Related papers: The Opacity Problem in Social Contagion
Recent research has explored the increasingly important role of social media by examining the dynamics of individual and group behavior, characterizing patterns of information diffusion, and identifying influential individuals. In this…
Modern society depends on the flow of information over online social networks, and users of popular platforms generate significant behavioral data about themselves and their social ties. However, it remains unclear what fundamental limits…
It is widely believed that information spread on social media is a percolation process, with parallels to phase transitions in theoretical physics. However, evidence for this hypothesis is limited, as phase transitions have not been…
The personalization of our news consumption on social media has a tendency to reinforce our pre-existing beliefs instead of balancing our opinions. This finding is a concern for the health of our democracies which rely on an access to…
Most studies on influence maximization focus on one-shot propagation, i.e. the influence is propagated from seed users only once following a probabilistic diffusion model and users' activation are determined via single cascade. In reality…
Social influence drives both offline and online human behaviour. It pervades cultural markets, and manifests itself in the adoption of scientific and technical innovations as well as the spread of social practices. Prior empirical work on…
Diffusion of information, spread of rumors and infectious diseases are all instances of stochastic processes that occur over the edges of an underlying network. Many times networks over which contagions spread are unobserved, and such…
We consider processes on social networks that can potentially involve three factors: homophily, or the formation of social ties due to matching individual traits; social contagion, also known as social influence; and the causal effect of an…
The emergence of online social networks has greatly facilitated the diffusion of information and behaviors. While the two diffusion processes are often intertwined, "talking the talk" does not necessarily mean "walking the talk"--those who…
Diffusion of information in networks is at the core of many problems in AI. Common examples include the spread of ideas and rumors as well as marketing campaigns. Typically, information diffuses at a non-linear rate, for example, if markets…
Conspiracy theories can threaten society by spreading misinformation, deepening polarization, and eroding trust in democratic institutions. Social media often fuels the spread of conspiracies, primarily driven by two key actors:…
The whole frame of interconnections in complex networks hinges on a specific set of structural nodes, much smaller than the total size, which, if activated, would cause the spread of information to the whole network [1]; or, if immunized,…
Online social networks provide a medium for citizens to form opinions on different societal issues, and a forum for public discussion. They also expose users to viral content, such as breaking news articles. In this paper, we study the…
Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered recommender systems play a crucial role in determining the content that users are exposed to on social media platforms. However, the behavioural patterns of these systems are often opaque, complicating…
Fake news has emerged as a pervasive problem within Online Social Networks, leading to a surge of research interest in this area. Understanding the dissemination mechanisms of fake news is crucial in comprehending the propagation of…
Scientists have been interested in estimating causal peer effects to understand how people's behaviors are affected by their network peers. However, it is well known that identification and estimation of causal peer effects are challenging…
Diffusion of innovation can be interpreted as a social spreading phenomena governed by the impact of media and social interactions. Although these mechanisms have been identified by quantitative theories, their role and relative importance…
When people prefer to coordinate their behaviors with their friends -- e.g., choosing whether to adopt a new technology, to protest against a government, to attend university -- divisions within a social network can sustain different…
Complex contagions describe systems where the probability or rate of contagious transmission is a nonlinear function of the exposure to contagious agents. These models were first studied theoretically but have since been used to capture…
Influence maximization is a well-studied problem that asks for a small set of influential users from a social network, such that by targeting them as early adopters, the expected total adoption through influence cascades over the network is…