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User comments on social media have been recognized as a crucial factor in distinguishing between fake and real news, with many studies focusing on the textual content of user reactions. However, the interactions among agents in the comment…
Cognitive and social traits of individuals are reflected in language use. Moreover, individuals who are prone to spread fake news online often share common traits. Building on these ideas, we introduce a model that creates representations…
Wikipedia and many User-Generated Content (UGC) communities are known for producing reliable, quality content, but also for being vulnerable to false or misleading information. Previous work has shown that many hoaxes on Wikipedia go…
Individuals engaging on social media often tend to establish online communities where interactions predominantly occur among like-minded peers. While considerable efforts have been devoted to studying and delineating these communities,…
Web 2.0 helps to expand the range and depth of conversation on many issues and facilitates the formation of online communities. Online communities draw various individuals together based on their common opinions on a core set of issues.…
Social media platforms enable the rapid dissemination and consumption of information. However, users instantly consume such content regardless of the reliability of the shared data. Consequently, the latter crowdsourcing model is exposed to…
In recent years, social media has increasingly become an important platform for political campaigns, especially elections. It remains elusive how exactly public discourse is driven by the intricate interplay between individual…
We study the evolution of long-lived controversial debates as manifested on Twitter from 2011 to 2016. Specifically, we explore how the structure of interactions and content of discussion varies with the level of collective attention, as…
Homophily -- our tendency to surround ourselves with others who share our perspectives and opinions about the world -- is both a part of human nature and an organizing principle underpinning many of our digital social networks. However,…
Understanding the dynamics of language toxicity on social media is important for us to investigate the propagation of misinformation and the development of echo chambers for political scenarios such as U.S. presidential elections. Recent…
We introduce a socially motivated extension of the voter model in which individual voters are also influenced by two opposing, fixed-opinion news sources. These sources forestall consensus and instead drive the population to a politically…
The social brain hypothesis fixes to 150 the number of social relationships we are able to maintain. Similar cognitive constraints emerge in several aspects of our daily life, from our mobility up to the way we communicate, and might even…
Social media platforms heavily changed how users consume and digest information and, thus, how the popularity of topics evolves. In this paper, we explore the interplay between the virality of controversial topics and how they may trigger…
Identifying controversial topics is not only interesting from a social point of view, it also enables the application of methods to avoid the information segregation, creating better discussion contexts and reaching agreements in the best…
Online platforms play a relevant role in the creation and diffusion of false or misleading news. Concerningly, the COVID-19 pandemic is shaping a communication network - barely considered in the literature - which reflects the emergence of…
Echo chambers and opinion polarization recently quantified in several sociopolitical contexts and across different social media, raise concerns on their potential impact on the spread of misinformation and on openness of debates. Despite…
Extremist communities increasingly rely on social media to sustain and amplify divisive discourse. However, the relationship between their internal participation structures, audience engagement, and narrative expression remains…
After the COVID-19 pandemic caused internet usage to grow by 70%, there has been an increased number of people all across the world using social media. Applications like Twitter, Meta Threads, YouTube, and Reddit have become increasingly…
While social media make it easy to connect with and access information from anyone, they also facilitate basic influence and unfriending mechanisms that may lead to segregated and polarized clusters known as "echo chambers." Here we study…
Users online tend to acquire information adhering to their system of beliefs and to ignore dissenting information. Such dynamics might affect page popularity. In this paper we introduce an algorithm, that we call PopRank, to assess both the…