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DCAP: Deep Cross Attentional Product Network for User Response Prediction

User response prediction is crucial to many industrial applications such as online advertising, recommender systems, and search ranking.

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Towards Statistical Foundations For Detecting Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior On Facebook

Facebook’s community standards disallow “coordinated inauthentic behavior”.

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Book Chapter: Countering hate speech

Counterspeech refers to communication that responds to hate speech in order to reduce it and negate its harmful potential effects.

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Global Data Governance Mapping: 52 case studies

Data is the most collected, analyzed, shared, and/or traded goods or services around the world.

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A New Wave of Research on Civilizational Politics: What Civilizations Are, What Explains Them, and Why They Matter – CORRIGENDUM

A new wave of scholarship has made major advances in how we understand the politics of civilizational identity by drawing powerfully from conceptual tools developed over the years to study other...

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User Preference-aware Fake News Detection

Disinformation and fake news have posed detrimental effects on individuals and society in recent years, attracting broad attention to fake news detection.

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Factual Corrections Eliminate False Beliefs About COVID-19 Vaccines

The spread of misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines threatens to prolong the pandemic, with prior evidence indicating that exposure to misinformation has negative effects on intent to take the...

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Predicting Directionality in Causal Relations in Text

Causal relations play a major role in many tasks in Natural Language Understanding and discourse analysis.

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QAnon on Twitter: An Overview

By Sam Jackson, Brandon Gorman and Mayuko Nakatsuka; University at Albany

Since the election of Donald Trump...

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Mining Dual Emotion for Fake News Detection

Emotion plays an important role in detecting fake news online. When leveraging emotional signals, the existing methods focus...

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Mainstreaming of conspiracy theories and misinformation

Parents - particularly moms - increasingly consult social media for support when taking decisions about their young children,...

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Where Have All the Data Gone? A Critical Reflection on Academic Digital Research in the Post-API Age

When the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica (CA) scandal burst into the headlines in March 2018, it cast a spotlight on tech...

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Debunking the Misinfodemic: Coronavirus Social Media Contains More, Not Less, Credible Content

Several high-profile sources have focused worldwide attention on the dangers of misinformation about COVID.

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A Graph Attention Based Approach for Trajectory Prediction in Multi-agent Sports Games

This work investigates the problem of multi-agents trajectory prediction.

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Fact-Enhanced Synthetic News Generation

The advanced text generation methods have witnessed great success in text summarization, language translation, and synthetic...

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SWARMGRAPH: Analyzing Large-Scale In-Memory Graphs on GPUs

Graph computation has attracted a significant amount of attention since many real-world data come in the format of graph.

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BugGraph: Differentiating Source-Binary Code Similarity with Graph Triplet-Loss Network

Binary code similarity detection, which answers whether two pieces of binary code are similar, has been used in a number of applications.

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The Consumer Citizen

Citizens are asked to buy, and asked to consider to buy, goods of all sizes and all prices, nearly all of the time.

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Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases

In this paper researchers show that standard machine learning can acquire stereotyped biases from textual data that reflect...

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Does Elite Rhetoric Undermine Democratic Norms?

In this paper, the researchers test the extent to which elite rhetoric can erode democratic norms in the contemporary United States.

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State media warning labels can counteract the effects of foreign misinformation

The rise of disinformation campaigns on social media has led platforms to lay out wide-ranging solutions to mitigate foreign interference.

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A Multi-Modal Method for Satire Detection using Textual and Visual Cues

Satire is a literary device that writers employ to mock or ridicule a person, group, or ideology by passing judgment on them for a cultural transgression or poor social behavior.

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Validating Social Media Monitoring: Statistical Pitfalls and Opportunities from Public Opinion

Social media are a promising new data source for real-world behavioral monitoring.

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Pandemic Politics in Eurasia: Roadmap for a New Research Subfield

Rarely do major research themes spring upon a discipline so suddenly that scholars must proceed without a robust research...

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The Disinformation Age

The intentional spread of falsehoods challenge the basic norms and values upon which institutional legitimacy and political stability depend.

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Facebook Pages, the “Disneyland” Measles Outbreak, and Promotion of Vaccine Refusal as a Civil Right, 2009–2019

Facebook connects billions of people globally, enabling individuals to share information on pages organized around common interests.

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Adapting and Extending a Typology to Identify Vaccine Misinformation on Twitter

One of the greatest risks to human health comes from the deluge of misleading, conflicting, and manipulated information currently available online

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Not sure? Handling hesitancy of COVID-19 vaccines

From the moment the first COVID-19 vaccines are rolled out, there will need to be a large fraction of the global population...

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Not just conspiracy theories: Vaccine opponents and pro-ponents add to the COVID-19 ‘infodemic’ on Twitter

In February 2020, the World Health Organization announced an ‘infodemic’ that accompanied the global pandemic of COVID-19.

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Unifying casualty distributions within and across conflicts

The distribution of whole war sizes and the distribution of event sizes within individual wars, can both be well approximated...

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Covid-19 infodemic reveals new tipping point epidemiology and a revised R formula

Many governments have managed to control their COVID-19 outbreak with a simple message: keep the effective 'R number' R<1 ...

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Hidden order in online extremism and its disruption by nudging collective chemistry

Disrupting the emergence and evolution of potentially violent extremist movements is a crucial challenge. In recent months,...

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The COVID-19 Social Media Infodemic Reflects Uncertainty and State-Sponsored Propaganda

Significant attention has been devoted to determining the credibility of online misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic on social media.

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Iterative Effect-Size Bias in Ridehailing: Measuring Social Bias in Dynamic Pricing of 100 Million Rides

In 2015, the dynamic algorithmic pricing used by the Princeton Review was found to be charging Asian-Americans higher prices...

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Content analysis of Persian/Farsi Tweets during COVID-19 pandemic in Iran using NLP

As COVID-19 has rapidly and widely spread in the United States and globally, this now pandemic is shaking up all aspects of daily life in all countries affected in an unforeseen manner.

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Quantifying COVID-19 content in the online health opinion war using machine learning

This paper features R.F. Sear a GW undergraduate student in computer science as first author.

A huge amount...

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The online competition between pro- and anti-vaccination views

Social media companies are struggling to control online health dis- and misinformation, for example, during the COVID-19...

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Misinformation on the Facebook News Feed: Experimental Evidence

The proliferation of misinformation and fake news represents a pressing policy issue, with potentially deleterious consequences for democracies around the world.

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Detecting East Asian Prejudice on Social Media

The outbreak of COVID-19 has raised concerns about the spread of Sinophobia and other forms of East Asian prejudice across the world.

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Hate multiverse spreads malicious COVID-19 content online beyond individual platform control

Controlling the spread of COVID-19 misinformation and its weaponization against certain demographics (e.g. anti-Asian) -- in...

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Pro-Russian Biases in Anti-Chinese Tweets about the Novel Coronavirus

The recent COVID-19 pandemic, which was first detected in Wuhan, China, has been linked to increased anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States.

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The Twitter Social Mobility Index: Measuring Social Distancing Practices from Geolocated Tweets

The outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, a Coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19, has caused a pandemic on a scale unseen in a generation.

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Chinese social media suggest decreased vaccine acceptance in China: An observational study on Weibo following the 2018 Changchun Changsheng vaccine incident

Vaccine acceptance is a crucial public health issue, which has been exacerbated by the use of social media to spread content opposing vaccination.

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Machines Learn Appearance Bias in Face Recognition

Researchers have raised concerns about the use of face recognition for, inter alia, police surveillance and job candidate...

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A computational science approach to understanding human conflict

We discuss how computational data science and agent-based modeling, are shedding new light on the age-old issue of human...

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Surfacing the Submerged State: Operational Transparency Increases Trust in and Engagement with Government

As trust in government reaches historic lows, frustration with government performance approaches record highs.

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Vaccine-related advertising in the Facebook Ad Archive

Facebook has over two billion active users, making it one of the largest communities in the world.

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GraphOne: A Data Store for Real-time Analytics on Evolving Graphs

There is a growing need to perform a diverse set of real-time analytics (batch and stream analytics) on evolving graphs to deliver the values of big data to users.

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Identifying Nuances in Fake News vs. Satire: Using Semantic and Linguistic Cues

The efforts by social media platforms to reduce the exposure of users to misinformation have resulted, on several occasions,...

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Crimea come what may: Do economic sanctions backfire politically?

When powerful global actors like the United States and European Union impose international economic sanctions – ‘actions that...

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Health Wars and Beyond: The Rapidly Expanding and Efficient Network Insurgency Interlinking Local and Global Online Crowds of Distrust

Distrust and misinformation pose an acute global threat to established science and medicine, as well as political processes.

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False Alarm: The Truth about Political Mistruths in the Trump Era

Americans are not invulnerable to factual information. They do not 'backfire'; facts do not make them less accurate.

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Framing and Strategic Narratives: Synthesis and Analytical Framework

Standard journalistic tropes were of little use after the 2016 US elections. Talk of blue and red states was eclipsed by distressed discussions.

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Government Role in Regulating Vaccine Misinformation on Social Media Platforms

Recognizing that interactive computer services offered a forum for true diversity of political discourse, Congress enacted the Communications Decency Act.

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Elites and foreign actors among the alt-right: The Gab social media platform

Content regulation and censorship of social media platforms is increasingly discussed by governments and the platforms themselves.

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In Search of Meaning: Why We Still Don't Know What Digital Data Represent

In the early years researchers greeted the internet and digital data with almost wide-eyed wonder and excitement.

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Securing Malware Cognitive Systems against Adversarial Attacks

A cognitive system is self-learning by leveraging a combination of intelligent techniques, such as machine learning (ML), data mining.

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A surprising connection between civilizational identity and succession expectations among Russian elites

We know from prior research that non-democratic regimes can become vulnerable when elites anticipate succession at the top,...

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To illuminate and motivate: a fuzzy-trace model of the spread of information online

In this paper, we present, and test, a novel mathematical formulation of how information spreads online.

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Helping the Homeless: The Role of Empathy, Race and Deservingness in Motivating Policy Support and Charitable Giving

Charitable organizations seeking support for their cause will often use the story of a specific individual to illustrate the problem and generate support.

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Can presidential misinformation on climate change be corrected? Evidence from Internet and phone experiments

Long-standing literature in political science makes clear that political elites can shape the factual beliefs and policy attitudes of the mass public, especially co-partisans.

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Challenges and frontiers in abusive content detection

Developing robust systems to detect abuse is a crucial part of online content moderation and plays a fundamental role in...

How Should We Now Conceptualize Protest, Diffusion, and Regime Change?

Brancati and Lucardi’s findings on the absence of “democracy protest” diffusion across borders raise important questions for...

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Git Blame Who?: Stylistic Authorship Attribution of Small, Incomplete Source Code Fragments

Program authorship attribution has implications for the privacy of programmers who wish to contribute code anonymously. While...

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SIMD-X: Programming and Processing of Graph Algorithms on GPUs

With high computation power and memory bandwidth, graphics processing units (GPUs) lend themselves to accelerate data-intensive analytics.

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How we do things with words: Analyzing text as social and cultural data

In this article we describe our experiences with computational text analysis. We hope to achieve three primary goals.

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The Future Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Humans and Human Rights

What are the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) on human rights in the next three decades?

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You Break It, You Buy It: The Naiveté of Social Engineering in Tech – And How to Fix It

Facebook’s mission statement promises to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”.

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The (Mis)Informed Citizen: Indicators for Examining the Quality of Online News

Current discourses about the spread of misinformation tend to juxtapose misinformation with "quality" news.

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Malicious Actors on Twitter: A Guide for Public Health Researchers

Social bots and other malicious actors have a significant presence on Twitter.

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Characterizing Trends in Human Papillomavirus Vaccine Discourse on Reddit (2007-2015): An Observational Study

Long-lasting infections with high-risk human papillomaviruses (HPVs) can cause cancer in parts of the body where HPV infects...

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Communicating Meaning in the Intelligence Enterprise

Intelligence organizations are tasked with informing decision makers about complex worldwide threats.

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Can online self-reports assist in real-time identification of influenza vaccination uptake? A cross-sectional study of influenza vaccine-related tweets in the USA, 2013–2017

The Advisory Council for Immunisation Practices at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends annual influenza vaccination for all healthy adults.

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Identifying Media Effects Through Low-Cost, Multiwave Field Experiments

Scholars of political communication have long been interested in unpacking the effects of media on political attitudes and behavior.

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The disinformation order: Disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutions

Many democratic nations are experiencing increased levels of false information circulating through social media and political websites that mimic journalism formats.