460 citations · 1.9k across the 24 of their papers we have counts for
25 papers
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…
Geo-Semantic-Parsing: AI-powered geoparsing by traversing semantic knowledge graphs
Leonardo Nizzoli, Marco Avvenuti, Maurizio Tesconi +1
Online social networks convey rich information about geospatial facets of reality. However in most cases, geographic information is not explicit and structured, thus preventing its…
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 Anatomy of Conspirators: Unveiling Traits using a Comprehensive Twitter Dataset
Margherita Gambini, Serena Tardelli, Maurizio Tesconi
The discourse around conspiracy theories is currently thriving amidst the rampant misinformation in online environments. Research in this field has been focused on detecting conspi…
The Emotions of the Crowd: Learning Image Sentiment from Tweets via Cross-modal Distillation
Alessio Serra, Fabio Carrara, Maurizio Tesconi +1
Trends and opinion mining in social media increasingly focus on novel interactions involving visual media, like images and short videos, in addition to text. In this work, we tackl…
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…
Modularity-based approach for tracking communities in dynamic social networks
Michele Mazza, Guglielmo Cola, Maurizio Tesconi
Community detection is a crucial task to unravel the intricate dynamics of online social networks. The emergence of these networks has dramatically increased the volume and speed o…
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…
Tweets2Stance: Users stance detection exploiting Zero-Shot Learning Algorithms on Tweets
Margherita Gambini, Tiziano Fagni, Caterina Senette +1
In the last years there has been a growing attention towards predicting the political orientation of active social media users, being this of great help to study political forecast…
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…
TweepFake: about Detecting Deepfake Tweets
Tiziano Fagni, Fabrizio Falchi, Margherita Gambini +2
The recent advances in language modeling significantly improved the generative capabilities of deep neural models: in 2019 OpenAI released GPT-2, a pre-trained language model that…
Charting the Landscape of Online Cryptocurrency Manipulation
Leonardo Nizzoli, Serena Tardelli, Marco Avvenuti +3
Cryptocurrencies represent one of the most attractive markets for financial speculation. As a consequence, they have attracted unprecedented attention on social media. Besides genu…
(Mis)Information Operations: An Integrated Perspective
Matteo Cinelli, Mauro Conti, Livio Finos +6
The massive diffusion of social media fosters disintermediation and changes the way users are informed, the way they process reality, and the way they engage in public debate. The…
Towards better social crisis data with HERMES: Hybrid sensing for EmeRgency ManagEment System
Marco Avvenuti, Salvatore Bellomo, Stefano Cresci +2
People involved in mass emergencies increasingly publish information-rich contents in online social networks (OSNs), thus acting as a distributed and resilient network of human sen…
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…
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…
Who framed Roger Reindeer? De-censorship of Facebook posts by snippet classification
Fabio Del Vigna, Marinella Petrocchi, Alessandro Tommasi +2
This paper considers online news censorship and it concentrates on censorship of identities. Obfuscating identities may occur for disparate reasons, from military to judiciary ones…
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…
Social Fingerprinting: detection of spambot groups through DNA-inspired behavioral modeling
Stefano Cresci, Roberto Di Pietro, Marinella Petrocchi +2
Spambot detection in online social networks is a long-lasting challenge involving the study and design of detection techniques capable of efficiently identifying ever-evolving spam…
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,…
Semi-supervised knowledge extraction for detection of drugs and their effects
Fabio Del Vigna, Marinella Petrocchi, Alessandro Tommasi +2
New Psychoactive Substances (NPS) are drugs that lay in a grey area of legislation, since they are not internationally and officially banned, possibly leading to their not prosecut…
Spotting the diffusion of New Psychoactive Substances over the Internet
Fabio Del Vigna, Marco Avvenuti, Clara Bacciu +4
Online availability and diffusion of New Psychoactive Substances (NPS) represent an emerging threat to healthcare systems. In this work, we analyse drugs forums, online shops, and…
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…