Related papers: Bayesian Social Influence in the Online Realm

In a large social network whose members harbor binary sentiments towards an issue, we investigate the asymptotic accuracy of sentiment detection. We model the user sentiments by an Ising Markov random field model and allow the user…

Basic human values represent a set of values such as security, independence, success, kindness, and pleasure, which we deem important to our lives. Each of us holds different values with different degrees of significance. Existing studies…

Social media users post content on various topics. A defining feature of social media is that other users can provide feedback -- called community feedback -- to their content in the form of comments, replies, and retweets. We hypothesize…

Cognitive biases are widespread in humans and animals alike, and can sometimes be reinforced by social interactions. One prime bias in judgment and decision-making is the human tendency to underestimate large quantities. Previous research…

In this work we consider the impact of information spread in time-varying social networks, where agents request to follow other agents with aligned opinions while dropping ties to neighbors whose posts are too dissimilar to their own views.…

A/B tests serve the purpose of reliably identifying the effect of changes introduced in online services. It is common for online platforms to run a large number of simultaneous experiments by splitting incoming user traffic randomly in…

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…

We present numerical simulations of a model of social influence, where the opinion of each agent is represented by a binary vector. Agents adjust their opinions as a result of random encounters, whenever the difference between opinions is…

Consider the following model to study adversarial effects on opinion forming. A set of initially selected experts form their binary opinion while being influenced by an adversary, who may convince some of them of the falsehood. All other…

The spread of ideas in online social networks is a crucial phenomenon to understand nowadays the proliferation of fake news and their impact in democracies. This makes necessary to use models that mimic the circulation of rumors. The law of…

With the advent of online networks, societies are substantially more connected with individual members able to easily modify and maintain their own social links. Here, we show that active network maintenance exposes agents to confirmation…

The existence of juxtaposed regions of distinct cultures in spite of the fact that people's beliefs have a tendency to become more similar to each other's as the individuals interact repeatedly is a puzzling phenomenon in the social…

We study the effects of social influences in opinion dynamics. In particular, we define a simple model, based on the majority rule voting, in order to consider the role of conformity. Conformity is a central issue in social psychology as it…

The concept of homophily is pervasive in online social media. While many empirical studies have relied on external sociodemographic traits to investigate it, significantly less is known about homophily at the cognitive level, that is, at…

Social media have quickly become a prevalent channel to access information, spread ideas, and influence opinions. However, it has been suggested that social and algorithmic filtering may cause exposure to less diverse points of view, and…

Unlike the more observable phenomenon of group opinion reinforcement, self-censorship online has received comparatively less attention. Our goal in this work is to dissect the phenomena of self-censorship and to examine the implications of…

When opinion spread is studied, peer pressure is often modeled by interactions of more than two individuals (higher-order interactions). In our work, we introduce a two-layer random hypergraph model, in which hyperedges represent households…

The network influence model is a model for binary outcome variables that accounts for dependencies between outcomes for units that are relationally tied. The basic influence model was previously extended to afford a suite of new dependence…

In many contexts it is useful to predict the number of individuals in some population who will initiate a particular activity during a given period. For example, the number of users who will install a software update, the number of…

In this paper, the effect on collective opinions of filtering algorithms managed by social network platforms is modeled and investigated. A stochastic multi-agent model for opinion dynamics is proposed, that accounts for a centralized…