Related papers: Consumers and Curators: Browsing and Voting Patter…
Political polarization appears to be on the rise, as measured by voting behavior, general affect towards opposing partisans and their parties, and contents posted and consumed online. Research over the years has focused on the role of the…
Social media is very popular for facilitating conversations about important topics and bringing forth insights and issues related to these topics. Reddit serves as a platform that fosters social interactions and hosts engaging discussions…
Most modern recommendation algorithms are data-driven: they generate personalized recommendations by observing users' past behaviors. A common assumption in recommendation is that how a user interacts with a piece of content (e.g., whether…
The social Web is transforming the way information is created and distributed. Blog authoring tools enable users to publish content, while sites such as Digg and Del.icio.us are used to distribute content to a wider audience. With content…
Most social network analysis works at the level of interactions between users. But the vast growth in size and complexity of social networks enables us to examine interactions at larger scale. In this work we use a dataset of 76M…
We often treat social media as a lens onto society. How might that lens distort the popularity of political and social viewpoints? We examine discrepancies between publicly posted and privately surveyed opinions within communities,…
Popularity systems, like Twitter retweets, Reddit upvotes, and Pinterest pins have the potential to guide people toward posts that others liked. That, however, creates a feedback loop that reduces their informativeness: items marked as more…
Online platforms have transformed the way in which individuals access and interact with news, with a high degree of trust particularly placed in search engine results. We use web tracked behavioral data across a 2-month period and analyze…
An increasing amount of attention has been devoted to the problem of "toxic" or antisocial behavior on social media. In this paper we analyze such behavior at very large scales: we analyze toxicity over a 14-year time span on nearly 500…
This paper presents a study of user voting on three websites: Imdb, Amazon and BookCrossings. It reports on an expert evaluation of the voting mechanisms of each website and a quantitative data analysis of users' aggregate voting behavior.…
We propose an annotation approach that captures not only labels but also the reading process underlying annotators' decisions, e.g., what parts of the text they focus on, re-read or skim. Using this framework, we conduct a case study on the…
It has been a widely shared concern that social media reinforces echo chambers of like-minded users and exacerbate political polarization. While fostering interactions across party lines is recognized as an important strategy to break echo…
Recommendation systems are pervasive in the digital economy. An important assumption in many deployed systems is that user consumption reflects user preferences in a static sense: users consume the content they like with no other…
Online marketplaces, search engines, and databases employ aggregated social information to rank their content for users. Two ranking heuristics commonly implemented to order the available options are the average review score and item…
A significant percentage of online content is now published and consumed via the mechanism of crowdsourcing. While any user can contribute to these forums, a disproportionately large percentage of the content is submitted by very active 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…
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…
With the 2022 US midterm elections approaching, conspiratorial claims about the 2020 presidential elections continue to threaten users' trust in the electoral process. To regulate election misinformation, YouTube introduced policies to…
In March 2025, Meta announced a new AI system to rank the order of the comments shown to Instagram users. With existing research showing how feed personalization systems can lead to increased polarization, the introduction of this new…
Ad blockers allow users to browse websites without viewing ads. Online news providers that rely on advertising revenue tend to perceive users adoption of ad blockers purely as a threat to revenue. Yet, this perception ignores the…