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Racism and intolerance on social media contribute to a toxic online environment which may spill offline to foster hatred, and eventually lead to physical violence. That is the case with online antisemitism, the specific category of hatred…
Polarisation research has demonstrated how people cluster in homogeneous groups with opposing opinions. However, this effect emerges not only through interaction between people, limiting communication between groups, but also between…
This study explores the dynamic relationship between online discourse, as observed in tweets, and physical hate crimes, focusing on marginalized groups. Leveraging natural language processing techniques, including keyword extraction and…
This short paper explores trends in extremist Facebook data from July 2023 to June 2024. We examined engagement, sentiment, and topics within Facebook groups categorized as anti-Israel/Semitic, anti-Palestine/Muslim, and anti-both, mapping…
Social media platforms play an increasingly important role in shaping political discussion and information flows. This study examines the structure of participation and attention in Arabic-language discourse about Hezbollah on X (formerly…
Terror attacks have been linked in part to online extremist content. Although tens of thousands of Islamist extremism supporters consume such content, they are a small fraction relative to peaceful Muslims. The efforts to contain the…
The algorithms and the interactions facilitated by online platforms have been used by radical groups to recruit vulnerable individuals to their cause. This has resulted in the sharp growth of violent events and deteriorating online…
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,…
The emergence of politically driven divisions in online discussion networks has attracted a wealth of literature, but also one which has thus far been largely limited to single country studies. Hence whilst there is good evidence that these…
The proliferation of ideological movements into extremist factions via social media has become a global concern. While radicalization has been studied extensively within the context of specific ideologies, our ability to accurately…
The rapid expansion of cyberspace has greatly facilitated the strategic shift of traditional crimes to online platforms. This has included malicious actors, such as extremist organisations, making use of online networks to disseminate…
User-generated content online is shaped by many factors, including endogenous elements such as platform affordances and norms, as well as exogenous elements, in particular significant events. These impact what users say, how they say it,…
Far-right actors are often purveyors of Islamophobic hate speech online, using social media to spread divisive and prejudiced messages which can stir up intergroup tensions and conflict. Hateful content can inflict harm on targeted victims,…
While online social media offers a way for ignored or stifled voices to be heard, it also allows users a platform to spread hateful speech. Such speech usually originates in fringe communities, yet it can spill over into mainstream…
Many people rely on online social networks as sources of news and information, and the spread of media content with ideologies across the political spectrum influences online discussions and impacts actions offline. To examine the impact of…
We evaluate homophily and heterophily among ideological and demographic groups in a typical opinion formation context: online discussions of current news. We analyze user interactions across five years in the r/news community on Reddit, one…
Social media platforms significantly influence ideological divisions by enabling users to select information that aligns with their beliefs and avoid opposing viewpoints. Analyzing approximately 47 million Facebook posts, this study…
Hate and extremism cannot be controlled globally without understanding how they operate at scale. Both have escalated dramatically during the Israel-Hamas and Ukraine-Russia wars. Here we show how the online hate-extremism system is now…
We study the dynamics of opinions in a setting where a leader has a payoff that depends on agents' beliefs and where agents derive psychological utility from their beliefs. Agents sample a signal that maximises their utility and then…
The daily exposure of social media users to propaganda and disinformation campaigns has reinvigorated the need to investigate the local and global patterns of diffusion of different (mis)information content on social media. Echo chambers…