Related papers: On Quantifying Knowledge Segregation in Society
This paper investigates the communication styles and structures of Twitter (X) communities within the vaccination context. While mainstream research primarily focuses on the echo-chamber phenomenon, wherein certain ideas are reinforced and…
Social news websites, such as Reddit, have evolved into prominent platforms for sharing and discussing news. A key issue on social news websites sites is the formation of echo chambers, which often lead to the spread of highly biased or…
The technological revolution of the Internet has digitized the social, economic, political, and cultural activities of billions of humans. While researchers have been paying due attention to concerns of misinformation and bias, these…
The growing prominence of social media in public discourse has led to a greater scrutiny of the quality of online information and the role it plays in amplifying political polarization. However, studies of polarization on social media…
An educated and informed consumption of media content has become a challenge in modern times. With the shift from traditional news outlets to social media and similar venues, a major concern is that readers are becoming encapsulated in…
The many decisions people make about what to pay attention to online shape the spread of information in online social networks. Due to the constraints of available time and cognitive resources, the ease of discovery strongly impacts how…
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…
Assessing the trustworthiness of information online is complicated. Literacy-based paradigms are both widely used to help and widely critiqued. We conducted a study with 35 Gen Zers from across the U.S. to understand how they assess…
The hypothesis of selective exposure assumes that people seek out information that supports their views and eschew information that conflicts with their beliefs, and that has negative consequences on our society. Few researchers have…
The suggestions generated by most existing recommender systems are known to suffer from a lack of diversity, and other issues like popularity bias. As a result, they have been observed to promote well-known "blockbuster" items, and to…
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…
Search systems in online social media sites are frequently used to find information about ongoing events and people. For topics with multiple competing perspectives, such as political events or political candidates, bias in the top ranked…
Homophily -- our tendency to surround ourselves with others who share our perspectives and opinions about the world -- is both a part of human nature and an organizing principle underpinning many of our digital social networks. However,…
In order to truly understand how social media might shape online discourses or contribute to societal polarization, we need refined models of platform choice, that is: models that help us understand why users prefer one social media…
Unlike traditional media, online news platforms allow users to consume content that suits their tastes and to facilitate interactions with other people. However, as more personalized consumption of information and interaction with…
Large-scale social networks are thought to contribute to polarization by amplifying people's biases. However, the complexity of these technologies makes it difficult to identify the mechanisms responsible and to evaluate mitigation…
Much of the existing approach to the digital divide suffers from an important limitation. It is based on a binary classification of Internet use by only considering whether someone is or is not an Internet user. To remedy this shortcoming,…
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…
Social media sites are information marketplaces, where users produce and consume a wide variety of information and ideas. In these sites, users typically choose their information sources, which in turn determine what specific information…
Background: Social media chatter in 2020 has been largely dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Existing research shows that COVID-19 discourse is highly politicized, with political preferences linked to beliefs and disbeliefs about the…