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Creators/Authors contains: "Blackburn, Jeremy"

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  1. Rumble has emerged as a prominent platform hosting contro- versial figures facing restrictions on YouTube. Despite this, the academic community’s engagement with Rumble has been minimal. To help researchers address this gap, we intro- duce a comprehensive dataset of about 6.7K podcast videos from August 2020 to December 2022, amounting to over 5.6K hours of content. Besides covering metadata of these podcast videos, we provide speech-to-text transcriptions for future analysis. We also provide speaker diarization informa- tion, a collection of 168K unique representative images from podcast videos, and face embeddings of more than 400K ex- tracted faces. With the rise of the influence of podcasts and populist figures, this dataset provides a rich resource to iden- tify challenges in cyber social threats in a relatively underex- plored space. 
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  2. Online web communities often face bans for violating platform policies, encouraging their migration to alternative platforms. This migration, however, can result in increased toxicity and unforeseen consequences on the new platform. In recent years, researchers have collected data from many alternative platforms, indicating coordinated efforts leading to offline events, conspiracy movements, hate speech propagation, and harassment. Thus, it becomes crucial to characterize and understand these alternative platforms. To advance research in this direction, we collect and release a large-scale dataset from Scored -- an alternative Reddit platform that sheltered banned fringe communities, for example, c/TheDonald (a prominent right-wing community) and c/GreatAwakening (a conspiratorial community). Over four years, we collected approximately 57M posts from Scored, with at least 58 communities identified as migrating from Reddit and over 950 communities created since the platform's inception. Furthermore, we provide sentence embeddings of all posts in our dataset, generated through a state-of-the-art model, to further advance the field in characterizing the discussions within these communities. We aim to provide these resources to facilitate their investigations without the need for extensive data collection and processing efforts. 
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  3. Alas, coordinated hate attacks, or raids, are becoming increasingly common online. In a nutshell, these are perpetrated by a group of aggressors who organize and coordinate operations on a platform (e.g., 4chan) to target victims on another community (e.g., YouTube). In this paper, we focus on attributing raids to their source community, paving the way for moderation approaches that take the context (and potentially the motivation) of an attack into consideration.We present TUBERAIDER, an attribution system achieving over 75% accuracy in detecting and attributing coordinated hate attacks on YouTube videos. We instantiate it using links to YouTube videos shared on 4chan's /pol/ board, r/The_Donald, and 16 Incels-related subreddits. We use a peak detector to identify a rise in the comment activity of a YouTube video, which signals that an attack may be occurring. We then train a machine learning classifier based on the community language (i.e., TF-IDF scores of relevant keywords) to perform the attribution. We test TUBERAIDER in the wild and present a few case studies of actual aggression attacks identified by it to showcase its effectiveness. 
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  4. Islamophobia, a negative predilection towards the Muslim community, is present on social media platforms. In addition to causing harm to victims, it also hurts the reputation of social media platforms that claim to provide a safe online environment for all users. The volume of social media content is impossible to be manually reviewed, thus, it is important to find automated solutions to combat hate speech on social media platforms. Machine learning approaches have been used in the literature as a way to automate hate speech detection. In this paper, we use deep learning techniques to detect Islamophobia over Reddit and topic modeling to analyze the content and reveal topics from comments identified as Islamophobic. Some topics we identified include the Islamic dress code, religious practices, marriage, and politics. To detect Islamophobia, we used deep learning models. The highest performance was achieved with BERTbase+CNN, with an F1-Score of 0.92. 
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