Related papers: Partisan Sharing: Facebook Evidence and Societal C…
This research aims to investigate the impact of users' privacy awareness on their self-disclosing behavior. Our primary research question is to investigate how young social media users feel about the benefits and risks of disclosing…
Social media have great potential to support diverse information sharing, but there is widespread concern that platforms like Twitter do not result in communication between those who hold contradictory viewpoints. Because users can choose…
In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the…
Previous work suggests that people's preference for different kinds of information depends on more than just accuracy. This could happen because the messages contained within different pieces of information may either be well-liked or…
The recent developments of social networks and recommender systems have dramatically increased the amount of social information shared in human communities, challenging the human ability to process it. As a result, sharing aggregated forms…
Social media is nearly ubiquitous in modern life, raising concerns about its societal impacts -- from mental health and polarization to violence and democratic disruption. Yet research on its causal effects is still inconclusive: Various…
Social networks offer a ready channel for fake and misleading news to spread and exert influence. This paper examines the performance of different reputation algorithms when applied to a large and statistically significant portion of the…
Echo chambers, i.e., situations where one is exposed only to opinions that agree with their own, are an increasing concern for the political discourse in many democratic countries. This paper studies the phenomenon of political echo…
We propose that social-media users' own post histories are an underused yet valuable resource for studying fake-news sharing. By extracting textual cues from their prior posts, and contrasting their prevalence against random social-media…
We report the first direct comparisons of multiple alternative social media algorithms on multiple platforms on outcomes of societal interest. We used a browser extension to modify which posts were shown to desktop social media users,…
Facebook News Feed personalization algorithm has a significant impact, on a daily basis, on the lifestyle, mood and opinion of millions of Internet users. Nonetheless, the behavior of such algorithms usually lacks transparency, motivating…
Social media are now a routine part of political campaigns all over the world. However, studies of the impact of campaigning on social platform have thus far been limited to cross-sectional datasets from one election period which are…
Today, an estimated 75% of the British public access information about politics and public life online, and 40% do so via social media. With this context in mind, we investigate information sharing patterns over social media in the lead-up…
In a stylized voting model, we establish that increasing the share of critical thinkers -- individuals who are aware of the ambivalent nature of a certain issue -- in the population increases the efficiency of surveys (elections) but might…
Online social networks provide users with unprecedented opportunities to engage with diverse opinions. At the same time, they enable confirmation bias on large scales by empowering individuals to self-select narratives they want to be…
How political beliefs change in accordance with media exposure is a complicated matter. Some studies have been able to demonstrate that groups with different media diets in the aggregate (e.g., U.S. media consumers ingesting partisan news)…
This paper provides a simple theoretical framework to evaluate the effect of key parameters of ranking algorithms, namely popularity and personalization parameters, on measures of platform engagement, misinformation and polarization. The…
An individual's opinions about media bias derive from their own independent assessment of media outputs combined with peer pressure from networked political allies and opponents. Here we generalize previous idealized, probabilistic models…
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…
Public opinion polling is usually done by random sampling from the entire population, treating individual opinions as independent. In the real world, individuals' opinions are often correlated, e.g., among friends in a social network. In…