Related papers: Everyday the Same Picture: Popularity and Content …
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…
Despite the enthusiastic rhetoric about the so called \emph{collective intelligence}, conspiracy theories -- e.g. global warming induced by chemtrails or the link between vaccines and autism -- find on the Web a natural medium for their…
The rising attention to the spreading of fake news and unsubstantiated rumors on online social media and the pivotal role played by confirmation bias led researchers to investigate different aspects of the phenomenon. Experimental evidence…
Popularity in social media is an important objective for professional users (e.g. companies, celebrities, and public figures, etc). A simple yet prominent metric utilized to measure the popularity of a user is the number of fans or…
The advent of WWW changed the way we can produce and access information. Recent studies showed that users tend to select information that is consistent with their system of beliefs, forming polarized groups of like-minded people around…
Social media are pervaded by unsubstantiated or untruthful rumors, that contribute to the alarming phenomenon of misinformation. The widespread presence of a heterogeneous mass of information sources may affect the mechanisms behind the…
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…
Popularity of content in social media is unequally distributed, with some items receiving a disproportionate share of attention from users. Predicting which newly-submitted items will become popular is critically important for both…
The spreading of unsubstantiated rumors on online social networks (OSN) either unintentionally or intentionally (e.g., for political reasons or even trolling) can have serious consequences such as in the recent case of rumors about Ebola…
The dynamics of attention in social media tend to obey power laws. Attention concentrates on a relatively small number of popular items and neglecting the vast majority of content produced by the crowd. Although popularity can be an…
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…
In this paper, we analyze content sharing between news sources in the alternative and mainstream media using a dataset of 713K articles and 194 sources. We find that content sharing happens in tightly formed communities, and these…
Users online tend to acquire information adhering to their system of beliefs and to ignore dissenting information. Such dynamics might affect page popularity. In this paper we introduce an algorithm, that we call PopRank, to assess both the…
The social brain hypothesis fixes to 150 the number of social relationships we are able to maintain. Similar cognitive constraints emerge in several aspects of our daily life, from our mobility up to the way we communicate, and might even…
The current work deals with the problem of attempting to predict the popularity of images before even being uploaded. This method is specifically focused on Flickr images. Social features of each image as well as that of the user who had…
In recent years, the reliability of information on the Internet has emerged as a crucial issue of modern society. Social network sites (SNSs) have revolutionized the way in which information is spread by allowing users to freely share…
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…
An increasing portion of modern socializing takes place via online social networks. Members of these communities often play distinct roles that can be deduced from observations of users' online activities. One such activity is the sharing…
User participation in online communities is driven by the intertwinement of the social network structure with the crowd-generated content that flows along its links. These aspects are rarely explored jointly and at scale. By looking at how…
Reciprocity, or the tendency of individuals to mirror behavior, is a key measure that describes information exchange in a social network. Users in social networks tend to engage in different levels of reciprocal behavior. Differences in…