6 papers
LOKI: Proactively Discovering Online Scam Websites by Mining Toxic Search Queries
Pujan Paudel, Gianluca Stringhini
Online e-commerce scams, ranging from shopping scams to pet scams, globally cause millions of dollars in financial damage every year. In response, the security community has develo…
Revealing The Secret Power: How Algorithms Can Influence Content Visibility on Twitter/X
Alessandro Galeazzi, Pujan Paudel, Mauro Conti +2
In recent years, the opaque design and the limited public understanding of social networks' recommendation algorithms have raised concerns about potential manipulation of informati…
PIXELMOD: Improving Soft Moderation of Visual Misleading Information on Twitter
Pujan Paudel, Chen Ling, Jeremy Blackburn +1
Images are a powerful and immediate vehicle to carry misleading or outright false messages, yet identifying image-based misinformation at scale poses unique challenges. In this pap…
Enabling Contextual Soft Moderation on Social Media through Contrastive Textual Deviation
Pujan Paudel, Mohammad Hammas Saeed, Rebecca Auger +2
Automated soft moderation systems are unable to ascertain if a post supports or refutes a false claim, resulting in a large number of contextual false positives. This limits their…
Unraveling the Web of Disinformation: Exploring the Larger Context of State-Sponsored Influence Campaigns on Twitter
Mohammad Hammas Saeed, Shiza Ali, Pujan Paudel +2
Social media platforms offer unprecedented opportunities for connectivity and exchange of ideas; however, they also serve as fertile grounds for the dissemination of disinformation…
iDRAMA-Scored-2024: A Dataset of the Scored Social Media Platform from 2020 to 2023
Jay Patel, Pujan Paudel, Emiliano De Cristofaro +2
Online web communities often face bans for violating platform policies, encouraging their migration to alternative platforms. This migration, however, can result in increased toxic…