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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…
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…
Over the past couple of years, anecdotal evidence has emerged linking coordinated campaigns by state-sponsored actors with efforts to manipulate public opinion on the Web, often around major political events, through dedicated accounts, or…
Recent events, such as the 2016 US Presidential Campaign, Brexit and the COVID-19 "infodemic", have brought into the spotlight the dangers of online disinformation. There has been a lot of research focusing on fact-checking and…
Twitter is increasingly used for political, advertising and marketing campaigns, where the main aim is to influence users to support specific causes, individuals or groups. We propose a novel methodology for mining and analyzing Twitter…
Until recently, social media were seen to promote democratic discourse on social and political issues. However, this powerful communication ecosystem has come under scrutiny for allowing hostile actors to exploit online discussions in an…
The societal and epistemological implications of online targeted advertising have been scrutinized by AI ethicists, legal scholars, and policymakers alike. However, the government's use of online targeting and its consequential…
Slanted news coverage strongly affects public opinion. This is especially true for coverage on politics and related issues, where studies have shown that bias in the news may influence elections and other collective decisions. Due to its…
Political astroturfing and organised trolling are online malicious behaviours with significant real-world effects. Common approaches examining these phenomena focus on broad campaigns rather than the small groups responsible. To reveal…
Communication strongly influences attitudes on climate change. Within sponsored communication, high spend and high reach advertising dominates. In the advertising ecosystem we can distinguish actors with adversarial stances: organizations…
Social media platforms offer unprecedented opportunities for connectivity and exchange of ideas; however, they also serve as fertile grounds for the dissemination of disinformation. Over the years, there has been a rise in state-sponsored…
In light of prominent discourse around the negative implications of generative AI, an emerging area of research is investigating the current and estimated impacts of AI-generated propaganda on African citizens participating in elections.…
In micro-blogging platforms, people can connect with others and have conversations on a wide variety of topics. However, because of homophily and selective exposure, users tend to connect with like-minded people and only read agreeable…
Popular social media platforms TikTok, Facebook and Instagram allow third-parties to run targeted advertising campaigns on sensitive attributes in-platform. These ads are interactive by default, meaning users can comment or ``react'' (e.g.,…
Over the past couple of years, the topic of "fake news" and its influence over people's opinions has become a growing cause for concern. Although the spread of disinformation on the Internet is not a new phenomenon, the widespread use of…
Social media trolling is a powerful tactic to manipulate public opinion on issues with a high moral component. Troll farms, as evidenced in the past, created fabricated content to provoke or silence people to share their opinion on social…
Recommender systems play an important role in modern information and e-commerce applications. While increasing research is dedicated to improving the relevance and diversity of the recommendations, the potential risks of state-of-the-art…
Today, targeted online advertising relies on unique identifiers assigned to users through third-party cookies--a practice at odds with user privacy. While the web and advertising communities have proposed solutions that we refer to as…
Social media platforms have been trying to be more transparent about the political ads they run on their platforms, because the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that political campaigns are using social media on a large scale. One such…
This paper investigates how political campaigns engaged UK football fan communities on Twitter in the aftermath of the Brexit Referendum (2016-2017). Football fandom, with its strong collective identities and tribal behaviours, offers…