Temporal dynamics of coordinated online behavior: Stability, archetypes, and influence.

Large-scale online campaigns, malicious or otherwise, require a significant degree of coordination among participants, which sparked interest in the study of . State-of-the-art methods for detecting coordinated behavior perform analyses, disregarding the temporal dynamics of coordination. Here, we carry out a analysis of coordinated behavior.

The COVID-19 scamdemic: A survey of phishing attacks and their countermeasures during COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic coincided with an equally-threatening scamdemic: a global epidemic of scams and frauds. The unprecedented cybersecurity concerns emerged during the pandemic sparked a torrent of research to investigate cyber-attacks and to propose solutions and countermeasures. Within the scamdemic, phishing was by far the most frequent type of attack.

Misinformation, manipulation, and abuse on social media in the era of COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic represented an unprecedented setting for the spread of online misinformation, manipulation, and abuse, with the potential to cause dramatic real-world consequences. The aim of this special issue was to collect contributions investigating issues such as the emergence of infodemics, misinformation, conspiracy theories, automation, and online harassment on the onset of the coronavirus outbreak. Articles in this collection adopt a diverse range of methods and techniques, and focus on the study of the narratives that fueled conspiracy theories, on the diffusion patterns of COVID-19 misinformation, on the global news sentiment, on hate speech and social bot interference, and on multimodal Chinese propaganda.

The limited reach of fake news on Twitter during 2019 European elections.

The advent of social media changed the way we consume content, favoring a disintermediated access to, and production of information. This scenario has been matter of critical discussion about its impact on society, magnified in the case of the Arab Springs or heavily criticized during Brexit and the 2016 U.S.

A framework for detecting unfolding emergencies using humans as sensors.

The advent of online social networks (OSNs) paired with the ubiquitous proliferation of smartphones have enabled social sensing systems. In the last few years, the aptitude of humans to spontaneously collect and timely share context information has been exploited for emergency detection and crisis management. Apart from event-specific features, these systems share technical approaches and architectural solutions to address the issues with capturing, filtering and extracting meaningful information from data posted to OSNs by networks of human sensors.