317 research outputs found
Towards Measuring Adversarial Twitter Interactions against Candidates in the US Midterm Elections
Adversarial interactions against politicians on social media such as Twitter
have significant impact on society. In particular they disrupt substantive
political discussions online, and may discourage people from seeking public
office. In this study, we measure the adversarial interactions against
candidates for the US House of Representatives during the run-up to the 2018 US
general election. We gather a new dataset consisting of 1.7 million tweets
involving candidates, one of the largest corpora focusing on political
discourse. We then develop a new technique for detecting tweets with toxic
content that are directed at any specific candidate.Such technique allows us to
more accurately quantify adversarial interactions towards political candidates.
Further, we introduce an algorithm to induce candidate-specific adversarial
terms to capture more nuanced adversarial interactions that previous techniques
may not consider toxic. Finally, we use these techniques to outline the breadth
of adversarial interactions seen in the election, including offensive
name-calling, threats of violence, posting discrediting information, attacks on
identity, and adversarial message repetition
Optimising Emotions, Incubating Falsehoods
This open access book deconstructs the core features of online misinformation and disinformation. It finds that the optimisation of emotions for commercial and political gain is a primary cause of false information online. The chapters distil societal harms, evaluate solutions, and consider what must be done to strengthen societies as new biometric forms of emotion profiling emerge. Based on a rich, empirical, and interdisciplinary literature that examines multiple countries, the book will be of interest to scholars and students of Communications, Journalism, Politics, Sociology, Science and Technology Studies, and Information Science, as well as global and local policymakers and ordinary citizens interested in how to prevent the spread of false information worldwide, both now and in the future
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