The broadcast of disinformation in online social networks (OSN) is a growing concern examined across several disciplines, including human-computer interaction (HCI). The pervasive issue has been prompting novel approaches to identify the malicious actors behind the dissemination of deceptive and fabricated content. Analyzing the characteristics and activities of these actors, we designed a taxonomy informed by collaboration with subject matter experts (SMEs) and a review of the academic literature. Our study explores how to distinguish the characteristics, activities, and strategies of malicious actors on OSN and examines how they contribute to the spread of disinformation. We describe the design process and the application of the taxonomy in a case study analyzing anti-migration discourse in social media channels, and reflect on its potential to aid researchers and practitioners in the responsible design of network systems.
Recent advances in AI have heightened scholars' and policy makers' concern with social influence and behavioral contagion in online communities. We conduct a field experiment on Reddit to investigate the extent to which online users are susceptible to positive behavioral stimuli…
Matter seeks to resolve longstanding interoperability problems in the Internet of Things (IoT), yet little is known about how developers experience the standard in day to day work. This paper examines over 13,000 issues from the official Project CHIP GitHub repository to understa…
Climate change is a source of anxiety about the future. Understanding how people express themselves about climate change enables us to address such concerns. To study climate change expression on social media, we analyzed 200 TikTok videos tagged with #climatechange, identifying…
We investigate the effectiveness of interventions that reduce the visibility of offensive content on the local social platform Nextdoor. Content filtering -- hiding or downranking offensive content that brushes against a platform's rules without clearly breaking them -- is deploy…
Live streaming platforms, as computer-mediated communication (CMC) systems, provide streamers with a range of tools, such as webcams, beauty filters, and stream titles, to shape their online personas in ways that either conform to or deviate from viewers' expectations. Drawing on…
Exploring similar nodes in attributed networks represents a key challenge in data mining. While recent representation learning methods embed networks into low-dimensional vectors, they often implicitly assume a uniform and continuous feature space. This paper proposes a visual an…