
Fabrício BenevenutoFederal University of Minas Gerais | UFMG · Departamento de Ciência da Computação
Fabrício Benevenuto
Ph.D.
About
249
Publications
0
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
14,126
Citations
Introduction
Publications
Publications (249)
The battle against the spread of misinformation on the Internet is a daunting task faced by modern society. Fake news content is primarily distributed through digital platforms, with websites dedicated to producing and disseminating such content playing a pivotal role in this complex ecosystem. Therefore, these websites are of great interest to mis...
Language is a dynamic aspect of our culture that changes when expressed in different technologies and/or communities. On the Internet, social networks have enabled the diffusion and evolution of different dialects, including African American English (AAE). However, this increased usage of different dialects is not without barriers. One particular b...
O WhatsApp se tornou uma ferramenta crucial na comunicação e propagação de desinformação no país. Desde de 2018, a ferramenta vem sido amplamente utilizada para campanhas de desinformação e discurso de ódio. Este trabalho, propõe o Monitor de WhatsApp 2.0, um sistema web que auxilia pesquisadores e jornalistas a acompanharem, em tempo real, os cont...
Spreading electoral propaganda using Online Social Networks (OSNs) during elections is an important problem and novel approaches are necessary to mitigate its effects. The lack of automatic electoral propaganda detection supports candidates which makes true digital podiums have emerged for candidates to spread their ideas, fight opponents, and ask...
The constant expansion of e-commerce, recently boosted due to the coronavirus pandemic, has led to a massive increase in online shopping, made by increasingly demanding customers, who seek comments and reviews on the Web to assist in decision-making regarding the purchase of products. In these reviews, part of the opinions found are comparisons, wh...
This paper provides data resources for low-resource hate speech detection. Specifically, we introduce two different data resources: (i) the HateBR 2.0 corpus, which is composed of 7,000 comments extracted from Brazilian politicians’ accounts on Instagram and manually annotated a binary class (offensive versus non-offensive) and hate speech targets....
Misinformation has become a global issue with impacts on various spheres of society, particularly in developing countries like Brazil. In most misinformation ecosystems, a recurring challenge is the spread of fake news through websites that closely replicate the look and function of reputable news outlets. This facilitates their dissemination, whic...
With the increasing use of smartphones, instant messaging platforms turned into important communication tools. According to WhatsApp, more than 100 billion messages are sent each day on the app. Communication on these platforms has allowed individuals to express themselves in other types of media, rather than simple text, including audio, videos, i...
WhatsApp provides a fertile ground for the large-scale dissemination of information, particularly in countries like Brazil and India. Given its increasing popularity and use for political discussions, it is paramount to ensure that WhatsApp groups are adequately protected from attackers who aim to disrupt the activity of WhatsApp groups. Motivated...
Online messaging platforms are key communication tools but are vulnerable to fake news and conspiracy theories. Mainstream platforms such as Facebook are increasing content moderation of harmful and conspiratorial content. In response, users from fringe communities are migrating to alternative platforms like Telegram. These platforms offer more fre...
WhatsApp has evolved into a popular communication tool, facilitating the exchange of billions of multimedia messages globally. With its large public groups and forwarding features, the platform has enabled messages to go viral, rapidly disseminating across the WhatsApp network. This has also brought WhatsApp to a central position in spreading misin...
WhatsApp has introduced a novel avenue for smartphone users to engage with and disseminate news stories. The convenience of forming interest-based groups and seamlessly sharing content has rendered WhatsApp susceptible to the exploitation of misinformation campaigns. While the process of fact-checking remains a potent tool in identifying fabricated...
Conspiracy theories are widely propagated on social media. Among various social media services, YouTube is one of the most influential sources of news and entertainment. This paper seeks to develop a dataset, YOUNICON, to enable researchers to perform conspiracy theory detection as well as classification of videos with conspiracy theories into diff...
Predicting the factuality of news reporting and bias of media outlets is surely relevant for automated news credibility and fact-checking. While prior work has focused on the veracity of news, we propose a fine-grained reliability analysis of the entire media. Specifically, we study the prediction of sentence-level factuality of news reporting and...
Conspiracy theories are widely propagated on social media. Among various social media services, YouTube is one of the most influential sources of news and entertainment. This paper seeks to develop a dataset, YOUNICON, to enable researchers to perform conspiracy theory detection as well as classification of videos with conspiracy theories into diff...
Misinformation has become a global issue with impacts on various spheres of society, particularly in developing countries like Brazil. In most misinformation ecosystems, a recurring challenge is the spread of fake news through websites that closely replicate the look and function of reputable news outlets. This facilitates their dissemination, whic...
Combating the spread of misinformation is a complex task. In addition, digital platforms (e.g., social networks, instant messaging apps, etc) enhance the dissemination of content produced by low redibility websites. Thus, monitoring and understanding the main characteristics of these websites has become an important task to interrupt the generation...
Some countries impose strict regulations regarding the distribution of electoral advertising during election periods. This is the case of Brazil, where electoral ads distributed before a predetermined period (called early ad) are prohibited by law. Whereas the enforcement of such regulation on traditional mass media technologies (e.g., radio and TV...
As the use of smartphones in Brazil has advanced in recent years, instant messaging platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram became part of Brazilians' lives and communication. However, the use of these platforms is not limited to exchanging messages between two users but also serves as a platform for group discussions and content dissemination. Thi...
Neste trabalho propomos uma metodologia para identificação de websites responsáveis pela produção e disseminação de desinformação em plataformas digitais no contexto brasileiro. Aplicamos nossa abordagem no Twitter e os resultados preliminares apresentam evidências do potencial da metodologia proposta para identificação de websites de desinformação...
A disseminação de notícias falsas tem impacto em diversas áreas cruciais da governança democrática. Muitas abordagens de identificação destas noticiais tomam como base a exploração de informações capturadas depois de sua propagação nas redes. Propomos uma metodologia de detecção em estágio inicial de propagação. Efetuamos uma análise exploratória q...
This paper provides data resources for low-resource hate speech detection. Specifically, we introduce a large-scale expert annotated corpus of Brazilian Instagram comments and a context-aware offensive lexicon, which was manually extracted by a linguist from the proposed corpus and annotated with contextual information. We further provide native-sp...
This paper provides data resources for low-resource hate speech detection. Specifically, we introduce a large-scale expert annotated corpus of Brazilian Instagram comments and a context-aware offensive lexicon, which was manually extracted by a linguist from the proposed corpus and annotated with contextual information. We further provide native-sp...
In recent years, digital platforms have become a powerful means for large scale information diffusion world-wide, particularly in Brazil. Understanding key aspects driving the misinformation diffusion process is of paramountimportance to the design and implementation of new tools to automatically detect misinformation content. In this scenario, fac...
Neste trabalho apresentamos uma investigação do potencial de atributos para detecção de desinformação considerando diferentes cenários (i.e., eleições presidenciais nos Estados Unidos e no Brasil). Para isso, reunimos dados destes dois eventos e computamos atributos explorados em trabalhos anteriores em ambos os repositórios. Depois, propomos uma m...
Propagandas eleitorais são parte essencial de uma eleição. A popularização das redes sociais online ofereceu um meio promissor para que candidatos se comuniquem com o eleitorado em larga escala. De fato, já foi apontado o uso destas aplicações para divulgar propagandas eleitorais, inclusive fora do período permitido pela legislação brasileira (prop...
Most information is passed on in the form of language. Therefore, research on how people use language to inform and misinform, and how this knowledge may be automatically extracted from large amounts of text is surely relevant. This survey provides first-hand experiences and a comprehensive review of rhetorical-level structure analysis for online d...
Due to the severity of the social media offensive and hateful comments in Brazil, and the lack of research in Portuguese, this paper provides the first large-scale expert annotated corpus of Brazilian Instagram comments for hate speech and offensive language detection. The HateBR corpus was collected from the comment section of Brazilian politician...
Desinformação é um problema crescente no mundo e, em particular, no Brasil. A facilidade de compartilhamento de informações promovida pela adoção de plataformas digitais intensificou severamente a extensão deste problema. No entanto, na maioria dos casos, essas plataformas são utilizadas apenas como veículos para disseminação de conteúdos que na ve...
Migration has been proposed as one of the factors that shape cultural similarities across countries. However, studying the relationship between culture and migration has been challenging, in part because culture is difficult to quantify. The traditionally used survey questionnaires have a number of drawbacks, including that they are costly and diff...
Instant messaging platforms such as Telegram became one of the main means of communication used by people all over the world. Most of them are home of several groups and channels that connect thousands of people focused on political topics. However, they have suffered with misinformation campaigns with a direct impact on electoral processes around...
Social media sites became an important channel to consume information, including news articles. In this context, there are a growing number of outlets that present themselves as news sources. However, among these outlets, we may have people objectively presenting reliable information or a political group acting in bad faith. Their actions can even...
WhatsApp is the most popular instant messaging application in many countries such as Brazil, India, and Indonesia, where many people use it as the main interface to the Web. Recently, WhatsApp has been pointed as an important actor in the spreading of misinformation. However, due to its encrypted and peer-to-peer nature, it is hard for people to ex...
Recentemente, o interesse por frentes de pesquisa analisando os mecanismos, bem como maneiras de evitar a disseminação de desinformação aumentou significativamente. Neste cenário, um recorrente obstáculo a indisponibilidade de checagens de fatos. Neste trabalho, compilamos uma extensa coleção de checagens oriundas de importantes agências de checage...
Recent research suggests that not all fact checking efforts are equal: when and what is fact checked plays a pivotal role in effectively correcting misconceptions. In this paper, we propose a framework to study fact checking efforts using Google Trends, a signal that captures search interest over topics on the world's largest search engine. Our fra...
Sentiment analysis became a hot topic, specially with the amount of opinions available in social media data. With the increasing interest in this theme, several methods have been proposed in the literature. Recent efforts have showed that there is no single method that always achieves the best prediction performance for different datasets. Addition...
Recently, there has been a significant increase in the popularity of anonymous social media sites like Whisper and Secret. Unlike traditional social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, posts on anonymous social media sites are not associated with well defined user identities or profiles. In this study, our goals are two-fold: (i) to understand t...
Digital platforms, including social media systems and messaging applications, have become a place for campaigns of misinformation that affect the credibility of the entire news ecosystem. The emergence of fake news in these environments has quickly evolved into a worldwide phenomenon, where the lack of scalable fact-checking strategies is especiall...
Redes sociais são parte do processo de construção de padrões de beleza, seja reforçando padrões do mundo real ou criando novas definições, replicadas fora do ambiente digital. Entretanto, este processo é propício para o surgimento de vieses. Na literatura, grande parte dos estudos focam em avaliar impacto de gênero e etnia na construção de padrões...
A popularização do uso de redes sociais online como plataformas para o debate político trouxe novos desafios como a propagação indevida de propagandas eleitorais. Por um lado, os eleitores usam as redes sociais para interagir, buscar informações e conhecer seus candidatos. Por outro lado, surgiram verdadeiros palanques digitais para candidatos difu...
News consumption is increasingly done on social media websites. In this environment, all types of entities and people present themselves as news sources. These new outlets might focus on specific audiences, and some exhibit the news less objectively. Facebook is one of these platforms, which categorizes an extensive group of pages as a kind of news...
Neste trabalho, investigamos o potencial das soluções automáticas para identificar notícias falsas disseminadas em plataformas digitais. Particularmente, exploramos novos conjuntos de dados e atributos para detecção de notícias falsas e avaliamos o desempenho de previsão de abordagens de aprendizado de máquina. Também quantificamos a informatividad...
QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory that became popular and mainstream over the past few years. Worryingly, the QAnon conspiracy theory has implications in the real world, with supporters of the theory participating in real-world violent acts like the US capitol attack in 2021. At the same time, the QAnon theory started evolving into a global ph...
This paper presents a new approach for offensive language and hate speech detection on social media. Our approach incorporates an offensive lexicon composed by implicit and explicit offensive and swearing expressions annotated with binary classes: context-dependent offensive and context-independent offensive. Due to the severity of the hate speech...
Despite the valuable social interactions that online media promote, these systems provide space for speech that would be potentially detrimental to different groups of people. The moderation of content imposed by many social media has motivated the emergence of a new social system for free speech named Gab, which lacks moderation of content. This a...
Information and communications technologies have enabled the rise of the phenomenon named sharing economy, which represents activities between people, coordinated by online platforms, to obtain, provide, or share access to goods and services. In hosting services of the sharing economy, it is common to have a personal contact between the host and gu...
Online messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord, each with hundreds of millions of users, are one of the dominant modes of communicating or interacting with one another. Despite the widespread use of public group chats, there exists no systematic or detailed characterization of these group chats. There is, more importantly, lack...
Whatsapp is the most popular messaging app in the world. It is not only used as a one-to-one messaging app but also as a platform for group discussion. Recently, Whatsapp has gained the spotlight for its role in disseminating (often low-quality) information. Our study focuses on YouTube videos shared by political-oriented public groups on Whatsapp...
As Internet users increasingly rely on social media sites to receive news, they are faced with a bewildering number of news media choices. For example, thousands of Facebook pages today are registered and categorized as some form of news media outlets. This situation boosted the so-called independent journalism, also known as alternative news media...
WhatsApp was alleged to have been widely used to spread misinformation and propaganda during the 2018 elections in Brazil and the 2019 elections in India. Due to the private encrypted nature of the messages on WhatsApp, it is hard to track the dissemination of misinformation at scale. In this work, using public WhatsApp data from Brazil and India,...
The popularity of smartphone messaging apps like WhatsApp are revolutionizing how many users communicate and interact with the internet. Characteristics such as the immediacy of messages directly delivered to the user's phone and secure communication through end-to-end encryption have made this tool unique but also allowed it to be extensively abus...
Recently, messaging applications, such as WhatsApp, have been reportedly abused by misinformation campaigns, especially in Brazil and India. A notable form of abuse in WhatsApp relies on several manipulated images and memes containing all kinds of fake stories. In this work, we performed an extensive data collection from a large set of WhatsApp pub...
Censuses around the world are key sources of data to guide government investments and public policies. However, these sources are very expensive to obtain and are collected relatively infrequently. Over the last decade, there has been growing interest in the use of data from social media to complement traditional data sources. However, social media...