Related papers: Why echo chambers form and network interventions f…

Like other social animals and biological systems, human groups constantly exchange information. Network models provide a way of quantifying this process by representing the pathways of information propagation between individuals. Existing…

The explosive growth of social media has not only revolutionized communication but also brought challenges such as political polarization, misinformation, hate speech, and echo chambers. This dissertation employs computational social…

Despite their playful purpose social media changed the way users access information, debate, and form their opinions. Recent studies, indeed, showed that users online tend to promote their favored narratives and thus to form polarized…

Social interactions influence people's opinions. In some situations, these interactions eventually yield a consensus opinion; in others, they can lead to opinion fragmentation and the formation of different opinion groups in the form of…

In most social and information systems the activity of agents generates rapidly evolving time-varying networks. The temporal variation in networks' connectivity patterns and the ongoing dynamic processes are usually coupled in ways that…

Collective decision-making arises from individual agents integrating their own personal observations with information obtained from social partners. In many biological systems that exhibit collective decision-making, the process by which…

Many link formation mechanisms for the evolution of social networks have been successful to reproduce various empirical findings in social networks. However, they have largely ignored the fact that individuals make decisions on whether to…

The effects of social media on critical issues, such as polarization and misinformation, are under scrutiny due to the disruptive consequences that these phenomena can have on our societies. Among the algorithms routinely used by social…

Online social networking technologies enable individuals to simultaneously share information with any number of peers. Quantifying the causal effect of these technologies on the dissemination of information requires not only identification…

Research on friendship networks in schools suggests that heterogeneity increases homophily preferences. We argue that this may be a misleading interpretation of the coefficients of the exponential random graph models (p*) that are used to…

Demonstrations, protests, riots, and shifts in public opinion respond to the coordinating potential of communication networks. Digital technologies have turned interpersonal networks into massive, pervasive structures that constantly…

The spread of ideas, behaviors, and technologies generally depends on feedback mechanisms operating across multiple scales. Previous studies have extensively examined pairwise transmission and local reinforcement. However, the role of…

This study investigates echo chambers in social networks through an analysis of Twitter news accounts. Utilizing bias labels from the AllSides website, we construct a dataset representing six dimensions of news bias. Through manual…

Opinion dynamics on networks has wide applications to empirical and engineered systems and profound prospects in the general study of complex systems. Many efforts have been devoted to understanding how opinion dynamics is affected by…

The structure of communication networks is an important determinant of the capacity of teams, organizations and societies to solve policy, business and science problems. Yet, previous studies reached contradictory results about the…

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…

The structure of a network can significantly influence the properties of the dynamical processes which take place on them. While many studies have been devoted to this influence, much less attention has been devoted to the interplay and…

Faced with uncertainty in decision making, individuals often turn to their social networks to inform their decisions. In consequence, these networks become central to how new products and behaviors spread. A key structural feature of…

This paper develops strategic foundations for an important statistical model of random networks with heterogeneous expected degrees. Based on this, we show how social networking services that subtly alter the costs and indirect benefits of…

Despite echo chambers in social media have been under considerable scrutiny, general models for their detection and analysis are missing. In this work, we aim to fill this gap by proposing a probabilistic generative model that explains…