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A deepfake is a photo or video of a person whose image has been digitally altered or partially replaced with an image of someone else. Deepfakes have the potential to cause a variety of problems and are often used maliciously. A common…
Social media expose millions of users every day to information campaigns --- some emerging organically from grassroots activity, others sustained by advertising or other coordinated efforts. These campaigns contribute to the shaping of…
Recommendation systems and content filtering approaches based on annotations and ratings, essentially rely on users expressing their preferences and interests through their actions, in order to provide personalised content. This activity,…
We need to rethink our approach to defend privacy on the internet. Currently, policymakers focus heavily on the idea of informed consent as a means to defend privacy. For instance, in many countries the law requires firms to obtain an…
Audience interest, demography, purchase behavior and other possible classifications are ex- tremely important factors to be carefully studied in a targeting campaign. This information can help advertisers and publishers deliver…
Following the 2016 US presidential election, there has been an increased focus on politically-motivated manipulation of mass-user behavior on social media platforms. Since a large volume of political discussion occurs on these platforms,…
Many internet ventures rely on advertising for their revenue. However, users feel discontent by the presence of ads on the websites they visit, as the data-size of ads is often comparable to that of the actual content. This has an impact…
There are different definitions of what a troll is. Certainly, a troll can be somebody who teases people to make them angry, or somebody who offends people, or somebody who wants to dominate any single discussion, or somebody who tries to…
We develop a model of electoral accountability with mainstream and alternative media. In addition to regular high- and low-competence types, the incumbent may be an aspiring autocrat who controls the mainstream media and will subvert…
Image repurposing is a commonly used method for spreading misinformation on social media and online forums, which involves publishing untampered images with modified metadata to create rumors and further propaganda. While manual…
While manipulative attacks on elections have been well-studied, only recently has attention turned to attacks that account for geographic information, which are extremely common in the real world. The most well known in the media is…
Offensive or antagonistic language targeted at individuals and social groups based on their personal characteristics (also known as cyber hate speech or cyberhate) has been frequently posted and widely circulated viathe World Wide Web. This…
Recent years have seen a new form of advertisement campaigns emerge: those involving so-called social media influencers. These influencers accept money in return for promoting products via their social media feeds. Although this constitutes…
The Internet and social media have transformed news availability and accessibility, reshaping information consumption and production. However, they can also facilitate the rapid spread of misinformation, posing significant societal…
Over the last 70 years, we, humans, have created an economic market where attention is being captured and turned into money thanks to advertising. During the last two decades, leveraging research in psychology, sociology, neuroscience and…
Social media provides a critical communication platform for political figures, but also makes them easy targets for harassment. In this paper, we characterize users who adversarially interact with political figures on Twitter using…
The flourishing of fake news is favored by recommendation algorithms of online social networks which, based on previous users activity, provide content adapted to their preferences and so create filter bubbles. We introduce an analytically…
The intrusiveness and the increasing invasiveness of online advertising have, in the last few years, raised serious concerns regarding user privacy and Web usability. As a reaction to these concerns, we have witnessed the emergence of a…
People are becoming increasingly concerned with their online privacy, especially with how advertising companies track them across websites (a practice called cross-site tracking), as reconstructing a user's browser history can reveal…
The exponential rise of social media networks has allowed the production, distribution, and consumption of data at a phenomenal rate. Moreover, the social media revolution has brought a unique phenomenon to social media platforms called…