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Collectives adapt their network structure to the challenges they face. It has been hypothesized that collectives experiencing a real or imagined threat from an outgroup tend to consolidate behind a few influential group members, and that…
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,…
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…
Many models have been proposed to explain opinion formation in groups of individuals; most of these models study opinion propagation as the interaction between nodes/agents in a social network. Opinion formation is a complex process and a…
Extreme weather events driven by climate change, such as wildfires, floods, and heatwaves, prompt significant public reactions on social media platforms. Analyzing the sentiment expressed in these online discussions can offer valuable…
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…
Fringe communities promoting conspiracy theories and extremist ideologies have thrived on mainstream platforms, raising questions about the mechanisms driving their growth. Here, we hypothesize and study a possible mechanism: new members…
An existing model of opinion dynamics on an adaptive social network is extended to introduce update policy heterogeneity, representing the fact that individual differences between social animals can affect their tendency to form, and be…
Terrorist attacks not only harm citizens but also shift their attention, which has long-lasting impacts on public opinion and government policies. Yet measuring the changes in public attention beyond media coverage has been methodologically…
Many extreme right groups have had an online presence for some time through the use of dedicated websites. This has been accompanied by increased activity in social media platforms in recent years, enabling the dissemination of extreme…
Extremist communities increasingly rely on social media to sustain and amplify divisive discourse. However, the relationship between their internal participation structures, audience engagement, and narrative expression remains…
In (Deffuant et al., 2002), we proposed a simple model of opinion dynamics, which we used to simulate the influence of extremists in a population. Simulations were run without any specific interaction structure and varying the simulation…
Increasing levels of far-right extremist violence have generated public concern about the spread of radicalization in the United States. Previous research suggests that radicalized individuals are destabilized by various environmental (or…
How communities respond to diverse societal challenges, from economic crises to political upheavals, is shaped by their collective minds - shared representations of ongoing events and current topics. In turn, collective minds are shaped by…
Hate speech is ubiquitous on the Web. Recently, the offline causes that contribute to online hate speech have received increasing attention. A recurring question is whether the occurrence of extreme events offline systematically triggers…
Group interactions take place within a particular socio-temporal context, which should be taken into account when modelling interactions in online communities. We propose a method for jointly modelling community structure and language over…
Support for extremist entities - whether from the far right, or far left - often manages to survive globally online despite significant external pressure, and may ultimately inspire violent acts by individuals having no obvious prior…
On-line social networks publish information on a high volume of real-world events almost instantly, becoming a primary source for breaking news. Some of these real-world events can end up having a very strong impact on on-line social…
The boundaries between physical and social networks have narrowed with the advent of the Internet and its pervasive platforms. This has given rise to a complex adaptive information ecosystem where individuals and machines compete for…