Related papers: When the Filter Bubble Bursts: Collective Evaluati…
Recent studies, targeting Facebook, showed the tendency of users to interact with information adhering to their preferred narrative and to ignore dissenting information. Primarily driven by confirmation bias, users tend to join polarized…
Information is transmitted through websites, and immediate reactions to various kinds of information are required. Hence, efforts by users to select information themselves have increased, which is fueling further improvements in…
Individuals of modern societies share ideas and participate in collective processes within a pervasive, variable, and mostly hidden ecosystem of content filtering technologies that determine what information we see online. Despite the…
Opinion evolution and judgment revision are mediated through social influence. Based on a large crowdsourced in vitro experiment (n=861), it is shown how a consensus model can be used to predict opinion evolution in online collective…
Polarization arises when the underlying network connecting the members of a community or society becomes characterized by highly connected groups with weak inter-group connectivity. The increasing polarization, the strengthening of echo…
Affective polarization, the emotional divide between ideological groups marked by in-group love and out-group hate, has intensified in the United States, driving contentious issues like masking and lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic.…
Filter bubbles and echo chambers have received global attention from scholars, media organizations, and the general public. Filter bubbles have primarily been regarded as intrinsically negative, and many studies have sought to minimize…
Our consumption of online information is mediated by filtering, ranking, and recommendation algorithms that introduce unintentional biases as they attempt to deliver relevant and engaging content. It has been suggested that our reliance on…
Polarization is a growing, global problem. As such, many social media based solutions have been proposed in order to reduce it. In this study, we propose a new solution that recommends topics to celebrities to encourage them to join a…
Imagine a food recommender system -- how would we check if it is \emph{causing} and fostering unhealthy eating habits or merely reflecting users' interests? How much of a user's experience over time with a recommender is caused by the…
In this work, we develop an analytical framework that integrates opinion dynamics with a recommendation system. By incorporating elements such as collaborative filtering, we provide a precise characterization of how recommendation systems…
Social networks play an important role in people's daily socialization, particularly through social media platforms, which have become key channels for communication and information dissemination. The digital ecosystem does not only evolve…
In a stylized voting model, we establish that increasing the share of critical thinkers -- individuals who are aware of the ambivalent nature of a certain issue -- in the population increases the efficiency of surveys (elections) but might…
Progress in natural language generation research has been shaped by the ever-growing size of language models. While large language models pre-trained on web data can generate human-sounding text, they also reproduce social biases and…
In recent years, the ease with which social media can be accessed has led to the unexpected problem of a shrinkage in information sources. This phenomenon is caused by a system that facilitates the connection of people with similar ideas…
A polarized social network is modeled as a system of interacting marked point processes with memory of variable length. Each point process indicates the successive times in which a social actor expresses a "favorable" or "contrary" opinion.…
Social media are used as main discussion channels by millions of individuals every day. The content individuals produce in daily social-media-based micro-communications, and the emotions therein expressed, may impact the emotional states of…
Research across different disciplines has documented the expanding polarization in social media. However, much of it focused on the US political system or its culturally controversial topics. In this work, we explore polarization on Twitter…
The democratization of AI tools for content generation, combined with unrestricted access to mass media for all (e.g. through microblogging and social media), makes it increasingly hard for people to distinguish fact from fiction. This…
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…