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Having more followers has become a norm in recent social media and micro-blogging communities. This battle has been taking shape from the early days of Twitter. Despite this strong competition for followers, many Twitter users are…

Individuals engaging on social media often tend to establish online communities where interactions predominantly occur among like-minded peers. While considerable efforts have been devoted to studying and delineating these communities,…

The rise of fake news in the past decade has brought with it a host of consequences, from swaying opinions on elections to generating uncertainty during a pandemic. A majority of methods developed to combat disinformation either focus on…

Major social media platforms increasingly adopt community-based fact-checking to address misinformation on their platforms. While previous research has largely focused on its effect on engagement (e.g., reposts, likes), an understanding of…

In the Twitter blogosphere, the number of followers is probably the most basic and succinct quantity for measuring popularity of users. However, the number of followers can be manipulated in various ways; we can even buy follows. Therefore,…

We present an in-depth study of co-following on Twitter based on the observation that two Twitter users whose followers have similar friends are also similar, even though they might not share any direct links or a single mutual follower. We…

Social media presents an opportunity for people to share content that they find to be significant, funny, or notable. No single piece of content will appeal to all users, but are there systematic variations between users that can help us…

Community detection in online social networks is typically based on the analysis of the explicit connections between users, such as "friends" on Facebook and "followers" on Twitter. But online users often have hundreds or even thousands of…

Drug use by people is on the rise and is of great interest to public health agencies and law enforcement agencies. As found by the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 20 million Americans aged 12 years or older consumed illicit drugs in…

How far and how fast does information spread in social media? Researchers have recently examined a number of factors that affect information diffusion in online social networks, including: the novelty of information, users' activity levels,…

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…

Thanks to platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, people can know facts and events that otherwise would have been silenced. However, social media significantly contribute also to fast spreading biased and false news while targeting specific…

News organizations are increasingly using social media to reach out to their audience aimed at raising their attention and engagement with news. Given the continuous decrease in subscription rates and audience trust in news media, it is…

Many people use social media to seek information during disasters while lacking access to traditional information sources. In this study, we analyze Twitter data to understand information spreading activities of social media users during…

Demographics, in particular, gender, age, and race, are a key predictor of human behavior. Despite the significant effect that demographics plays, most scientific studies using online social media do not consider this factor, mainly due to…

Cyberbullying and cyberaggression are increasingly worrisome phenomena affecting people across all demographics. More than half of young social media users worldwide have been exposed to such prolonged and/or coordinated digital harassment.…

Accurately analyzing and modeling online browsing behavior play a key role in understanding users and technology interactions. In this work, we design and conduct a user study to collect browsing data from 31 participants continuously for…

As breaking news unfolds people increasingly rely on social media to stay abreast of the latest updates. The use of social media in such situations comes with the caveat that new information being released piecemeal may encourage rumours,…

Sociolinguistic theories have highlighted how narratives are often retold, co-constructed and reconceptualized in collaborative settings. This working paper focuses on the re-interpretation of characters, an integral part of the narrative…

Feld's friendship paradox states that "your friends have more friends than you, on average." This paradox arises because extremely popular people, despite being rare, are overrepresented when averaging over friends. Using a sample of the…