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Malicious actors create inauthentic social media accounts controlled in part by algorithms, known as social bots, to disseminate misinformation and agitate online discussion. While researchers have developed sophisticated methods to detect…
Complex networks often exhibit co-evolutionary dynamics, meaning that the network topology and the state of nodes or links are coupled, affecting each other in overlapping time scales. We focus on the co-evolutionary dynamics of online…
Within OSNs, many of our supposedly online friends may instead be fake accounts called social bots, part of large groups that purposely re-share targeted content. Here, we study retweeting behaviors on Twitter, with the ultimate goal of…
Whether genuine communities can form on algorithmically-driven short-form video platforms like TikTok remains an open question, given that user interactions are often brief, dispersed, and difficult to trace. Building on theories of tie…
Bots are, for many Web and social media users, the source of many dangerous attacks or the carrier of unwanted messages, such as spam. Nevertheless, crawlers and software agents are a precious tool for analysts, and they are continuously…
Peer-to-peer (P2P) botnets use decentralized command and control networks that make them resilient to disruptions. The P2P botnet overlay networks manifest structures in mutual-contact graphs, also called communication graphs, formed using…
Partner selection is crucial for cooperation and hinges on communication. As artificial agents, especially those powered by large language models (LLMs), become more autonomous, intelligent, and persuasive, they compete with humans for…
Relationships between people constantly evolve, altering interpersonal behavior and defining social groups. Relationships between nodes in social networks can be represented by a tie strength, often empirically assessed using surveys. While…
AI companion chatbots are increasingly used for emotional support, with prior work in the domain predominantly documenting their mixed psychosocial impacts, including both increased emotional expression and heightened loneliness. However,…
We examine the growth, survival, and context of 256 novel hashtags during the 2012 U.S. presidential debates. Our analysis reveals the trajectories of hashtag use fall into two distinct classes: "winners" that emerge more quickly and are…
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…
Loneliness and stress are prevalent among young adults and are linked to significant psychological and health-related consequences. Social robots may offer a promising avenue for emotional support, especially when considering the ongoing…
Social media platforms serve as a significant medium for sharing personal emotions, daily activities, and various life events, ensuring individuals stay informed about the latest developments. From the initiation of an account, users…
We study how bots contribute to open-source discussions in the Ethereum ecosystem and whether they influence developers' emotional tone. Our dataset covers 36,875 accounts across ten repositories with 105 validated bots (0.28%). Human…
The quickly growing popularity of AI companions poses risks to mental health, personal wellbeing, and social relationships. Past work has identified many individual factors that can drive human-companion interaction, but we know little…
Twitter bot detection has become a crucial task in efforts to combat online misinformation, mitigate election interference, and curb malicious propaganda. However, advanced Twitter bots often attempt to mimic the characteristics of genuine…
Topic lifecycle analysis on Twitter, a branch of study that investigates Twitter topics from their birth through lifecycle to death, has gained immense mainstream research popularity. In the literature, topics are often treated as one of…
With the proliferation of social media, many studies resort to social media to construct datasets for developing social meaning understanding systems. For the popular case of Twitter, most researchers distribute tweet IDs without the actual…
To what extent user's stance towards a given topic could be inferred? Most of the studies on stance detection have focused on analysing user's posts on a given topic to predict the stance. However, the stance in social media can be inferred…
For an interactive agent, such as task-oriented spoken dialog systems or chatbots, measuring and adapting to Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is critical in order to understand user perception of an agent's behavior and increase user engagement…