Related papers: Reducing Controversy by Connecting Opposing Views
Nowadays, social media is the ground for political debate and exchange of opinions. There is a significant amount of research that suggests that social media are highly polarized. A phenomenon that is commonly observed is the echo chamber…
The rise of social media and online social networks has been a disruptive force in society. Opinions are increasingly shaped by interactions on online social media, and social phenomena including disagreement and polarization are now…
Online social platforms have become central in the political debate. In this context, the existence of echo chambers is a problem of primary relevance. These clusters of like-minded individuals tend to reinforce prior beliefs, elicit…
Which topics spark the most heated debates on social media? Identifying those topics is not only interesting from a societal point of view, but also allows the filtering and aggregation of social media content for disseminating news…
In the era of social media, people frequently share their own opinions online on various issues and also in the way, get exposed to others' opinions. Be it for selective exposure of news feed recommendation algorithms or our own inclination…
Controversial content refers to any content that attracts both positive and negative feedback. Its automatic identification, especially on social media, is a challenging task as it should be done on a large number of continuously evolving…
Divisiveness appears to be increasing in much of the world, leading to concern about political violence and a decreasing capacity to collaboratively address large-scale societal challenges. In this working paper we aim to articulate an…
The presence of political misinformation and ideological echo chambers on social media platforms is concerning given the important role that these sites play in the public's exposure to news and current events. Algorithmic systems employed…
Social media have great potential for enabling public discourse on important societal issues. However, adverse effects, such as polarization and echo chambers, greatly impact the benefits of social media and call for algorithms that…
This paper deals with the modeling and estimation of the sociological phenomena called echo chambers and segregation in social networks. Specifically, we present a novel community-based graph model that represents the emergence of…
Polarization is a troubling phenomenon that can lead to societal divisions and hurt the democratic process. It is therefore important to develop methods to reduce it. We propose an algorithmic solution to the problem of reducing…
Political debate nowadays takes place mainly on online social media, with election periods amplifying ideological engagement. Reddit is generally considered more resistant to polarization and echo chamber effects than platforms like Twitter…
Polarized topics often spark discussion and debate on social media. Recent studies have shown that polarized debates have a specific clustered structure in the endorsement net- work, which indicates that users direct their endorsements…
Social media has a misinformation problem, and counterspeech -- fighting bad speech with more speech -- has been an ineffective solution. Here, we argue that bridging-based ranking -- an algorithmic approach to promoting content favored by…
Recent studies suggest that social media usage -- while linked to an increased diversity of information and perspectives for users -- has exacerbated user polarization on many issues. A popular theory for this phenomenon centers on the…
Echo chambers on social media are a significant problem that can elicit a number of negative consequences, most recently affecting the response to COVID-19. Echo chambers promote conspiracy theories about the virus and are found to be…
Motivated by the large expansion in the study of social networks, this paper deals with the problem of multiple messages spreading over the same network using gossip algorithms. Given two messages distributed over some nodes of the graph,…
All societies have been much more bipolar over the past few years, particularly after the emergence of online social networks and media. In fact, the gap between the two ends of social spectrum is going to be even deeper after the spread of…
The operation of adding edges has been frequently used to the study of opinion dynamics in social networks for various purposes. In this paper, we consider the edge addition problem for the DeGroot model of opinion dynamics in a social…
In several settings (e.g., sensor networks and social networks), nodes of a graph are equipped with initial opinions, and the goal is to estimate the average of these opinions using local operations. A natural algorithm to achieve this is…