Related papers: Why Do Urban Legends Go Viral?
The ever-increasing amount of multimedia content on modern social media platforms are valuable in many applications. While the openness and convenience features of social media also foster many rumors online. Without verification, these…
One of the approaches to the solution of the navigation problem in current information flows is ranking the documents according to their popularity level. The definition of local and global news popularity which is based on the number of…
Complex machine learning algorithms are used more and more often in critical tasks involving text data, leading to the development of interpretability methods. Among local methods, two families have emerged: those computing importance…
Online discussion threads are conversational cascades in the form of posted messages that can be generally found in social systems that comprise many-to-many interaction such as blogs, news aggregators or bulletin board systems. We propose…
Narrative is a foundation of human cognition and decision making. Because narratives play a crucial role in societal discourses and spread of misinformation and because of the pervasive use of social media, the narrative dynamics on social…
Memes are the cultural equivalent of genes that spread across human culture by means of imitation. What makes a meme and what distinguishes it from other forms of information, however, is still poorly understood. Our analysis of memes in…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown a tremendous capacity for generating literary text. However, their effectiveness in generating children's stories has yet to be thoroughly examined. In this study, we evaluate the trustworthiness of…
Social networks have become one of the main information channels for human beings due to the immediate and social interactivity they offer, allowing in some cases to publish what each user considers relevant. This has brought with it the…
Randomized rumor spreading processes diffuse information on an undirected graph and have been widely studied. In this work, we present a generic framework for analyzing a broad class of such processes on regular graphs. Our analysis is…
In the age of social news, it is important to understand the types of reactions that are evoked from news sources with various levels of credibility. In the present work we seek to better understand how users react to trusted and deceptive…
False information can be created and spread easily through the web and social media platforms, resulting in widespread real-world impact. Characterizing how false information proliferates on social platforms and why it succeeds in deceiving…
We show that many ancient Indian mythological legends are really allegorical depictions of astronomical and other physical phenomena of which the composers had a good idea. This detail enables us to also use techniques of astronomical…
What makes content go viral? Which videos become popular and why others don't? Such questions have elicited significant attention from both researchers and industry, particularly in the context of online media. A range of models have been…
Modern society habitually uses online social media services to publicly share observations, thoughts, opinions, and beliefs at any time and from any location. These geotagged social media posts may provide aggregate insights into people's…
Inspired by the theory of desirable gambles that is used to model uncertainty in the field of imprecise probabilities, I present a theory of desirable things. Its aim is to model a subject's beliefs about which things are desirable. What…
We examine certain features of popular myths regarding ghosts, vampires and zombies as they appear in film and folklore. We use physics to illuminate inconsistencies associated with these myths and to give practical explanation to certain…
The burst in the use of online social networks over the last decade has provided evidence that current rumor spreading models miss some fundamental ingredients in order to reproduce how information is disseminated. In particular, recent…
Information and individual activities often spread globally through the network of social ties. While social contagion phenomena have been extensively studied within the framework of threshold models, it is common to make an assumption that…
Local news has become increasingly important in the news industry due to its various benefits. It offers local audiences information that helps them participate in their communities and interests. It also serves as a reliable source of…
Social media platforms have been used for information and news gathering, and they are very valuable in many applications. However, they also lead to the spreading of rumors and fake news. Many efforts have been taken to detect and debunk…