Related papers: Censorship is Futile
Peer recommendation is a crowdsourcing task that leverages the opinions of many to identify interesting content online, such as news, images, or videos. Peer recommendation applications often use social signals, e.g., the number of prior…
The negative effects of misinformation filter bubbles in adaptive systems have been known to researchers for some time. Several studies investigated, most prominently on YouTube, how fast a user can get into a misinformation filter bubble…
For Iranians and the Iranian diaspora, the Farsi Twittersphere provides an important alternative to state media and an outlet for political discourse. But this understudied online space has become an opinion manipulation battleground, with…
Collaborative crowdsourcing has become a popular approach to organizing work across the globe. Being global also means being vulnerable to shocks -- unforeseen events that disrupt crowds -- that originate from any country. In this study, we…
An increasing number of countries implement Internet censorship at different scales and for a variety of reasons. In particular, the link between the censored client and entry point to the uncensored network is a frequent target of…
We provide a model to investigate the tension between information aggregation and spread of misinformation in large societies (conceptualized as networks of agents communicating with each other). Each individual holds a belief represented…
The fast growing ad-blocker usage results in large revenue decrease for ad-supported online websites. Facing this problem, many online publishers choose either to cooperate with ad-blocker software companies to show acceptable ads or to…
During the first days of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russia's media regulator blocked access to many global social media platforms and news sites, including Twitter, Facebook, and the BBC. To bypass the information controls set by…
Today's social media platforms enable to spread both authentic and fake news very quickly. Some approaches have been proposed to automatically detect such "fake" news based on their content, but it is difficult to agree on universal…
For the past 20 years, China has increasingly restricted the access of minors to online games using addiction prevention systems (APSes). At the same time, and through different means, i.e., the Great Firewall of China (GFW), it also…
Online social platforms allow users to filter out content they do not like. According to selective exposure theory, people tend to view content they agree with more to get more self-assurance. This causes people to live in ideological…
Many internet ventures rely on advertising for their revenue. However, users feel discontent by the presence of ads on the websites they visit, as the data-size of ads is often comparable to that of the actual content. This has an impact…
Funding the production of quality online content is a pressing problem for content producers. The most common funding method, online advertising, is rife with well-known performance and privacy harms, and an intractable subject-agent…
"Fake news" is an old problem. In recent years, however, increasing usage of social media as a source of information, the spread of unverified medical advice during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the rise of generative artificial intelligence…
Recently a simple military exercise on the Internet was perceived as the beginning of a new civil war in the US. Social media aggregate people around common interests eliciting a collective framing of narratives and worldviews. However, the…
Governments have used social distancing to stem the spread of COVID-19, but lack evidence on the most effective policy to ensure compliance. We examine the effectiveness of fines and informational messages (nudges) in promoting social…
The concept of truth, as a public good is the production of a collective understanding, which emerges from a complex network of social interactions. The recent impact of social networks on shaping the perception of truth in political arena…
The rise in popularity of Twitter has led to a debate on its impact on public opinions. The optimists foresee an increase in online participation and democratization due to social media's personal and interactive nature. Cyber-pessimists,…
Recent years have seen a marked increase in the spread of misinformation, a phenomenon which has been accelerated and amplified by social media such as Facebook and Twitter. While some actors spread misinformation to push a specific agenda,…
Over the last 70 years, we, humans, have created an economic market where attention is being captured and turned into money thanks to advertising. During the last two decades, leveraging research in psychology, sociology, neuroscience and…