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Users organize themselves into communities on web platforms. These communities can interact with one another, often leading to conflicts and toxic interactions. However, little is known about the mechanisms of interactions between…
In recent years, statistical physics' methodologies have proven extremely successful in offering insights into the mechanisms that govern social interactions. However, the question of whether these models are able to capture trends observed…
Among the topics discussed on social media, some spark more heated debate than others. For example, experience suggests that major political events, such as a vote for healthcare law in the US, would spark more debate between opposing sides…
What is the boundary between a vigorous argument and a breakdown of relations? What drives a group of individuals across it? Taking Wikipedia as a test case, we use a hidden Markov model to approximate the computational structure and social…
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has elicited a diverse array of responses from nations around the globe. During a global conflict, polarized narratives are spread on social media to sway public opinion. We examine the dynamics of the…
Influencers play a crucial role in shaping public narratives through information creation and diffusion in the Global South. While public figures from various walks of life and their impact on public discourse have been studied, defence…
Social media platforms contain abundant data that can provide comprehensive knowledge of historical and real-time events. During crisis events, the use of social media peaks, as people discuss what they have seen, heard, or felt. Previous…
Drug use by people is on the rise and is of great interest to public health agencies and law enforcement agencies. As found by the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 20 million Americans aged 12 years or older consumed illicit drugs in…
Opioid and substance misuse is rampant in the United States today, with the phenomenon known as the "opioid crisis". The relationship between substance use and mental health has been extensively studied, with one possible relationship…
Social media platforms are increasingly being used by governments to foster user interaction. Particularly in cities with enhanced ICT infrastructures (i.e., Informational World Cities) and high internet penetration rates, social media…
Opinion dynamics models how the publicly expressed opinions of users in a social network coevolve according to their neighbors as well as their own intrinsic opinion. Motivated by the real-world manipulation of social networks during the…
When `cyber' is used as a prefix, attention is typically drawn to the technological and spectacular aspects of war and conflict -- and, by extension, security. We offer a different approach to engaging with and understanding security in…
Social media broadly refers to digital platforms and applications that simulate social interactions online. This study investigates the impact of social media platforms and their algorithms on political interest among users. As social media…
While social media has been proved as an exceptionally useful tool to interact with other people and massively and quickly spread helpful information, its great potential has been ill-intentionally leveraged as well to distort political…
The wide availability of user-provided content in online social media facilitates the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and narratives. Despite the enthusiastic rhetoric on the part of some that this process…
A study of the dynamical formation of networks of friends and enemies in social media, in this case Twitter, is presented. We characterise the single node properties of such networks, as the clustering coefficient and the degree, to…
People nowadays express their opinions in online spaces, using different forms of interactions such as posting, sharing and discussing with one another. How do these digital traces change in response to events happening in the real world?…
The daily exposure of social media users to propaganda and disinformation campaigns has reinvigorated the need to investigate the local and global patterns of diffusion of different (mis)information content on social media. Echo chambers…
Social networks have triumphed in communicating people online, but they have also been exploited to launch influence operations for manipulating society. The deployment of software-controlled accounts (e.g., social bots) has proven to be…
In online social media systems users are not only posting, consuming, and resharing content, but also creating new and destroying existing connections in the underlying social network. While each of these two types of dynamics has…