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The proliferation of public networks has enabled instantaneous and interactive communication that transcends temporal and spatial constraints. The vast amount of textual data on the Web has facilitated the study of quantitative analysis of…
Content moderation in online platforms is crucial for ensuring activity therein adheres to existing policies, especially as these platforms grow. NLP research in this area has typically focused on automating some part of it given that it is…
We study how collective memories are formed online. We do so by tracking entities that emerge in public discourse, that is, in online text streams such as social media and news streams, before they are incorporated into Wikipedia, which, we…
We present a toy model of opinion spreading in a society which combines a self-reinforcing mechanism with diffusion. The relative strength of these two mechanisms - called the affectability of the system - is a free parameter of the model.…
We test the hypothesis that the extent to which one obtains information on a given topic through Wikipedia depends on the language in which it is consulted. Controlling the size factor, we investigate this hypothesis for a number of 25…
Today's society faces widening disagreement and conflicts among constituents with incompatible views. Escalated views and opinions are seen not only in radical ideology or extremism but also in many other scenes of our everyday life. Here…
In online debates individual arguments support or attack each other, leading to some subset of arguments being considered more relevant than others. However, in large discussions readers are often forced to sample a subset of the arguments…
The flow of information reaching us via the online media platforms is optimized not by the information content or relevance but by popularity and proximity to the target. This is typically performed in order to maximise platform usage. As a…
Wikipedia, the Web's largest encyclopedia, frequently faces content disputes or malicious users seeking to subvert its integrity. Administrators can mitigate such disruptions by enforcing "page protection" that selectively limits…
Human communities have self-organizing properties in which specific Dunbar Numbers may be invoked to explain group attachments. By analyzing Wikipedia editing histories across a wide range of subject pages, we show that there is an emergent…
We propose an edit-centric approach to assess Wikipedia article quality as a complementary alternative to current full document-based techniques. Our model consists of a main classifier equipped with an auxiliary generative module which,…
The evolution of opinions in a population of individuals who constantly interact with a common source of user-generated content (i.e. the internet) and are also subject to propaganda is analyzed using computer simulations. The model is…
We consider a class of models of opinion formation where the dissemination of individual opinions occurs through the spreading of local consensus and disagreement. We study the emergence of full collective consensus or maximal disagreement…
Online discourse takes place in corporate-controlled spaces thought by users to be public realms. These platforms in name enable free speech but in practice implement varying degrees of censorship either by government edict or by uneven and…
In this paper we address the challenge of assessing the quality of Wikipedia pages using scores derived from edit contribution and contributor authoritativeness measures. The hypothesis is that pages with significant contributions from…
Among the different disciplines in the social, behavioral and economic sciences, a fundamental class of problems is related to the prediction of the final state of the presence of individual opinions in a large population. The main aspects…
Social media platforms, increasingly used as news sources for varied data analytics, have transformed how information is generated and disseminated. However, the unverified nature of this content raises concerns about trustworthiness and…
The Web has become the main source for news acquisition. At the same time, news discussion has become more social: users can post comments on news articles or discuss news articles on other platforms like Reddit. These features empower and…
Responding to misinformation online can be an exhausting and thankless task. It takes time and energy to write effective content, puts users at risk of online harassment, and strains personal relationships. Despite these challenges, there…
This paper examines if large language models (LLMs) can help people write constructive comments on divisive social issues due to the difficulty of expressing constructive disagreement online. Through controlled experiments with 600…