Related papers: Beyond the Rabbit Hole: Mapping the Relational Har…
Social media provide a fertile ground where conspiracy theories and radical ideas can flourish, reach broad audiences, and sometimes lead to hate or violence beyond the online world itself. QAnon represents a notable example of a political…
As radical messaging has proliferated on social networking sites, platforms like Reddit have been used to host support groups, including support communities for the families and friends of radicalized individuals. This study examines the…
The rapid spread of radical ideologies in recent years has led to a worldwide string of terrorist attacks. Understanding how extremist tendencies germinate, develop, and drive individuals to action is important from a cultural standpoint,…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to demonstrate imbalanced biases against certain groups. However, the study of unprovoked targeted attacks by LLMs towards at-risk populations remains underexplored. Our paper presents three…
In recent years, radicalization is being increasingly attempted on video-sharing platforms. Previous studies have been proposed to identify online radicalization using generic social context analysis, without taking into account…
Radicalization is the process by which people come to adopt increasingly extreme political or religious ideologies. While radical thinking is by no means problematic in itself, it becomes a threat to national security when it leads to…
Online discussion platforms offer a forum to strengthen and propagate belief in misinformed conspiracy theories. Yet, they also offer avenues for conspiracy theorists to express their doubts and experiences of cognitive dissonance. Such…
Social media is a modern person's digital voice to project and engage with new ideas and mobilise communities $\unicode{x2013}$ a power shared with extremists. Given the societal risks of unvetted content-moderating algorithms for…
This paper makes three contributions. First, it presents a generalizable, novel framework dubbed \textit{toxicity rabbit hole} that iteratively elicits toxic content from a wide suite of large language models. Spanning a set of 1,266…
The disruptive offline mobilization of participants in online conspiracy theory (CT) discussions has highlighted the importance of understanding how online users may form radicalized conspiracy beliefs. While prior work researched the…
Radicalized beliefs, such as those tied to QAnon, Russiagate, and other political conspiracy theories, can lead some individuals and groups to engage in violent behavior, as evidenced in recent months. Understanding the mechanisms by which…
QAnon refers to a set of far-right, conspiratorial ideologies that have risen in popularity in the U.S. since their initial promotion in 2017 on the 4chan internet message board. A central narrative element of QAnon is that a powerful group…
The confluence of technological and societal advances is changing the nature of global terrorism. For example, engagement with Web, social media, and smart devices has the potential to affect the mental behavior of the individuals and…
Widespread conspiracy theories may significantly impact our society. This paper focuses on the QAnon conspiracy theory, a consequential conspiracy theory that started on and disseminated successfully through social media. Our work…
Society faces a fundamental global problem of understanding which individuals are currently developing strong support for some extremist entity such as ISIS (Islamic State) -- even if they never end up doing anything in the real world. The…
Nowadays, Social Networks have become an essential communication tools producing a large amount of information about their users and their interactions, which can be analysed with Data Mining methods. In the last years, Social Networks are…
As conversational AI systems increasingly permeate the socio-emotional realms of human life, they bring both benefits and risks to individuals and society. Despite extensive research on detecting and categorizing harms in AI systems, less…
There has been concern about the proliferation of the "QAnon" conspiracy theory on Facebook, but little is known about how its misleading narrative propagated on the world's largest social media platform. Thus, the present research analyzed…
The rise in eating disorders, a condition with serious health complications, has been linked to the proliferation of idealized body images on social media platforms. However, the relationship between social media and eating disorders is…
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes ubiquitous, the need for Explainable AI (XAI) has become critical for transparency and trust among users. A significant challenge in XAI is catering to diverse users, such as data scientists, domain…