Related papers: Public Discourse in the Web Does Not Exhibit Group…
"What other people think" has always been an important piece of information during various decision-making processes. Today people frequently make their opinions available via the Internet, and as a result, the Web has become an excellent…
Humanity for centuries has perfected skills of interpersonal interactions and evolved patterns that enable people to detect lies and deceiving behavior of others in face-to-face settings. Unprecedented growth of people's access to mobile…
Social groups with widely different music tastes, political convictions, and religious beliefs emerge and disappear on scales from extreme subcultures to mainstream mass-cultures. Both the underlying social structure and the formation of…
We study the formation of public opinion in a poll process where the current score is open to public. The voters are assumed to vote probabilistically for or against their own preference considering the group opinion collected up to then in…
Online social media has become an important platform to organize around different socio-cultural and political topics. An extensive scholarship has discussed how people are divided into echo-chamber-like groups. However, there is a lack of…
One of the main dimensions characterizing the unfolding of opinion formation processes in social debates is the degree of open-mindedness of the involved population. Opinion dynamic modeling studies have tried to capture such a peculiar…
Opinion polarization is on the rise, causing concerns for the openness of public debates. Additionally, extreme opinions on different topics often show significant correlations. The dynamics leading to these polarized ideological opinions…
We introduce a socially motivated extension of the voter model in which individual voters are also influenced by two opposing, fixed-opinion news sources. These sources forestall consensus and instead drive the population to a politically…
In (Deffuant et al., 2002), we proposed a simple model of opinion dynamics, which we used to simulate the influence of extremists in a population. Simulations were run without any specific interaction structure and varying the simulation…
Despite extensive research, the mechanisms through which online platforms shape extremism and polarization remain poorly understood. We identify and test a mechanism, grounded in empirical evidence, that explains how ranking algorithms can…
Political debate nowadays takes place mainly on online social media, with election periods amplifying ideological engagement. Reddit is generally considered more resistant to polarization and echo chamber effects than platforms like Twitter…
This paper presents a study of user voting on three websites: Imdb, Amazon and BookCrossings. It reports on an expert evaluation of the voting mechanisms of each website and a quantitative data analysis of users' aggregate voting behavior.…
Social media has played an important role in shaping political discourse over the last decade. At the same time, it is often perceived to have increased political polarization, thanks to the scale of discussions and their public nature. In…
This study explores the dynamic relationship between online discourse, as observed in tweets, and physical hate crimes, focusing on marginalized groups. Leveraging natural language processing techniques, including keyword extraction and…
The suggestions generated by most existing recommender systems are known to suffer from a lack of diversity, and other issues like popularity bias. As a result, they have been observed to promote well-known "blockbuster" items, and to…
Much recent research on social networks has focused on the modeling and analysis of how opinions evolve as a function of interpersonal relationships. It is also of great interest to model and understand the implications of friendly and…
This work aims at emphasizing a number of questions that, although crucial since the early days of media studies, have not yet been the object of the empirical and computational study that they deserve: How does collective attention…
News website comment sections are spaces where potentially conflicting opinions and beliefs are voiced. Addressing questions of how to study such cultural and societal conflicts through technological means, the present article critically…
We live in an age of information abundance but know little about how this influences our opinions or attitudes. A common expectation is that people consulting numerous pieces of information, well balancing the different sides of an issue,…
Understanding social polarization requires integrating insights from psychology, sociology, and complex systems science. Agent-based modeling provides a natural framework to combine perspectives from different fields and explore how…