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Political debates on social media often escalate quickly, leading to increased engagement as well as more emotional and polarised exchanges. Trigger points (Mau, Lux, and Westheuser 2023) represent moments when individuals feel that their…
This study proposes a qualitative analysis of self replies in Wikipedia talk pages, more precisely when the first two messages of a discussion are written by the same user. This specific pattern occurs in more than 10% of threads with two…
During the COVID-19 pandemic, people started to discuss about pandemic-related topics on social media. On subreddit \textit{r/COVID19positive}, a number of topics are discussed or being shared, including experience of those who got a…
Language is a fundamental aspect of human societies, continuously evolving in response to various stimuli, including societal changes and intercultural interactions. Technological advancements have profoundly transformed communication, with…
In recent years, online communities have formed around suicide and self-harm prevention. While these communities offer support in moment of crisis, they can also normalize harmful behavior, discourage professional treatment, and instigate…
The disparity between news stories valued by journalists and those preferred by readers, known as the "News Gap", is well-documented. However, the difference in expectations regarding news related user-generated content is less studied.…
The social Web is a widely used platform for online discussion. Across social media, users can start discussions by posting a topical image, url, or message. Upon seeing this initial post, other users may add their own comments to the post,…
The content of today's social media is becoming more and more rich, increasingly mixing text, images, videos, and audio. It is an intriguing research question to model the interplay between these different modes in attracting user attention…
In the face of the growing global influence and prevalence of Chinese technology companies, governments worldwide have expressed concern and mistrust toward these companies. There is a scarcity of research that specifically examines the…
Social media play a key role in mobilizing collective action, holding the potential for studying the pathways that lead individuals to actively engage in addressing global challenges. However, quantitative research in this area has been…
Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be proficient in correctly answering questions in the context of online discourse. However, the study of using LLMs to model human-like answers to fact-driven social media questions is still…
In the Internet era the information overload and the challenge to detect quality content has raised the issue of how to rank both resources and users in online communities. In this paper we develop a general ranking method that can…
How communities respond to diverse societal challenges, from economic crises to political upheavals, is shaped by their collective minds - shared representations of ongoing events and current topics. In turn, collective minds are shaped by…
Decades of research on differences in the language of men and women have established postulates about preferences in lexical, topical, and emotional expression between the two genders, along with their sociological underpinnings. Using a…
Human ratings are one of the most prevalent methods to evaluate the performance of natural language processing algorithms. Similarly, it is common to measure the quality of sentences generated by a natural language generation model using…
Studying human values is instrumental for cross-cultural research, enabling a better understanding of preferences and behaviour of society at large and communities therein. To study the dynamics of communities online, we propose a method to…
This study proposes content and interaction analysis techniques for a large repository created from social media content. Though we have presented our study for a large platform dedicated to discussions around financial topics, the proposed…
Identifying and communicating relationships between causes and effects is important for understanding our world, but is affected by language structure, cognitive and emotional biases, and the properties of the communication medium. Despite…
This paper provides a simple theoretical framework to evaluate the effect of key parameters of ranking algorithms, namely popularity and personalization parameters, on measures of platform engagement, misinformation and polarization. The…
We have conducted three empirical studies of the effects of friend recommendations and general ratings on how online users make choices. These two components of social influence were investigated through user studies on Mechanical Turk. We…