Related papers: Discussion quality diffuses in the digital public …
Social media systems rely on user feedback and rating mechanisms for personalization, ranking, and content filtering. However, when users evaluate content contributed by fellow users (e.g., by liking a post or voting on a comment), these…
Social media usage has been shown to have both positive and negative consequences for users' mental health. Several studies indicated that peer feedback plays an important role in the relationship between social media use and mental health.…
Social media users post content on various topics. A defining feature of social media is that other users can provide feedback -- called community feedback -- to their content in the form of comments, replies, and retweets. We hypothesize…
A widespread moderation strategy by online news platforms is to feature what the platform deems high quality comments, usually called editor picks or featured comments. In this paper, we compare online discussions of news articles in which…
Framing theory posits that how information is presented shapes audience responses, but computational work has largely ignored audience reactions. While recent work showed that article framing systematically shapes the content of reader…
Social media platform design often incorporates explicit signals of positive feedback. Some moderators provide positive feedback with the goal of positive reinforcement, but are often unsure of their ability to actually influence user…
At a time when information seekers first turn to digital sources for news and opinion, it is critical that we understand the role that social media plays in human behavior. This is especially true when information consumers also act as…
Social influence is the process by which individuals adapt their opinion, revise their beliefs, or change their behavior as a result of social interactions with other people. In our strongly interconnected society, social influence plays a…
Theoretical work on sequential choice and large-scale experiments in online ranking and voting systems has demonstrated that social influence can have a drastic impact on social and technological systems. Yet, the effect of social influence…
Our opinions, which things we like or dislike, depend on the opinions of those around us. Nowadays, we are influenced by the opinions of online strangers, expressed in comments and ratings on online platforms. Here, we perform novel…
The quality of a user's social media experience is determined both by the content they see and by the quality of the conversation and interaction around it. In this paper, we look at replies to tweets from mainstream media outlets and…
At a time when information seekers first turn to digital sources for news and opinion, it is critical that we understand the role that social media plays in human behavior. This is especially true when information consumers also act as…
Comments play an important role within online creative communities because they make it possible to foster the production and improvement of authors' artifacts. We investigate how comment-based communication help shape members' behavior…
In our digital and connected societies, the development of social networks, online shopping, and reputation systems raises the question of how individuals use social information, and how it affects their decisions. We report experiments…
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…
Social susceptibility is defined and analyzed using data from CNN news website. The current models of opinion dynamics, voting, and herding in closed communities are extended, and the community's response to the injection of a group with…
It is very common to observe crowds of individuals solving similar problems with similar information in a largely independent manner. We argue here that crowds can become "smarter," i.e., more efficient and robust, by partially following…
Recent research shows that humans are heavily influenced by online social interactions: We are more likely to perform actions which, in the past, have led to positive social feedback. We introduce a quantitative model of behavior changes in…
The recent developments of social networks and recommender systems have dramatically increased the amount of social information shared in human communities, challenging the human ability to process it. As a result, sharing aggregated forms…
This study investigates how the majority group influences individual judgment formation and expression in anonymous, spontaneous online conversations. Drawing on theories of social conformity and anti-conformity, we analyze everyday…