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An important challenge in the process of tracking and detecting the dissemination of misinformation is to understand the political gap between people that engage with the so called "fake news". A possible factor responsible for this gap is…

Social media is interactive, and interaction brings misinformation. With the growing amount of user-generated data, fake news on online platforms has become much frequent since the arrival of social networks. Now and then, an event occurs…

The pervasive use of social media has grown to over two billion users to date, and is commonly utilized as a means to share information and shape world events. Evidence suggests that passive social media usage (i.e., viewing without taking…

This thesis addresses two paradoxes: (1) why empirical studies find that fake news represent only a small share of the information consulted and shared on social media despite the absence of editorial control or journalistic norms, and (2)…

Vaccine hesitancy has been recognized as a major global health threat. Having access to any type of information in social media has been suggested as a potential powerful influence factor to hesitancy. Recent studies in other fields than…

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…

Although news negativity is often studied, missing is comparative evidence on the prevalence of and engagement with negative political and non-political news posts on social media. We use 6,081,134 Facebook posts published between January…

Over the past couple of years, the topic of "fake news" and its influence over people's opinions has become a growing cause for concern. Although the spread of disinformation on the Internet is not a new phenomenon, the widespread use of…

This paper initiates the study of the testable implications of choice data in settings where agents have privacy preferences. We adapt the standard conceptualization of consumer choice theory to a situation where the consumer is aware of,…

Images are an indispensable part of the news content we consume. Highly emotional images from sources of misinformation can greatly influence our judgements. We present two studies on the effects of emotional facial images on users'…

This paper investigates the usage patterns of Facebook among different demographics in the United States, focusing on the consumption of political information and its variability across age, gender, and ethnicity. Employing a novel data…

The new information and communication technology providers collect increasing amounts of personal data, a lot of which is user generated. Unless use policies are privacy-friendly, this leaves users vulnerable to privacy risks such as…

Our consumption of online information is mediated by filtering, ranking, and recommendation algorithms that introduce unintentional biases as they attempt to deliver relevant and engaging content. It has been suggested that our reliance on…

Social media are used as main discussion channels by millions of individuals every day. The content individuals produce in daily social-media-based micro-communications, and the emotions therein expressed, may impact the emotional states of…

In this work we study, on a sample of 2.3 million individuals, how Facebook users consumed different information at the edge of political discussion and news during the last Italian electoral competition. Pages are categorized, according to…

Social network sites allow users to publicly tag people in their posts. These tagged posts allow users to share to both the general public and a targeted audience, dynamically assembled via notifications that alert the people mentioned. We…

It is commonly believed that information spreads between individuals like a pathogen, with each exposure by an informed friend potentially resulting in a naive individual becoming infected. However, empirical studies of social media suggest…

In an era marked by an abundance of news sources, access to information significantly influences public opinion. Notably, the bias of news sources often serves as an indicator of individuals' political leanings. This study explores this…

With rapid increase in online information consumption, especially via social media sites, there have been concerns on whether people are getting selective exposure to a biased subset of the information space, where a user is receiving more…

Recent studies, targeting Facebook, showed the tendency of users to interact with information adhering to their preferred narrative and to ignore dissenting information. Primarily driven by confirmation bias, users tend to join polarized…