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Probabilistic models can learn users' preferences from the history of their item adoptions on a social media site, and in turn, recommend new items to users based on learned preferences. However, current models ignore psychological factors…
Humans make decisions based on the information they obtain from several major sources, among which the comments of others in Internet forums play an increasing role. Such forums cover a wide spectrum of topics and represent an essential…
The rich set of interactions between individuals in the society results in complex community structure, capturing highly connected circles of friends, families, or professional cliques in a social network. Thanks to frequent changes in the…
Recent years have seen a rise in social media platforms that provide peer-to-peer support to individuals suffering from mental distress. Studies on the impact of these platforms have focused on either short-term scales of single-post…
Engaging with diverse political views is important for reaching better collective decisions, however, users online tend to remain confined within ideologically homogeneous spaces. In this work, we study users who are members of these spaces…
Contemporary social media networks can be viewed as a break to the early two-step flow model in which influential individuals act as intermediaries between the media and the public for information diffusion. Today's social media platforms…
Online platforms host a diverse user base, which can be broadly categorized into "specialist users" with focused interests and "generalist users" who engage in a wide range of topics. This study explores the behavioral differences between…
Human interactions can be either positive or negative, giving rise to different complex social or anti-social phenomena. The dynamics of these interactions often lead to certain spatio-temporal patterns and complex networks, which can be…
When discussing difficult topics online, is it common to meaningfully engage with people from diverse perspectives? Why or why not? Could features of the online environment be redesigned to encourage civil conversation across difference? In…
After the COVID-19 pandemic caused internet usage to grow by 70%, there has been an increased number of people all across the world using social media. Applications like Twitter, Meta Threads, YouTube, and Reddit have become increasingly…
We study the evolution of long-lived controversial debates as manifested on Twitter from 2011 to 2016. Specifically, we explore how the structure of interactions and content of discussion varies with the level of collective attention, as…
Whenever a social media user decides to share a story, she is typically pleased to receive likes, comments, shares, or, more generally, feedback from her followers. As a result, she may feel compelled to use the feedback she receives to…
In a previous paper we proposed a model to study the dynamics of opinion formation in human societies by a co-evolution process involving two distinct time scales of fast transaction and slower network evolution dynamics. In the transaction…
Modeling user engagement dynamics on social media has compelling applications in user-persona detection and political discourse mining. Most existing approaches depend heavily on knowledge of the underlying user network. However, a large…
Social media research on mental health has focused predominantly on detecting and diagnosing conditions at the individual level. In this work, we shift attention to \emph{intergroup} behavior, examining how two prominent neurodivergent…
A community's identity defines and shapes its internal dynamics. Our current understanding of this interplay is mostly limited to glimpses gathered from isolated studies of individual communities. In this work we provide a systematic…
Choice decisions made by users of online applications can suffer from biases due to the users' level of engagement. For instance, low engagement users may make random choices with no concern for the quality of items offered. This biased…
Social networks are rich source of data to analyze user habits in all aspects of life. User's behavior is decisive component of a health system in various countries. Promoting good behavior can improve the public health significantly. In…
The advent of the era of Big Data has allowed many researchers to dig into various socio-technical systems, including social media platforms. In particular, these systems have provided them with certain verifiable means to look into certain…
We evaluate homophily and heterophily among ideological and demographic groups in a typical opinion formation context: online discussions of current news. We analyze user interactions across five years in the r/news community on Reddit, one…