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A widespread moderation strategy by online news platforms is to feature what the platform deems high quality comments, usually called editor picks or featured comments. In this paper, we compare online discussions of news articles in which…
At a time when information seekers first turn to digital sources for news and opinion, it is critical that we understand the role that social media plays in human behavior. This is especially true when information consumers also act as…
Consider a person trying to spread an important message on a social network. He/she can spend hours trying to craft the message. Does it actually matter? While there has been extensive prior work looking into predicting popularity of…
Expressing attitude or stance toward entities and concepts is an integral part of human behavior and personality. Recently, evaluative language data has become more accessible with social media's rapid growth, enabling large-scale opinion…
This paper addresses the problem of predicting popularity of comments in an online discussion forum using reinforcement learning, particularly addressing two challenges that arise from having natural language state and action spaces. First,…
Hate speech is plaguing the cyberspace along with user-generated content. This paper investigates the role of conversational context in the annotation and detection of online hate and counter speech, where context is defined as the…
Toxic language remains an ongoing challenge on social media platforms, presenting significant issues for users and communities. This paper provides a cross-topic and cross-lingual analysis of toxicity in Reddit conversations. We collect 1.5…
Research exploring linguistic markers in individuals with depression has demonstrated that language usage can serve as an indicator of mental health. This study investigates the impact of discussion topic as context on linguistic markers…
Many social media platforms offer a mechanism for readers to react to comments, both positively and negatively, which in aggregate can be thought of as community endorsement. This paper addresses the problem of predicting community…
Millions of people use online social networks to reinforce their sense of belonging, for example by giving and asking for feedback as a form of social validation and self-recognition. It is common to observe disagreement among people…
Changing someone's opinion is arguably one of the most important challenges of social interaction. The underlying process proves difficult to study: it is hard to know how someone's opinions are formed and whether and how someone's views…
Several factors influence the popularity of content on social media, including the what, when, and who of a post. Of these factors, the what and when of content are easiest to customize in order to maximize viewership and reach. Further,…
The number of user reviews of tourist attractions, restaurants, mobile apps, etc. is increasing for all languages; yet, research is lacking on how reviews in multiple languages should be aggregated and displayed. Speakers of different…
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…
Community-level bans are a common tool against groups that enable online harassment and harmful speech. Unfortunately, the efficacy of community bans has only been partially studied and with mixed results. Here, we provide a flexible…
In an online community, new words come and go: today's "haha" may be replaced by tomorrow's "lol." Changes in online writing are usually studied as a social process, with innovations diffusing through a network of individuals in a speech…
In an online community, new words come and go: today's "haha" may be replaced by tomorrow's "lol." Changes in online writing are usually studied as a social process, with innovations diffusing through a network of individuals in a speech…
This paper introduces a method for detecting inappropriately targeting language in online conversations by integrating crowd and expert annotations with ChatGPT. We focus on English conversation threads from Reddit, examining comments that…
Moral reasoning reflects how people acquire and apply moral rules in particular situations. With increasingly social interactions happening online, social media data provides an unprecedented opportunity to assess in-the-wild moral…
Understanding the impact of digital platforms on user behavior presents foundational challenges, including issues related to polarization, misinformation dynamics, and variation in news consumption. Comparative analyses across platforms and…