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The emergence of online political advertising has come with little regulation, allowing political advertisers on social media to avoid accountability. We analyze how transparency and accountability deficits caused by dark money and…
Othering, the act of portraying outgroups as fundamentally different from the ingroup, often escalates into framing them as existential threats--fueling intergroup conflict and justifying exclusion and violence. These dynamics are…
The conflict in Ukraine has been not only characterised by military engagement but also by a significant information war, with social media platforms like X, formerly known as Twitter playing an important role in shaping public perception.…
Foreign power interference in domestic elections is an existential threat to societies. Manifested through myriad methods from war to words, such interference is a timely example of strategic interaction between economic and political…
Social media are now a routine part of political campaigns all over the world. However, studies of the impact of campaigning on social platform have thus far been limited to cross-sectional datasets from one election period which are…
Propaganda is a form of deceptive narratives that instigate or mislead the public, usually with a political purpose. In this paper, we aim to identify propaganda in political news at two fine-grained levels: sentence-level and token-level.…
Websites use third-party ads and tracking services to deliver targeted ads and collect information about users that visit them. These services put users' privacy at risk, and that is why users' demand for blocking these services is growing.…
Day by day, people exchange opinions about a given new with relatives, friends, and coworkers. In most cases, they get informed about a given issue by reading newspapers, listening to the radio, or watching TV, i.e., through a Mass Media…
Popular Internet services in recent years have shown that remarkable things can be achieved by harnessing the power of the masses using crowd-sourcing systems. However, crowd-sourcing systems can also pose a real challenge to existing…
This thesis addresses two paradoxes: (1) why empirical studies find that fake news represent only a small share of the information consulted and shared on social media despite the absence of editorial control or journalistic norms, and (2)…
The World Wide Web provides unrivalled access to information globally, including factual news reporting and commentary. However, state actors and commercial players increasingly spread biased (distorted) or fake (non-factual) information to…
During the summer of 2018, Facebook, Google, and Twitter created policies and implemented transparent archives that include U.S. political advertisements which ran on their platforms. Through our analysis of over 1.3 million ads with…
Profiling users for the purpose of targeted advertisements or other kinds of personalization is very popular on the internet. But besides the benefits of individually tailored news feeds and shopping recommendation research has shown that…
Misinformation is a global problem in modern social media platforms with few solutions known to be effective. Social media platforms have offered tools to raise awareness of information, but these are closed systems that have not been…
In micro-blogging platforms, people connect and interact with others. However, due to cognitive biases, they tend to interact with like-minded people and read agreeable information only. Many efforts to make people connect with those who…
This paper uses and recycles data from a third-party digital marketing firm, to explore how targeted ads contribute to larger systems of racial discrimination. Focusing on a case study of targeted ads for educational searches in New York…
One of the most pressing challenges in the digital media landscape is understanding the impact of biases on the news sources that people rely on for information. Biased news can have significant and far-reaching consequences, influencing…
In 2016, a network of social media accounts animated by Russian operatives attempted to divert political discourse within the American public around the presidential elections. This was a coordinated effort, part of a Russian-led complex…
Trolling and social bots have been proven as powerful tactics for manipulating the public opinion and sowing discord among Twitter users. This effort requires substantial content fabrication and account coordination to evade Twitter's…
As Machine Learning (ML) is still a recent field of study, especially outside the realm of abstract Mathematics and Computer Science, few works have been conducted on the political aspect of large Language Models (LLMs), and more…