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Exploring the internal mechanism of information spreading is critical for understanding and controlling the process. Traditional spreading models often assume individuals play the same role in the spreading process. In reality, however,…
It is widely believed that one's peers influence product adoption behaviors. This relationship has been linked to the number of signals a decision-maker receives in a social network. But it is unclear if these same principles hold when the…
The question that how cultural variation emerges has drawn lots of interest in sociological inquiry. Sociologists predominantly study such variation through the lens of social contagion, which mostly attributes cultural variation to the…
We collect and analyse messages exchanged in Twitter using two of the platform's publicly available APIs (the search and stream specifications). We assess the differences between the two samples, and compare the networks of communication…
Social media platforms promise to enable rich and vibrant conversations online; however, their potential is often hindered by antisocial behaviors. In this paper, we study the relationship between structure and toxicity in conversations on…
Recent work has found that the propagation of behaviors and sentiments through networks extends in ranges up to 2 to 4 degrees of distance. The regularity with which the same observation is found in dissimilar phenomena has been associated…
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) bring together a global crowd of thousands of learners for several weeks or months. In theory, the openness and scale of MOOCs can promote iterative dialogue that facilitates group cognition and knowledge…
Opinion diffusion is a crucial phenomenon in social networks, often underlying the way in which a collective of agents develops a consensus on relevant decisions. The voter model is a well-known theoretical model to study opinion spreading…
Existing studies of how information diffuses across social networks have thus far concentrated on analysing and recovering the spread of deterministic innovations such as URLs, hashtags, and group membership. However investigating how…
Predicting the popularity of content is important for both the host and users of social media sites. The challenge of this problem comes from the inequality of the popularity of con- tent. Existing methods for popularity prediction are…
Computer-mediated communication is driving fundamental changes in the nature of written language. We investigate these changes by statistical analysis of a dataset comprising 107 million Twitter messages (authored by 2.7 million unique user…
Echo chambers are defined by the simultaneous presence of opinion polarization with respect to a controversial topic and homophily, i.e. the preference of individuals to interact with like-minded peers. While recent efforts have been…
A fundamental question related to innovation diffusion is how the social network structure influences the process. Empirical evidence regarding real-world influence networks is very limited. On the other hand, agent-based modeling…
Randomized rumor spreading processes diffuse information on an undirected graph and have been widely studied. In this work, we present a generic framework for analyzing a broad class of such processes on regular graphs. Our analysis is…
Members of different political groups not only disagree about issues but also dislike and distrust each other. While social media can amplify this emotional divide -- called affective polarization by political scientists -- there is a lack…
Information on social media spreads through an underlying diffusion network that connects people of common interests and opinions. This diffusion network often comprises multiple layers, each capturing the spreading dynamics of a certain…
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…
Cumulative effect in social contagions underlies many studies on the spread of innovation, behaviors, and influence. However, few large-scale empirical studies are conducted to validate the existence of cumulative effect in the information…
Peer influence and social contagion are key denominators in the adoption and participation of information spreading, such as news propagation, word-of-mouth or viral marketing. In this study, we argue that it is biased to only focus on the…
While narratives have shaped cognition and cultures for centuries, digital media and online social networks have introduced new narrative phenomena. With increased narrative agency, networked groups of individuals can directly contribute…