COSMOS Research Center is pleased to announce a new publication in Springer’s Journal of Social Network Analysis and Mining titled “Large-Scale Toxicity Intervention in Social Networks: Evaluating Integer Programming-Optimized Focal Toxic Structures”.

Online harassment and toxic campaigns rarely happen in isolation. Instead, they are driven by focal toxic structures (densely connected groups of social media accounts) that work together to amplify harmful content and evade standard filters. Traditional content moderation systems focus on removing individual posts or banning single accounts, but these coordinated groups simply create new profiles or use coded language to keep campaigns alive. Platform moderation teams face strict resource limits and cannot review every flagged user, making it critical to know exactly which groups to prioritize for removal. To solve this, the study introduces an advanced optimization model combining Weighted Focal Structure Analysis with Integer Programming optimization. Instead of evaluating toxic groups one by one, this mathematical approach looks at the entire network at once to select the most impactful combination of groups to remove. It maximizes network disruption while respecting real-world constraints, such as moderation budget limits, overlap prevention, and minimum impact thresholds.

Using a large-scale dataset of 324,769 Telegram users active during the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the research systematically compared standard sequential selection against the new optimized approach and a hybrid model. The findings revealed that the mathematically optimized approach drastically outperformed standard baseline methods across every metric. It achieved up to a 149% increase in network fragmentation, split up the main toxic highways twice as effectively, and achieved nearly double the reduction in overall harmful content while removing 17% fewer total users.

This research advances computational social science by giving trust and safety teams a scalable, data-driven framework to dismantle harmful campaigns at their root. By shifting the focus from reactive post removals to strategic network interventions, COSMOS continues to pave the way for safer, more resilient digital ecosystems.

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