Related papers: When Transparency Falls Short: Auditing Platform M…
Dark patterns have become increasingly pervasive in online choice architectures, encompassing practices like subscription traps, hiding information about fees, pre-selecting options by default, nagging, and drip pricing. Regulators around…
Data aggregators collect large amount of information about individual users and create detailed online behavioral profiles of individuals. Behavioral profiles benefit users by improving products and services. However, they have also raised…
In 2024, half of the global population is expected to participate in elections, offering researchers a unique opportunity to study online information diffusion and user behavior. This study investigates the media landscape on social media…
Moderation of reader comments is a significant problem for online news platforms. Here, we experiment with models for automatic moderation, using a dataset of comments from a popular Croatian newspaper. Our analysis shows that while…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as gateways to information, yet their content moderation practices remain underexplored. This work investigates the extent to which LLMs refuse to answer or omit information when…
Protest-related social media data are valuable for understanding collective action but inherently high-risk due to concerns surrounding surveillance, repression, and individual privacy. Contemporary AI systems can identify individuals,…
Facebook and Twitter recently announced community-based review platforms to address misinformation. We provide an overview of the potential affordances of such community-based approaches to content moderation based on past research and…
Research on online coordinated behaviour has predominantly focused on text-based social media platforms. However, the rise of video-first platforms such as TikTok introduces distinct challenges. The multimodal nature of video posts,…
Algorithmic content moderation manages an explosive number of user-created content shared online everyday. Despite a massive number of 3D designs that are free to be downloaded, shared, and 3D printed by the users, detecting sensitivity…
Social media platforms have been accused of causing a range of harms, resulting in dozens of lawsuits across jurisdictions. These lawsuits are situated within the context of a long history of American product safety litigation, suggesting…
Following the Digital Services Act of 2023, which requires Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) and Very Large Online Search Engines (VLOSEs) to facilitate data accessibility for independent research, TikTok augmented its Research API access…
This study examines social media users' preferences for the use of platform-wide moderation in comparison to user-controlled, personalized moderation tools to regulate three categories of norm-violating content - hate speech, sexually…
Accurately estimating how users respond to moderation interventions is paramount for developing effective and user-centred moderation strategies. However, this requires a clear understanding of which user characteristics are associated with…
Participation on social media platforms has many benefits but also poses substantial threats. Users often face an unintended loss of privacy, are bombarded with mis-/disinformation, or are trapped in filter bubbles due to over-personalized…
Data harvesting and profiling have become a de facto business model for many businesses in the digital economy. The surveillance of individual persons through their use of private sector platforms has a well-understood effect on personal…
Social media platforms, increasingly used as news sources for varied data analytics, have transformed how information is generated and disseminated. However, the unverified nature of this content raises concerns about trustworthiness and…
As social media has become a predominant mode of communication globally, the rise of abusive content threatens to undermine civil discourse. Recognizing the critical nature of this issue, a significant body of research has been dedicated to…
Ensuring content compliance with community guidelines is crucial for maintaining healthy online social environments. However, traditional human-based compliance checking struggles with scaling due to the increasing volume of user-generated…
Community-level blocklists are key to content moderation practices in decentralized social media. These blocklists enable moderators to prevent other communities, such as those acting in bad faith, from interacting with their own -- and, if…
Online platforms, including social media and search platforms, have routinely used their users' data for targeted ads, to improve their services, and to sell to third-party buyers. But an increasing awareness of the importance of users'…