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Sahil Tripathi, Gautam Siddharth Kashyap, Mehwish Nasim, Jian Yang 0001, Jiechao Gao, Usman Naseem

Meme-based social abuse detection is challenging because harmful intent often relies on implicit cultural symbolism and subtle cross-modal incongruence. Prior approaches, from fusion-based methods to in-context learning with Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), have made progress but remain limited by three factors: i) cultural blindness (missing symbolic context), ii) boundary ambiguity (satire vs. abuse confusion), and iii) lack of interpretability (opaque model reasoning). We introduce CROSS-ALIGN+, a three-stage framework that systematically addresses these limitations: (1) Stage I mitigates cultural blindness by enriching multimodal representations with structured knowledge from ConceptNet, Wikidata, and Hatebase; (2) Stage II reduces boundary ambiguity through parameter-efficient LoRA adapters that sharpen decision boundaries; and (3) Stage III enhances interpretability by generating cascaded explanations. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks and eight LVLMs demonstrate that CROSS-ALIGN+ consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to 17% relative F1 improvement while providing interpretable justifications for each decision.

Patrick Gerard, Luca Luceri, Leonardo Blas, Emilio Ferrara

Online narratives spread unevenly across platforms, with content emerging on one site often appearing on others, hours, days or weeks later. Existing cross-platform information diffusion models often treat platforms as isolated systems, disregarding cross-platform activity that might make these patterns more predictable. In this work, we frame cross-platform prediction as a network proximity problem: rather than tracking individual users across platforms or relying on brittle signals like shared URLs or hashtags, we construct platform-invariant discourse networks that link users through shared narrative engagement. We show that cross-platform neighbor proximity provides a strong predictive signal: adoption patterns follow discourse network structure even without direct cross-platform influence. Our highly-scalable approach substantially outperforms diffusion models and other baselines while requiring less than 3% of active users to make predictions. We also validate our framework through retrospective deployment. We sequentially process a datastream of 5.7M social media posts occurred during the 2024 U.S. election, to simulate real-time collection from four platforms (X, TikTok, Truth Social, and Telegram): our framework successfully identified emerging narratives, including crises-related rumors, yielding over 94% AUC with sufficient lead time to support proactive intervention.

Lin Tian, Marian-Andrei Rizoiu

Social media engagement prediction is a central challenge in computational social science, particularly for understanding how users interact with misinformation. Existing approaches often treat engagement as a homogeneous time-series signal, overlooking the heterogeneous social mechanisms and platform designs that shape how misinformation spreads. In this work, we ask: ''Can neural architectures discover social exchange principles from behavioral data alone?'' We introduce Dreams (Disentangled Representations and Episodic Adaptive Modeling for Social media misinformation engagements), a social exchange theory-guided framework that models misinformation engagement as a dynamic process of social exchange. Rather than treating engagement as a static outcome, Dreams models it as a sequence-to-sequence adaptation problem, where each action reflects an evolving negotiation between user effort and social reward conditioned by platform context. It integrates adaptive mechanisms to learn how emotional and contextual signals propagate through time and across platforms. On a cross-platform dataset spanning 7 platforms and 2.37M posts collected between 2021 and 2025, Dreams achieves state-of-the-art performance in predicting misinformation engagements, reaching a mean absolute percentage error of 19.25%. This is a 43.6% improvement over the strongest baseline. Beyond predictive gains, the model reveals consistent cross-platform patterns that align with social exchange principles, suggesting that integrating behavioral theory can enhance empirical modeling of online misinformation engagement. The source code is available at: https://github.com/ltian678/DREAMS.

Jintao Wen, Yunfeng Ning, Hankun Kang, Xin Miao, Tieyun Qian

该来源暂未提供摘要。

Xuanyu Su, Diana Inkpen, Nathalie Japkowicz

Online hate on social media ranges from overt slurs and threats (hard hate speech ) to soft hate speech: discourse that appears reasonable on the surface but uses framing and value-based arguments to steer audiences toward blaming or excluding a target group. We hypothesize that current moderation systems, largely optimized for surface toxicity cues, are not robust to this reasoning-driven hostility, yet existing benchmarks do not measure this gap systematically. We introduce SoftHateBench, a generative benchmark that produces soft-hate variants while preserving the underlying hostile standpoint. To generate soft hate, we integrate the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT) and Relevance Theory (RT) in a unified framework: AMT provides the backbone argument structure for rewriting an explicit hateful standpoint into a seemingly neutral discussion while preserving the stance, and RT guides generation to keep the AMT chain logically coherent. The benchmark spans 7 sociocultural domains and 28 target groups, comprising 4,745 soft-hate instances. Evaluations across encoder-based detectors, general-purpose LLMs, and safety models show a consistent drop from hard to soft tiers: systems that detect explicit hostility often fail when the same stance is conveyed through subtle, reasoning-based language. Disclaimer. Contains offensive examples used solely for research.

Haoshuang Liu, Zihan Feng 0001, Yajun Yang, Xin Wang 0030, Hong Gao 0001, Qinghua Hu

该来源暂未提供摘要。

Nikos Theologis, Evaggelia Pitoura, Evimaria Terzi, Panayiotis Tsaparas

Opinion formation models are widely used to study social and behavioral processes on online social networks, yet their fairness remains largely unexplored. We study this novel problem in the context of the Friedkin–Johnsen model, a well-established framework for opinion dynamics. In this model, the expressed opinion of an individual evolves by combining peer opinions with a fixed inner opinion weighted by their stubbornness. We define a node's influence as the weight its inner opinion contributes to the public opinion. Given different groups of nodes, we require that influence is distributed fairly across groups. To achieve this, we design minimal interventions that adjust stubbornness, making individuals more receptive to others or more anchored to their own views. We derive closed-form expressions for how changes in the stubbornness of a single node affect influence and leverage them to develop efficient algorithms. Experiments on synthetic and real-world networks provide insights into the role of stubbornness in fairness and demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our methods.

Dun Tan, Lixing Chen, Bo Zhang 0063, Hongfu Liu 0003, Hao Peng 0002, Shenghong Li 0001, Yang Bai 0010, Pan Zhou 0001

该来源暂未提供摘要。

Yangyang Xu 0002, Jinpeng Hu, Peipei Song, Zhangling Duan, Xun Yang 0001

Depressive disorders represent a major global public health challenge. As an increasing number of individuals share their emotional experiences and concerns on social media, researchers have shown growing interest in leveraging such data for early depression screening. However, most existing methods rely on a fixed model and a singular reasoning paradigm, which constrains their adaptability to depression detection. The limited availability of mental health-related data and variability in training data distributions across different LLMs hinder their consistent and comprehensive understanding of diverse psychological symptoms. In this paper, we propose AdaDepression, a framework that enables explainable depression screening through a two-hop retrieval algorithm to identify symptom-relevant posts and a two-stage adaptive routing mechanism for selecting appropriate reasoning strategies and LLMs. Specifically, we first collect representative posts from the training dataset to capture the real-world symptom expressions, and then utilize these posts to retrieve symptom-relevant posts from the user's posting history. Subsequently, we employ the Mixture of Routers (MoR), which integrates the Mixture of Experts (MoE) into the routing mechanism to select the optimal reasoning strategies and LLMs in a cascaded manner. Finally, we complete the standardized psychological questionnaire using the selected LLMs and reasoning strategies. Experimental results on the Reddit-based benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, outperforming existing studies on various metrics. Our code is released at https://github.com/MindIntLab-HFUT/AdaDepression.

Gian Marco Orlando, Jinyi Ye, Valerio La Gatta, Mahdi Saeedi, Vincenzo Moscato, Emilio Ferrara, Luca Luceri

Generative agents are rapidly advancing in sophistication, raising urgent questions about how they might coordinate when deployed in online ecosystems. This is particularly consequential in information operations (IOs), influence campaigns that aim to manipulate public opinion on social media. While traditional IOs have been orchestrated by human operators and relied on manually crafted tactics, agentic AI promises to make campaigns more automated, adaptive, and difficult to detect. This work presents the first systematic study of emergent coordination among generative agents in simulated IO campaigns. Using generative agent-based modeling, we instantiate IO and organic agents in a simulated environment and evaluate coordination across operational regimes, from simple goal alignment to team knowledge and collective decision-making. As operational regimes become more structured, IO networks become denser and more clustered, interactions more reciprocal and positive, narratives more homogeneous, amplification more synchronized, and hashtag adoption faster and more sustained. Remarkably, simply revealing to agents which other agents share their goals can produce coordination levels nearly equivalent to those achieved through explicit deliberation and collective voting. Overall, we show that generative agents, even without human guidance, can reproduce coordination strategies characteristic of real-world IOs, underscoring the societal risks posed by increasingly automated, self-organizing IOs.

Yilong Zang, Hengyun Li, Bruce X. B. Yu, Liangfei Qiu

Restaurants, as small hospitality businesses, are inherently vulnerable, making accurate survival prediction crucial. Previous studies have demonstrated the significance of user reviews and incorporated diverse review?derived factors, yet they have largely overlooked the large?scale network formed by user–restaurant interactions. How restaurant survival is influenced by the review network remains insufficiently explored. To fill this gap, leveraging network embeddedness theory, we statistically analyze the impact of two dimensions of embeddedness, structural and positional, on each restaurant's survival. Utilizing two real-world review datasets, the newly curated OpenRice and the well-established Yelp, our results reveal that a restaurant's network embeddedness and its temporal evolution positively correlate with its survival. Building on this insight, we propose a Dynamic Embeddedness-aware Graph Neural Network, DyE-GNN, for restaurant survival prediction. DyE-GNN not only explicitly integrates network embeddedness theory to guide the model design but also leverages domain knowledge to enable robust adaptability. Extensive experiments on both datasets confirm the superiority of DyE-GNN, underscoring the importance of network embeddedness attention, temporal dynamics, and survival knowledge of peer restaurants. Visualizations further demonstrate that network embeddedness facilitates the identification of at-risk restaurants at the network margin.

Renhong Huang, Ning Tang, Jiarong Xu, Yuxuan Cao, Qingqian Tu, Sheng Guo 0005, Bo Zheng 0007, Huiyuan Liu, Yang Yang 0009

Social platforms serve as central hubs for information exchange, where user behaviors and platform interventions jointly shape opinions. However, intervention policies like recommendation and content filtering, can unintentionally amplify echo chambers and polarization, posing significant societal risks. Proactively evaluating the impact of such policies is therefore crucial. Existing approaches primarily rely on reactive online A/B testing, where risks are identified only after deployment, making risk identification delayed and costly. LLM-based social simulations offer a promising pre-deployment alternative, but current methods fall short in realistically modeling platform interventions and incorporating feedback from the platform. Bridging these gaps is essential for building actionable frameworks to assess and optimize platform policies. To this end, we propose PolicySim, an LLM-based social simulation sandbox for the proactive assessment and optimization of intervention policies. PolicySim models the bidirectional dynamics between user behavior and platform interventions through two key components: (1) a user agent module refined via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and direct preference optimization (DPO) to achieve platform-specific behavioral realism; and (2) an adaptive intervention module that employs a contextual bandit with message passing to capture dynamic network structures. Experiments show that PolicySim can accurately simulate platform ecosystems at both micro and macro levels and support effective intervention policy.

Hankun Kang, Xin Miao, Jianhao Chen 0003, Jintao Wen, Mayi Xu, Weiyu Zhang 0001, Wenpeng Lu, Tieyun Qian

Toxicity detection mitigates the dissemination of toxic content (e.g., hateful comments, posts, and messages within online social actions) to safeguard a healthy online social environment. However, malicious users persistently develop evasive perturbations to disguise toxic content and evade detectors. Traditional detectors or methods are static over time and are inadequate in addressing these evolving evasion tactics. Thus, continual learning emerges as a logical approach to dynamically update detection ability against evolving perturbations. Nevertheless, disparities across perturbations hinder the detector's continual learning on perturbed text. More importantly, perturbation-induced noises distort semantics to degrade comprehension and also impair critical feature learning to render detection sensitive to perturbations. These amplify the challenge of continual learning against evolving perturbations. In this work, we present ContiGuard, the first framework tailored for continual learning of the detector on time-evolving perturbed text (termed continual toxicity detection) to enable the detector to continually update capability and maintain sustained resilience against evolving perturbations. Specifically, to boost the comprehension, we present an LLM powered semantic enriching strategy, where we dynamically incorporate possible meaning and toxicity-related clues excavated by LLM into the perturbed text to improve the comprehension. To mitigate non-critical features and amplify critical ones, we propose a discriminability driven feature learning strategy, where we strengthen discriminative features while suppressing the less-discriminative ones to shape a robust classification boundary for detection. Additionally, we introduce a historical capability replay strategy to preserve previously learned features via feature alignment to alleviate capability forgetting. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first study on continual toxicity detection against time-evolving evasive perturbed text. Extensive experiments prove the superior performance of ContiGuard over both existing detectors and continual methods. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/khk-abc/ContiGuard. Warning: This paper contains discussions of harmful content that may be disturbing to some readers.

Hengrui Cui, Yang Fang 0001, Yuehang Cao, Xiang Zhao 0002

The widespread use of social-media graphs has provided a convenient channel for rumor propagation. Rapid localization of rumor sources is therefore crucial for mitigating diffusion and enabling punitive countermeasures. Source Localization (SL) aims to identify the origin nodes given partial infection observations. Although deep-learning-based SL approaches outperform traditional estimators, three fundamental limitations remain: (i) Model Complexity —existing methods enrich node embeddings with cascades of auxiliary features, yielding high-capacity but excessively complex representations, leading to an exponential increase in the number of model parameters; (ii) Annotation gap —to overcome the scarcity of real-world misinformation cascades, current pipelines repeatedly simulate diffusion from a fixed seed, eroding robustness on true, few-shot outbreaks; and (iii) Computational bottleneck —full-model retraining or recurrent cascade simulation is required for every new task, which disqualifies the solutions from real-time deployment. Inspired by the success of prompt learning in NLP and graph learning, we propose LAPS, a Lightweight privilege-Allocation Prompting framework for Source localization. LAPS first trims parameter explosion and data scarcity by pre-training a graph-level source region classifier on adaptive subgraphs with source-prior diffusion data. It then enables few-shot SL via a privilege-allocation prompt module that updates <1% of all the parameters, avoiding model retraining to facilitate efficiency. Extensive experiments on five real-world networks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our prompt-based framework on few-shot source localization task.

Zhejian Yang, Songwei Zhao, Zilin Zhao, Hechang Chen

Link prediction is a cornerstone of the Web ecosystem, powering applications from recommendation and search to knowledge graph completion and collaboration forecasting. However, large-scale networks present unique challenges: they contain hundreds of thousands of nodes and edges with heterogeneous and overlapping community structures that evolve over time. Existing approaches face notable limitations: traditional graph neural networks struggle to capture global structural dependencies, while recent graph transformers achieve strong performance but incur quadratic complexity and lack interpretable latent structure. We propose TGSBM (Transformer-Guided Stochastic Block Model), a framework that integrates the principled generative structure of Overlapping Stochastic Block Models with the representational power of sparse Graph Transformers. TGSBM comprises three main components: (i) expander-augmented sparse attention that enables near-linear complexity and efficient global mixing, (ii) a neural variational encoder that infers structured posteriors over community memberships and strengths, and (iii) a neural edge decoder that reconstructs links via OSBM's generative process, preserving interpretability. Experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate competitive performance (mean rank 1.6 under HeaRT protocol), superior scalability (up to 6× faster training), and interpretable community structures. These results position TGSBM as a practical approach that strikes a balance between accuracy, efficiency, and transparency for large-scale link prediction.

Zenghua Liao, Jinzhi Liao, Xiang Zhao 0002

Large Language Models are rapidly emerging as web-native interfaces to social platforms. On the social web, users frequently have ambiguous and dynamic goals, making complex intent understanding—rather than single-turn execution—the cornerstone of effective human-LLM collaboration. Existing approaches attempt to clarify user intents through sequential or parallel questioning, yet they fall short of addressing the core challenge: modeling the logical dependencies among clarification questions. Inspired by the Cognitive Load Theory, we propose Prism, a novel framework for complex intent understanding that enables logically coherent and efficient intent clarification. Prism comprises four tailored modules: a complex intent decomposition module, which decomposes user intents into smaller, well-structured elements and identifies logical dependencies among them; a logical clarification generation module, which organizes clarification questions based on these dependencies to ensure coherent, low-friction interactions; an intent-aware reward module, which evaluates the quality of clarification trajectories via an intent-aware reward function and leverages Monte Carlo Sample to simulate user-LLM interactions for large-scale, high-quality training data generation; and a self-evolved intent tuning module, which iteratively refines the LLM's logical clarification capability through data-driven feedback and optimization. Prism consistently outperforms existing approaches across clarification interactions, intent execution, and cognitive load benchmarks. It achieves state-of-the-art logical consistency, reduces logical conflicts to 11.5%, increases user satisfaction by 14.4%, and decreases task completion time by 34.8%. All data and code are released.

Chunyu Wei, Yongsiqi Tu, Yunhai Wang

Information cocoons pose significant challenges to democratic discourse and social cohesion. While extensive research has examined how social networks and recommender systems independently contribute to this phenomenon, their coevolving dynamics remain unexplored. We present Unicoon, the first unified computational framework that simultaneously models both social network propagation and algorithmic content delivery using LLM-based multi-agent simulation. Our key innovation lies in a hypergraph formulation where agents constitute nodes, social relationships form edges, and recommender-delivered content creates dynamic hyperedges, elegantly capturing heterogeneous information diffusion patterns within a single mathematical structure. To address the adaptive nature of recommendation algorithms, we introduce a dynamic hyperedge construction technique that computationally matches trending content with interested user cohorts in real-time. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world networks reveal that the synergistic interplay of social and algorithmic mechanisms creates qualitatively distinct polarization patterns, with a critical finding that larger macro-structures paradoxically accelerate micro-level cohort polarization.

Fangfang Li 0004, Huihui Zhang, Xin Zhang 0018, Wei Wu 0011

Detecting social bots is critical to ensuring the security of online discourse and maintaining trust in social networks. Early feature-based and text-based methods often fail against bots that mimic human behavior, and graph-based approaches have emerged to better exploit structural signals. However, most existing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) still focus on pairwise connections, overlooking higher-order relational patterns, and their multi-relation fusion strategies are typically simplistic, ignoring dependencies between relations and user-specific preferences. To overcome these limitations, we propose MPS-Bot, a model that integrates higher-order structure modeling with user-specific cross-relation dependency learning. MPS-Bot introduces a simplex convolutional layer that leverages simplexes derived from network structures to capture group coordination patterns beyond pairwise connections. In addition, a cross-relation dependency attention mechanism adaptively fuses relation-specific representations according to each user's relational preferences, leading to more discriminative and robust multi-relation representations. Extensive experiments on two widely used Twitter bot detection benchmarks, MGTAB and TwiBot-22, show that MPS-Bot generally outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. These findings highlight the effectiveness of higher-dimensional message passing over simplexes as a powerful approach to unmasking bots in social networks.

Tangila Islam Tanni, Renita Washburn, Yan Solihin, Mary Jean Amon

Although extensive research has examined social media nudges to influence privacy, comparably less work investigates mechanisms of peer-to-peer influence, or the ways in which peer groups can amplify or dampen privacy considerations. This study takes an experimental approach to examining how people are influenced to share potentially sensitive photos of others without consent---a common practice on social media---by comparing the effects of encouraging, discouraging, or mixed feedback social media comments. The results show that discouraging peer comments reduce the sharing of others' photos when content portrayed targets negatively. However, peer influence backfired among users with a history of online misconduct, with both encouraging and discouraging comments leading to more photo sharing. Moreover, a mix of comments that both discouraged and encouraged sharing led to the highest levels of sharing. Linking to prior work, this research establishes a broader understanding of when privacy nudges are likely to backfire on social media: for users with past online misconduct and when information goes against social norms. The findings advance understanding of how peer-to-peer dynamics shape online information flows and highlight the complex effects of Web-based social feedback on privacy decisions. These insights provide actionable design recommendations for platforms to foster responsible, privacy-conscious sharing norms.

Longkun Guo, Chaoqi Jia, Chao Chen 0015

As a fundamental technique with many real-world applications, including social network analysis, center-based clustering may inadvertently discriminate against certain populations based on factors such as age, gender, or socioeconomic status, particularly when nodes are associated with sensitive attributes. In this work, we study the problem of fair k-center clustering in the streaming setting, which seeks to select representative items from a large data stream while respecting group-representation fairness. Given an input dataset in Euclidean space partitioned into m disjoint groups, the fairness constraint requires that the number of centers selected from each group satisfies a given upper bound. Moreover, the problem aims to select a set of centers that minimizes the maximum distance from any point to its nearest center (the k-center objective) while satisfying the fairness constraint. We present a one-pass streaming algorithm with approximation ratio 4.46, improving the previous best ratio of (5+?) for this problem in general metrics. Notably, our result establishes that streaming fair k-center admits a strictly better approximation ratio in Euclidean space than in general metrics, in contrast to the standard k-center problem, whose best-known approximation ratio is 2 in both Euclidean and general metric spaces. Finally, we complement our theoretical results with an empirical evaluation on five real-world social network datasets and million-scale synthetic datasets, demonstrating significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods in clustering quality while maintaining comparable runtime efficiency.