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Social susceptibility is defined and analyzed using data from CNN news website. The current models of opinion dynamics, voting, and herding in closed communities are extended, and the community's response to the injection of a group with…
The interaction between fringe subcultures and mainstream online communities poses significant challenges for understanding discourse on social media. In this work, we investigate whether users active in conspiracy-focused communities…
In recent years, Online Social Networks have become an important medium for people who suffer from mental disorders to share moments of hardship, and receive emotional and informational support. In this work, we analyze how discussions in…
Social media feeds have become central to the Internet. Among the most visible are trending feeds, which rank content deemed timely and relevant. To examine how feed signals influence behaviors and perceptions, we conducted a randomized…
Today, users are reading the news through social platforms. These platforms are built to facilitate crowd engagement, but not necessarily disseminate useful news to inform the masses. Hence, the news that is highly engaged with may not be…
A significant share of political discourse occurs online on social media platforms. Policymakers and researchers try to understand the role of social media design in shaping the quality of political discourse around the globe. In the past…
In order to keep up with the demand of curating the deluge of crowd-sourced content, social media platforms leverage user interaction feedback to make decisions about which content to display, highlight, and hide. User interactions such as…
Online conversations are often interrupted by trolling, which causes emotional distress and conflict among users. Previous research has focused on moderating harmful content after it has been posted, but ways to manage emotions in real-time…
We often treat social media as a lens onto society. How might that lens distort the popularity of political and social viewpoints? We examine discrepancies between publicly posted and privately surveyed opinions within communities,…
Online discussion boards are an important medium for collaboration. The goal of our work is to understand how messages and individual discussants contribute to Q&A discussions. We present a novel network model for capturing in-formation…
In ad-hoc retrieval, evaluation relies heavily on user actions, including implicit feedback. In a conversational setting such signals are usually unavailable due to the nature of the interactions, and, instead, the evaluation often relies…
Online social media has become increasingly popular in recent years due to its ease of access and ability to connect with others. One of social media's main draws is its anonymity, allowing users to share their thoughts and opinions without…
When conflicts escalate, is it due to what is said or how it is said? In the conflict literature, two theoretical approaches take opposing views: one focuses on the content of the disagreement, while the other focuses on how it is…
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…
Online comments play a crucial role in shaping public sentiment and opinion dynamics on social media. However, evaluating their popularity remains challenging, not only because it depends on linguistic quality, originality, and emotional…
Rules are a critical component of the functioning of nearly every online community, yet it is challenging for community moderators to make data-driven decisions about what rules to set for their communities. The connection between a…
Controversial posts are those that split the preferences of a community, receiving both significant positive and significant negative feedback. Our inclusion of the word "community" here is deliberate: what is controversial to some…
Recent research shows that humans are heavily influenced by online social interactions: We are more likely to perform actions which, in the past, have led to positive social feedback. We introduce a quantitative model of behavior changes in…
With the advent of numerous community forums, tasks associated with the same have gained importance in the recent past. With the influx of new questions every day on these forums, the issues of identifying methods to find answers to said…
To promote constructive discussion of controversial topics online, we propose automatic reframing of disagreeing responses to signal receptiveness to a preceding comment. Drawing on research from psychology, communications, and linguistics,…