Related papers: Community Interaction and Conflict on the Web
Previous research has documented the existence of both online echo chambers and hostile intergroup interactions. In this paper, we explore the relationship between these two phenomena by studying the activity of 5.97M Reddit users and 421M…
Anti-social behaviors in social media can happen both at user and community levels. While a great deal of attention is on the individual as an 'aggressor,' the banning of entire Reddit subcommunities (i.e., subreddits) demonstrates that…
In this work, we present a novel quantification of conflict in online discussion. Unlike previous studies on conflict dynamics, which model conflict as a binary phenomenon, our measure is continuous-valued, which we validate with manually…
While online hate groups pose significant risks to the health of online platforms and safety of marginalized groups, little is known about what causes users to become active in hate groups and the effect of social interactions on furthering…
Online communities and their host platforms are mutually dependent yet conflict-prone. When platform policies clash with community values, communities have resisted through strikes, blackouts, and even migration to other platforms. Through…
Community rules play a key part in enabling or constraining the behaviors of members in online communities. However, little is unknown regarding whether and to what degree changing rules actually affects community dynamics. In this paper,…
Online communities play a critical role in shaping societal discourse and influencing collective behavior in the real world. The tendency for people to connect with others who share similar characteristics and views, known as homophily,…
In order to keep up with the demand of curating the deluge of crowd-sourced content, social media platforms leverage user interaction feedback to make decisions about which content to display, highlight, and hide. User interactions such as…
Many Web platforms rely on user collaboration to generate high-quality content: Wiki, Q&A communities, etc. Understanding and modeling the different collaborative behaviors is therefore critical. However, collaboration patterns are…
While online social media offers a way for ignored or stifled voices to be heard, it also allows users a platform to spread hateful speech. Such speech usually originates in fringe communities, yet it can spill over into mainstream…
In health-related topics, user toxicity in online discussions frequently becomes a source of social conflict or promotion of dangerous, unscientific behaviour; common approaches for battling it include different forms of detection, flagging…
Millions of people use online social networks to reinforce their sense of belonging, for example by giving and asking for feedback as a form of social validation and self-recognition. It is common to observe disagreement among people…
Emotions play an important role in interpersonal interactions and social conflict, yet their function in the development of controversy and disagreement in online conversations has not been explored. To address this gap, we study…
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…
Disagreement and conflict are a fact of social life and considerably affect our well-being and productivity. Such negative interactions are rarely explicitly declared and recorded and this makes them hard for scientists to study. We…
People nowadays express their opinions in online spaces, using different forms of interactions such as posting, sharing and discussing with one another. How do these digital traces change in response to events happening in the real world?…
The aim of this paper is to present methods to systematically analyze individual and group behavioral patterns observed in community driven discussion platforms like Reddit where users exchange information and views on various topics of…
Making online social communities 'better' is a challenging undertaking, as online communities are extraordinarily varied in their size, topical focus, and governance. As such, what is valued by one community may not be valued by another.…
In recent years, Online Social Networks have become an important medium for people who suffer from mental disorders to share moments of hardship, and receive emotional and informational support. In this work, we analyze how discussions in…
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…