460 citations · 2.4k across the 35 of their papers we have counts for
22 papers · 1 filter
Multimodal Coordinated Online Behavior: Trade-offs and Strategies
Lorenzo Mannocci, Stefano Cresci, Matteo Magnani +2
Coordinated online behavior, which spans from beneficial collective actions to harmful manipulation such as disinformation campaigns, has become a key focus in digital ecosystem an…
Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior and Information Spreading on Twitter
Matteo Cinelli, Stefano Cresci, Walter Quattrociocchi +2
We explore the effects of coordinated users (i.e., users characterized by an unexpected, suspicious, or exceptional similarity) in information spreading on Twitter by quantifying t…
Detection and Characterization of Coordinated Online Behavior: A Survey
Lorenzo Mannocci, Michele Mazza, Anna Monreale +2
Coordination is a fundamental aspect of life. The advent of social media has made it integral also to online human interactions, such as those that characterize thriving online com…
The Great Ban: Efficacy and Unintended Consequences of a Massive Deplatforming Operation on Reddit
Lorenzo Cima, Amaury Trujillo, Marco Avvenuti +1
In the current landscape of online abuses and harms, effective content moderation is necessary to cultivate safe and inclusive online spaces. Yet, the effectiveness of many moderat…
The DSA Transparency Database: Auditing Self-reported Moderation Actions by Social Media
Amaury Trujillo, Tiziano Fagni, Stefano Cresci
Since September 2023, the Digital Services Act (DSA) obliges large online platforms to submit detailed data on each moderation action they take within the European Union (EU) to th…
Demystifying Misconceptions in Social Bots Research
Stefano Cresci, Kai-Cheng Yang, Angelo Spognardi +3
Research on social bots aims at advancing knowledge and providing solutions to one of the most debated forms of online manipulation. Yet, social bot research is plagued by widespre…
Tracking Fringe and Coordinated Activity on Twitter Leading Up To the US Capitol Attack
Vishnuprasad Padinjaredath Suresh, Gianluca Nogara, Felipe Cardoso +3
The aftermath of the 2020 US Presidential Election witnessed an unprecedented attack on the democratic values of the country through the violent insurrection at Capitol Hill on Jan…
Temporal Dynamics of Coordinated Online Behavior: Stability, Archetypes, and Influence
Serena Tardelli, Leonardo Nizzoli, Maurizio Tesconi +4
Large-scale online campaigns, malicious or otherwise, require a significant degree of coordination among participants, which sparked interest in the study of coordinated online beh…
MulBot: Unsupervised Bot Detection Based on Multivariate Time Series
Lorenzo Mannocci, Stefano Cresci, Anna Monreale +2
Online social networks are actively involved in the removal of malicious social bots due to their role in the spread of low quality information. However, most of the existing bot d…
One of Many: Assessing User-level Effects of Moderation Interventions on r/The_Donald
Amaury Trujillo, Stefano Cresci
Evaluating the effects of moderation interventions is a task of paramount importance, as it allows assessing the success of content moderation processes. So far, intervention effec…
Personalized Interventions for Online Moderation
Stefano Cresci, Amaury Trujillo, Tiziano Fagni
Current online moderation follows a one-size-fits-all approach, where each intervention is applied in the same way to all users. This naive approach is challenged by established so…
Fine-Grained Prediction of Political Leaning on Social Media with Unsupervised Deep Learning
Tiziano Fagni, Stefano Cresci
Predicting the political leaning of social media users is an increasingly popular task, given its usefulness for electoral forecasts, opinion dynamics models and for studying the p…
Make Reddit Great Again: Assessing Community Effects of Moderation Interventions on r/The_Donald
Amaury Trujillo, Stefano Cresci
The subreddit r/The_Donald was repeatedly denounced as a toxic and misbehaving online community, reasons for which it faced a sequence of increasingly constraining moderation inter…
The Spread of Propaganda by Coordinated Communities on Social Media
Kristina Hristakieva, Stefano Cresci, Giovanni Da San Martino +2
Large-scale manipulations on social media have two important characteristics: (i) use of propaganda to influence others, and (ii) adoption of coordinated behavior to spread it and…
Coordinated Behavior on Social Media in 2019 UK General Election
Leonardo Nizzoli, Serena Tardelli, Marco Avvenuti +2
Coordinated online behaviors are an essential part of information and influence operations, as they allow a more effective disinformation's spread. Most studies on coordinated beha…
The Limited Reach of Fake News on Twitter during 2019 European Elections
Matteo Cinelli, Stefano Cresci, Alessandro Galeazzi +2
The advent of social media changed the way we consume content favoring a disintermediated access and production. This scenario has been matter of critical discussion about its impa…
Better Safe Than Sorry: An Adversarial Approach to Improve Social Bot Detection
Stefano Cresci, Marinella Petrocchi, Angelo Spognardi +1
The arm race between spambots and spambot-detectors is made of several cycles (or generations): a new wave of spambots is created (and new spam is spread), new spambot filters are…
RTbust: Exploiting Temporal Patterns for Botnet Detection on Twitter
Michele Mazza, Stefano Cresci, Marco Avvenuti +2
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 re…
Cashtag piggybacking: uncovering spam and bot activity in stock microblogs on Twitter
Stefano Cresci, Fabrizio Lillo, Daniele Regoli +2
Microblogs are increasingly exploited for predicting prices and traded volumes of stocks in financial markets. However, it has been demonstrated that much of the content shared in…
The paradigm-shift of social spambots: Evidence, theories, and tools for the arms race
Stefano Cresci, Roberto Di Pietro, Marinella Petrocchi +2
Recent studies in social media spam and automation provide anecdotal argumentation of the rise of a new generation of spambots, so-called social spambots. Here, for the first time,…
DNA-inspired online behavioral modeling and its application to spambot detection
Stefano Cresci, Roberto Di Pietro, Marinella Petrocchi +2
We propose a strikingly novel, simple, and effective approach to model online user behavior: we extract and analyze digital DNA sequences from user online actions and we use Twitte…
Fame for sale: efficient detection of fake Twitter followers
Stefano Cresci, Roberto Di Pietro, Marinella Petrocchi +2
are those Twitter accounts specifically created to inflate the number of followers of a target account. Fake followers are dangerous for the social platfo…