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In theory, a major advantage to the big data approach in studying online communities is that it should be possible to collect a representative random sample from a broadly defined population. However, in practice, data collection processes…
Over the last couple of decades, Social Networks have connected people on the web from across the globe and have become a crucial part of our daily life. These networks have also rapidly grown as platforms for propagating products, ideas,…
On the Web, there is always a need to aggregate opinions from the crowd (as in posts, social networks, forums, etc.). Different mechanisms have been implemented to capture these opinions such as "Like" in Facebook, "Favorite" in Twitter,…
Optimism about the Internet's potential to bring the world together has been tempered by concerns about its role in inflaming the 'culture wars'. Via mass selection into like-minded groups, online society may be becoming more fragmented and…
News sources play a central role in democratic societies by shaping political and social discourse through specific topics, viewpoints and voices. Understanding these dynamics is essential for assessing whether the media landscape offers a…
Modeling information cascades in a social network through the lenses of the ideological leaning of its users can help understanding phenomena such as misinformation propagation and confirmation bias, and devising techniques for mitigating…
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…
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…
The proliferation of online social networks has significantly reshaped the way individuals access and engage with information. While these platforms offer unprecedented connectivity, they may foster environments where users are increasingly…
With social media becoming ubiquitous, information consumption from this media has also increased. However, one of the serious problems that have emerged with this increase, is the propagation of rumors. Therefore, rumor identification is a…
Polarization is a troubling phenomenon that can lead to societal divisions and hurt the democratic process. It is therefore important to develop methods to reduce it. We propose an algorithmic solution to the problem of reducing…
Detection of emerging topics are now receiving renewed interest motivated by the rapid growth of social networks. Conventional term-frequency-based approaches may not be appropriate in this context, because the information exchanged are not…
How popular a topic or an opinion appears to be in a network can be very different from its actual popularity. For example, in an online network of a social media platform, the number of people who mention a topic in their posts---i.e., its…
The role of social media in opinion formation has far-reaching implications in all spheres of society. Though social media provide platforms for expressing news and views, it is hard to control the quality of posts due to the sheer volumes…
In the recent years, we have witnessed the rapid adoption of social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, and their use as part of the everyday life of billions of people worldwide. Given the habit of people to use these…
Social-media platforms have created new ways for citizens to stay informed and participate in public debates. However, to enable a healthy environment for information sharing, social deliberation, and opinion formation, citizens need to be…
The emergence of politically driven divisions in online discussion networks has attracted a wealth of literature, but also one which has thus far been largely limited to single country studies. Hence whilst there is good evidence that these…
Understanding how people argue across ideological divides online is important for studying political polarization, misinformation, and content moderation. Existing datasets capture only part of this problem: some preserve text but ignore…
A vast amount of textual web streams is influenced by events or phenomena emerging in the real world. The social web forms an excellent modern paradigm, where unstructured user generated content is published on a regular basis and in most…
Social networks have ensured the expanding disproportion between the face of WWW stored traditionally in search engine repositories and the actual ever changing face of Web. Exponential growth of web users and the ease with which they can…