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Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society
Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTubeFirst large-scale quantitative audit of user radicalization on YouTube. The authors tracked 349 channels across three ideological communities (Intellectual Dark Web, Alt-lite, Alt-right) and found strong evidence that users systematically migrate toward more extreme content.
Bots & coordinated campaignsDeepfakes & multimodal
Characterizing the Use of Images in State-Sponsored Information Warfare Operations by Russian Trolls on TwitterLarge-scale analysis of 1.8M images posted by ~3.6K Russian state-sponsored Twitter accounts (IRA-controlled). Russian trolls strategically deployed images and memes to maximize political influence, with political imagery 2+ times more effective than general content.
Bots & coordinated campaignsDetection methods
Better Safe Than Sorry: an Adversarial Approach to improve Social Bot DetectionProposes GenBot, a novel genetic algorithm that synthesizes evolved versions of existing spambots by encoding behavioral timelines as "digital DNA" sequences and iteratively evolving them to resemble legitimate user behavior. Tests the evolved bots against three state-of-the-art detection systems and finds they largely evade detection…
Spread & networksBots & coordinated campaigns
A Study of Misinformation in WhatsApp groups with a focus on the Brazilian Presidential ElectionsStudy of 130 public WhatsApp groups during the 2018 Brazilian presidential election found that 13.1% of shared links pointed to junk news sources, with 40% of links directing to YouTube—a platform used strategically to bypass platform moderation. Videos and images dominated message content (33% of all messages) and were heavily…
Bots & coordinated campaignsPlatforms, policy & society
Coordinating a Multi-Platform Disinformation Campaign: Internet Research Agency Activity on Three U.S. Social Media Platforms, 2015 to 2017This paper analyzes Russian Internet Research Agency activity across Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit from 2015–2017 using vector autoregression models on 3,126 Facebook ads, 1.9M tweets, and 12,603 Reddit posts. Key finding: Reddit activity influenced subsequent Twitter activity (a "trial balloon" effect), but the IRA's Twitter engagement…
Spread & networksBots & coordinated campaigns
On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web CommunitiesLarge-scale empirical study of how image memes originate and propagate across fringe and mainstream Web communities. Analyzes 160M images posted to Twitter, Reddit, /pol/, and Gab (2016–2017) using perceptual hashing, clustering, and custom distance metrics.
Bots & coordinated campaignsSpread & networks
Bots increase exposure to negative and inflammatory content in online social systemsSocial bots during the 2017 Catalan independence referendum strategically targeted influential humans to amplify negative and inflammatory content. Operating from network peripheries, bots coordinated sentiment-driven amplification that exacerbated polarization, with approximately one in three referendum-related tweets generated by bots.
Spread & networksBots & coordinated campaigns
Influencers in Polarized Political Networks on TwitterThis paper identifies three types of influencers in polarized political Twitter conversations during Brazil's 2016 Dilma Rousseff impeachment: "opinion leaders" who shape discourse within ideological groups, "informational influencers" (media/institutions) drawn into one camp, and "activists" who amplify like-minded messages. The…
Bots & coordinated campaignsDetection methods
The Paradigm-Shift of Social Spambots: Evidence, Theories, and Tools for the Arms RaceThis paper provides empirical evidence of a paradigm shift in spambot design on Twitter, where new "social spambots" closely mimic genuine user behavior and successfully evade detection. Neither Twitter's automated systems, human annotators, nor established academic detection tools can effectively identify these accounts; however,…
Bots & coordinated campaignsPlatforms, policy & society
Detecting Bots on Russian Political TwitterAutomated Twitter accounts (bots) represent 50% of activity in Russian political discourse. Using supervised ensemble classifiers on 3.8M accounts and 18M tweets from 2014–2015, the authors achieve 95% precision in detecting bots while maintaining 75% recall.
Spread & networksBots & coordinated campaigns
The Spread of True and False News OnlineAnalyzes 126,000 verified true and false news cascades from Twitter (2006–2017) covering 3 million users and 4.5 million shares. False news diffuses significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than truth across all categories, with false political news spreading fastest.
Bots & coordinated campaignsDatasets & evaluation
BotOrNot: A System to Evaluate Social BotsBotOrNot is a publicly available service and API that evaluates whether a Twitter account is controlled by a human or automated bot. Using 1,000+ features across six categories (network, user, friends, temporal, content, sentiment), the system applies Random Forest classification to achieve 0.95 AUC on a labeled dataset of 15k bots and…
Bots & coordinated campaignsDetection methods
DNA-Inspired Online Behavioral Modeling and Its Application to Spambot DetectionProposes a novel methodology to characterize online user behavior using DNA-inspired digital sequences, where each user action (tweet type, content features) is encoded as a character in a string. Applies standard bioinformatic DNA analysis techniques—specifically longest common substring (LCS) analysis—to detect spambots on Twitter by…
Bots & coordinated campaignsDetection methods
The Rise of Social BotsSocial bots—automated software agents in social media—are increasingly sophisticated and pose real threats including misinformation spread, trend manipulation, and election interference. This paper characterizes modern bot behavior, surveys detection challenges, and proposes a taxonomy of detection approaches: graph-based methods…