Related papers: When Celebrities Speak: A Nationwide Twitter Exper…
The COVID-19 pandemic has been damaging to the lives of people all around the world. Accompanied by the pandemic is an infodemic, an abundant and uncontrolled spreading of potentially harmful misinformation. The infodemic may severely…
The link between affect, defined as the capacity for sentimental arousal on the part of a message, and virality, defined as the probability that it be sent along, is of significant theoretical and practical importance, e.g. for viral…
Information spread in social media depends on a number of factors, including how the site displays information, how users navigate it to find items of interest, users' tastes, and the `virality' of information, i.e., its propensity to be…
How do humans respond to indirect social influence when making decisions? We analysed an experiment where subjects had to repeatedly guess the correct answer to factual questions, while having only aggregated information about the answers…
Geotagging on social media has become an important proxy for understanding people's mobility and social events. Research that uses geotags to infer public opinions relies on several key assumptions about the behavior of geotagged and…
Human interactions are mediated by social influence. During crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, social influence determines whether life-saving information is adopted or immunization campaigns meet their targets. The literature on online…
Trolling and social bots have been proven as powerful tactics for manipulating the public opinion and sowing discord among Twitter users. This effort requires substantial content fabrication and account coordination to evade Twitter's…
Social networks play a fundamental role in the diffusion of information. However, there are two different ways of how information reaches a person in a network. Information reaches us through connections in our social networks, as well as…
The way people respond to messaging from public health organizations on social media can provide insight into public perceptions on critical health issues, especially during a global crisis such as COVID-19. It could be valuable for…
COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented challenges to the world, and vaccination has been a key strategy to combat the disease. Since Twitter is one of the most widely used public microblogging platforms, researchers have analysed…
Fake news are affecting a large proportion of the population even becoming a danger to the society. Mostly, this disinformation flow take place through Internet. Being aware of that problem, in this work we propose a synthetic indicator…
The rise of social media platforms has fundamentally altered the public discourse by providing easy to use and ubiquitous forums for the exchange of ideas and opinions. Elected officials often use such platforms for communication with the…
Modifiable health behaviors, a leading cause of illness and death in many countries, are often driven by individual beliefs and sentiments about health and disease. Individual behaviors affecting health outcomes are increasingly modulated…
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, fears grew that making vaccination a political (instead of public health) issue may impact the efficacy of this life-saving intervention, spurring the spread of vaccine-hesitant content. In this…
The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected the normal course of life -- from lock-downs and virtual meetings to the unprecedentedly swift creation of vaccines. To halt the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has started preparing for the global…
Solicited public opinion surveys reach a limited subpopulation of willing participants and are expensive to conduct, leading to poor time resolution and a restricted pool of expert-chosen survey topics. In this study, we demonstrate that…
The dynamics and influence of fake news on Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election remains to be clarified. Here, we use a dataset of 171 million tweets in the five months preceding the election day to identify 30 million tweets,…
Politicians with large media visibility and social media audiences have a significant influence on public discourse. Consequently, their dissemination of misinformation can have profound implications for society. This study investigated the…
Databases of highly networked individuals have been indispensable in studying narratives and influence on social media. To support studies on Twitter in India, we present a systematically categorised database of accounts of influence on…
With the ubiquitous reach of social media, influencers are increasingly central to articulation of political agendas on a range of topics. We curate a sample of tweets from the 200 most followed sportspersons in India and the United States…