforts based on freely available data. It has become a frequent topic of conversation on social media, where private users or networks can share their findings. Such data is highly…

Social media platforms have become a major vector for the large-scale dissemination of misinformation and conspiracy content, posing significant risks to public trust, health, and societal stability. While prior work has primarily focused…

Governments use propaganda, including through visual content -- or Politically Salient Image Patterns (PSIP) -- on social media, to influence and manipulate public opinion. In the present work, we collected Telegram post-history of from 989…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in autonomous agents that engage, converse, and co-evolve in online social platforms. While prior work has documented the generation of toxic content by LLMs, far less is known about…

Information-based attacks on social media, such as disinformation campaigns and propaganda, are emerging cybersecurity threats. The security community has focused on countering these threats on social media platforms like X and Reddit.…

The digital media, identified as computational propaganda provides a pathway for propaganda to expand its reach without limit. State-backed propaganda aims to shape the audiences' cognition toward entities in favor of a certain political…