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This paper highlights the developing need for quantitative modes for capturing and monitoring malicious communication in social media. There has been a deliberate "weaponization" of messaging through the use of social networks including by…
Commercial content moderation APIs are marketed as scalable solutions to combat online hate speech. However, the reliance on these APIs risks both silencing legitimate speech, called over-moderation, and failing to protect online platforms…
This paper evaluates Parler, the controversial social media platform, from two seemingly orthogonal perspectives: UX design perspective and data science. UX design researchers explore how users react to the interface/content of their social…
Recent studies suggest that social media usage -- while linked to an increased diversity of information and perspectives for users -- has exacerbated user polarization on many issues. A popular theory for this phenomenon centers on the…
On social networks, algorithmic personalization drives users into filter bubbles where they rarely see content that deviates from their interests. We present a model for content curation and personalization that avoids filter bubbles, along…
Information cocoons are frequently cited in the literature on whether and how social media might lead to ideological segregation and political polarization. From the behavioural and communication perspectives, this paper first examines why…
The rapid growth of social media in recent years has fed into some highly undesirable phenomena such as proliferation of abusive and offensive language on the Internet. Previous research suggests that such hateful content tends to come from…
Generative AI is altering how we work, learn, communicate, and participate in online communities. How might online communities be changed by generative AI? To start addressing this question, we focused on online community moderators'…
Echoing the history of search engines and social media content rankings, the advent of large language models (LLMs) has led to a push for increased personalization of model outputs to individual users. In the past, personalized…
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…
People are shifting from traditional news sources to online news at an incredibly fast rate. However, the technology behind online news consumption promotes content that confirms the users' existing point of view. This phenomenon has led to…
Social media platforms provide an environment where people can freely engage in discussions. Unfortunately, they also enable several problems, such as online harassment. Recently, Google and Jigsaw started a project called Perspective,…
In social networks, users often engage with like-minded peers. This selective exposure to opinions might result in echo chambers, i.e., political fragmentation and social polarization of user interactions. When echo chambers form, opinions…
We present the Bayesian Echo Chamber, a new Bayesian generative model for social interaction data. By modeling the evolution of people's language usage over time, this model discovers latent influence relationships between them. Unlike…
In recent times, social media sites such as Twitter have been extensively used for debating politics and public policies. These debates span millions of tweets and numerous topics of public importance. Thus, it is imperative that this vast…
Abusive behaviors are common on online social networks. The increasing frequency of antisocial behaviors forces the hosts of online platforms to find new solutions to address this problem. Automating the moderation process has thus received…
We analyze the relationship between partisanship, echo chambers, and vulnerability to online misinformation by studying news sharing behavior on Twitter. While our results confirm prior findings that online misinformation sharing is…
As social media has become a predominant mode of communication globally, the rise of abusive content threatens to undermine civil discourse. Recognizing the critical nature of this issue, a significant body of research has been dedicated to…
Online social platforms are beset with hateful speech - content that expresses hatred for a person or group of people. Such content can frighten, intimidate, or silence platform users, and some of it can inspire other users to commit…
Search engines play a crucial role as digital gatekeepers, shaping the visibility of Web and social media content through algorithmic curation. This study investigates how search engines like Google selectively promotes or suppresses…