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Social media plays an important role for a vast majority in one's internet life. Likewise, sharing, publishing and posting content through social media became nearly effortless. This unleashes new threats as unintentionally shared…
Online hate speech is associated with substantial social harms, yet it remains unclear how consistently platforms enforce hate speech policies or whether enforcement is feasible at scale. We address these questions through a global audit of…
Online tracking remains problematic, with compliance and ethical issues persisting despite regulatory efforts. Consent interfaces, the visible manifestation of this industry, have seen significant attention over the years. We present robust…
Attention capitalism has generated design processes and product development decisions that prioritize platform growth over all other considerations. To the extent limits have been placed on these incentives, interventions have primarily…
Online political microtargeting involves monitoring people's online behaviour, and using the collected data, sometimes enriched with other data, to show people-targeted political advertisements. Online political microtargeting is widely…
Online political advertising has become the cornerstone of political campaigns. The budget spent solely on political advertising in the U.S. has increased by more than 100% from \$700 million during the 2017-2018 U.S. election cycle to…
Social information is particularly prominent in digital settings where the design of platforms can more easily give real-time information about the behaviour of peers and reference groups and thereby stimulate political activity. Changes to…
Personal moderation tools on social media platforms let users control their news feeds by configuring acceptable toxicity thresholds for their feed content or muting inappropriate accounts. This research examines how four critical…
Approximately 50% of tweets in X's user timelines are personalized recommendations from accounts they do not follow. This raises a critical question: What political content are users exposed to beyond their established networks, and what…
Content moderation systems are typically evaluated by measuring agreement with human labels. In rule-governed environments this assumption fails: multiple decisions may be logically consistent with the governing policy, and agreement…
The rise of digital platforms has enabled the large scale observation of individual and collective behavior through high resolution interaction data. This development has opened new analytical pathways for investigating how information…
Online social media enables mass-level, transparent, and democratized discussion on numerous socio-political issues. Due to such openness, these platforms often endure manipulation and misinformation - leading to negative impacts. To…
Social media platforms have been establishing content moderation guidelines and employing various moderation policies to counter hate speech and misinformation. The goal of this paper is to study these community guidelines and moderation…
We describe the current content moderation strategy employed by Meta to remove policy-violating content from its platforms. Meta relies on both handcrafted and learned risk models to flag potentially violating content for human review. Our…
Digital platforms use recommendations to facilitate exchanges between platform actors, such as trade between buyers and sellers. Aiming to protect consumers and guarantee fair competition on platforms, legislators increasingly require that…
Extensive efforts in automated approaches for content moderation have been focused on developing models to identify toxic, offensive, and hateful content with the aim of lightening the load for moderators. Yet, it remains uncertain whether…
Our work represents another step into the detection and prevention of these ever-more present political manipulation efforts. We, therefore, start by focusing on understanding what the state-of-the-art approaches lack -- since the problem…
In the wake of increasing political extremism, online platforms have been criticized for contributing to polarization. One line of criticism has focused on echo chambers and the recommended content served to users by these platforms. In…
In an era of digital governance, the use of automation for individual and cooperative work is increasing in public administrations (Tangi et al., 2022). Despite the promises of efficiency and cost reduction, automation could bring new…
To facilitate accountability and transparency, the Digital Services Act (DSA) sets up a process through which Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) need to grant vetted researchers access to their internal data (Article 40(4)).…