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The micro-blogging platform Twitter allows its nearly 320 million monthly active users to build a network of follower connections to other Twitter users (i.e., followees) in order to subscribe to content posted by these users. With this…
Among the vast information available on the web, social media streams capture what people currently pay attention to and how they feel about certain topics. Awareness of such trending topics plays a crucial role in multimedia systems such…
Faced with the challenge of attracting user attention and revenue, social media websites have turned to video advertisements (video-ads). While in traditional media the video-ad market is mostly based on an interaction between content…
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the dire necessity to improve public health literacy for societal resilience. YouTube, the largest video-sharing social media platform, provides a vast repository of user-generated health information in…
YouTube Shorts and other short-form video platforms now influence how billions engage with content, yet their recommendation systems remain largely opaque. Small shifts in promoted content can significantly impact user exposure, especially…
Online extremists in social networks pose a new form of threat to the general public. These extremists range from cyberbullies who harass innocent users to terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) that use…
In the second half of the 20th century, Parliament allowed broadcasters to transmit radio and eventually television coverage of debates and meetings of select committees. More recently, in an effort to further improve transparency and…
Due to the significant growth of social networking and human activities through the web in recent years, attention to analyzing big data using real-time crowdsourcing has increased. This data may appear in the form of streaming images,…
With the 2022 US midterm elections approaching, conspiratorial claims about the 2020 presidential elections continue to threaten users' trust in the electoral process. To regulate election misinformation, YouTube introduced policies to…
Understanding the factors that impact the popularity dynamics of social media can drive the design of effective information services, besides providing valuable insights to content generators and online advertisers. Taking YouTube as case…
Following the rising popularity of YouTube, there is an emerging problem on this platform called clickbait, which provokes users to click on videos using attractive titles and thumbnails. As a result, users ended up watching a video that…
Video watching had emerged as one of the most frequent media activities on the Internet. Yet, little is known about how users watch online video. Using two distinct YouTube datasets, a set of random YouTube videos crawled from the Web and a…
Tumblr is one of the largest and most popular microblogging website on the Internet. Studies shows that due to high reachability among viewers, low publication barriers and social networking connectivity, microblogging websites are being…
The goal of this paper is to study the behaviour of view-count in YouTube. We first propose several bio-inspired models for the evolution of the view-count of YouTube videos. We show, using a large set of empirical data, that the view-count…
YouTube is a major social media platform that plays a significant role in digital culture, with content creators at its core. These creators often engage in controversial behaviour to drive engagement, which can foster toxicity. This paper…
In recent years, critics of online platforms have raised concerns about the ability of recommendation algorithms to amplify problematic content, with potentially radicalizing consequences. However, attempts to evaluate the effect of…
Online content creators spend significant time and effort building their user base through a long, often arduous process that requires finding the right "niche" to cater to. So, what incentive is there for an established content creator…
Social-media platforms have created new ways for citizens to stay informed and participate in public debates. However, to enable a healthy environment for information sharing, social deliberation, and opinion formation, citizens need to be…
We present the first large-scale measurement study of cross-partisan discussions between liberals and conservatives on YouTube, based on a dataset of 274,241 political videos from 973 channels of US partisan media and 134M comments from…
Polarization is a troubling phenomenon that can lead to societal divisions and hurt the democratic process. It is therefore important to develop methods to reduce it. We propose an algorithmic solution to the problem of reducing…