Related papers: Why Do Urban Legends Go Viral?
The link between affect, defined as the capacity for sentimental arousal on the part of a message, and virality, defined as the probability that it be sent along, is of significant theoretical and practical importance, e.g. for viral…
Social biases and stereotypes are embedded in our culture in part through their presence in our stories, as evidenced by the rich history of humanities and social science literature analyzing such biases in children stories. Because these…
Media news are making a large part of public opinion and, therefore, must not be fake. News on web sites, blogs, and social media must be analyzed before being published. In this paper, we present linguistic characteristics of media news…
Today's probabilistic language generators fall short when it comes to producing coherent and fluent text despite the fact that the underlying models perform well under standard metrics, e.g., perplexity. This discrepancy has puzzled the…
In the Social Web scenario, large amounts of User-Generated Content (UGC) are diffused through social media often without almost any form of traditional trusted intermediaries. Therefore, the risk of running into misinformation is not…
The propagation of rumours on social media poses an important threat to societies, so that various techniques for rumour detection have been proposed recently. Yet, existing work focuses on \emph{what} entities constitute a rumour, but…
Misinformation on social media presents a major threat to modern societies. While previous research has analyzed the virality across true and false social media posts, not every misleading post is necessarily equally viral. Rather,…
Conspiracy theories, as a type of misinformation, are narratives that explains an event or situation in an irrational or malicious manner. While most previous work examined conspiracy theory in social media short texts, limited attention…
Social networks offer a ready channel for fake and misleading news to spread and exert influence. This paper examines the performance of different reputation algorithms when applied to a large and statistically significant portion of the…
The propagation of a rumor (unverified information) on a social network is subject to several factors mainly related to the content of this information and especially to the behaviors (profiles) of the actors on this network that…
As breaking news unfolds people increasingly rely on social media to stay abreast of the latest updates. The use of social media in such situations comes with the caveat that new information being released piecemeal may encourage rumours,…
Mis- and disinformation, commonly collectively called fake news, continue to menace society. Perhaps, the impact of this age-old problem is presently most plain in politics and healthcare. However, fake news is affecting an increasing…
Trending topics are the online conversations that grab collective attention on social media. They are continually changing and often reflect exogenous events that happen in the real world. Trends are localized in space and time as they are…
How do blogs cite and influence each other? How do such links evolve? Does the popularity of old blog posts drop exponentially with time? These are some of the questions that we address in this work. Our goal is to build a model that…
Deep neural networks have demonstrated remarkable performance in many data-driven and prediction-oriented applications, and sometimes even perform better than humans. However, their most significant drawback is the lack of interpretability,…
We investigate the temporal patterns of human communication and its influence on the spreading of information in social networks. The analysis of mobile phone calls of 20 million people in one country shows that human communication is…
Social networks readily transmit information, albeit with less than perfect fidelity. We present a large-scale measurement of this imperfect information copying mechanism by examining the dissemination and evolution of thousands of memes,…
'Fake News' continues to undermine trust in modern journalism and politics. Despite continued efforts to study fake news, results have been conflicting. Previous attempts to analyse and combat fake news have largely focused on…
Social network is a main tunnel of rumor spreading. Previous studies are concentrated on a static rumor spreading. The content of the rumor is invariable during the whole spreading process. Indeed, the rumor evolves constantly in its…
Cultural evolution is driven by how we choose what to consume and share with others. A common belief is that the cultural artifacts that succeed are ones that balance novelty and conventionality. This balance theory suggests that people…