相关论文: Tracking China's cross-strait bot networks against…
We developed and used a collection of statistical methods (unsupervised machine learning) to extract relevant information from a Twitter supplied data set consisting of alleged Russian trolls who (allegedly) attempted to influence the 2016…
Efforts by foreign actors to influence public opinion have gained considerable attention because of their potential to impact democratic elections. Thus, the ability to identify and counter sources of disinformation is increasingly becoming…
The diffusion of opinions in Social Networks is a relevant process for adopting positions and attracting potential voters in political campaigns. Opinion polarization, bias, targeted diffusion, and the radicalization of postures are key…
Online data scraping has taken on new dimensions in recent years, as traditional scrapers have been joined by new AI-specific bots. To counteract unwanted scraping, many sites use tools like the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP), which places…
The openness feature of Twitter allows programs to generate and control Twitter accounts automatically via the Twitter API. These accounts, which are known as bots, can automatically perform actions such as tweeting, re-tweeting, following,…
Social media platforms provide an ideal environment to spread misinformation, where social bots can accelerate the spread. This paper explores the interplay between social bots and misinformation on the Sina Weibo platform. We construct a…
The increased relevance of social media in our daily life has been accompanied by efforts to manipulate online conversations and opinions. Deceptive social bots -- automated or semi-automated accounts designed to impersonate humans -- have…
The rising popularity of ChatGPT and other AI-powered large language models (LLMs) has led to increasing studies highlighting their susceptibility to mistakes and biases. However, most of these studies focus on models trained on English…
We study the problem of election control through social influence when the manipulator is allowed to use the locations that she acquired on the network for sending \emph{both} positive and negative messages on \emph{multiple} candidates,…
Malicious Twitter bots are detrimental to public discourse on social media. Past studies have looked at spammers, fake followers, and astroturfing bots, but retweet bots, which artificially inflate content, are not well understood. In this…
The use of reinforcement learning to dynamically adapt and evade detection is now well-documented in several cybersecurity settings including Covert Social Influence Operations (CSIOs), in which bots try to spread disinformation. While AI…
A wide range of participation is essential for democracy, as it helps prevent the dominance of extreme views, erosion of legitimacy, and political polarization. However, engagement in online political discussions often features a limited…
It is a widely accepted fact that state-sponsored Twitter accounts operated during the 2016 US presidential election, spreading millions of tweets with misinformation and inflammatory political content. Whether these social media campaigns…
When experimental subjects can interact with each other, the outcome of one individual may be affected by the treatment status of others. In many social science experiments, such spillover effects may occur through multiple networks, for…
With the explosive growth of online social media, the ancient problem of information disorders interfering with news diffusion has surfaced with a renewed intensity threatening our democracies, public health, and news outlets' credibility.…
The impact of social media on the modern world is difficult to overstate. Virtually all companies and public figures have social media accounts on popular platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. In China, the micro-blogging service…
A new form of human trafficking has emerged across Chinese borders, where individuals are lured to Southeast Asia with fraudulent job offers and then coerced into operating online scams. Despite its massive economic and human toll, this…
Bots have become increasingly prevalent in the digital sphere and have taken up a proactive role in shaping democratic processes. While previous studies have focused on their influence at the individual level, their potential macro-level…
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…
Sinophobia, anti-Chinese sentiment, has existed on the Web for a long time. The outbreak of COVID-19 and the extended quarantine has further amplified it. However, we lack a quantitative understanding of the cause of Sinophobia as well as…