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A main characteristic of social media is that its diverse content, copiously generated by both standard outlets and general users, constantly competes for the scarce attention of large audiences. Out of this flood of information some topics…
Predicting popularity, or the total volume of information outbreaks, is an important subproblem for understanding collective behavior in networks. Each of the two main types of recent approaches to the problem, feature-driven and generative…
One of the main challenges online social systems face is the prevalence of antisocial behavior, such as harassment and personal attacks. In this work, we introduce the task of predicting from the very start of a conversation whether it will…
The rising attention to the spreading of fake news and unsubstantiated rumors on online social media and the pivotal role played by confirmation bias led researchers to investigate different aspects of the phenomenon. Experimental evidence…
How does network structure affect diffusion? Recent studies suggest that the answer depends on the type of contagion. Complex contagions, unlike infectious diseases (simple contagions), are affected by social reinforcement and homophily.…
Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress towards computational fake news detection. To mitigate its negative impact, we argue that it is critical to understand what user attributes potentially cause users to share fake news. The key…
On many social networking web sites such as Facebook and Twitter, resharing or reposting functionality allows users to share others' content with their own friends or followers. As content is reshared from user to user, large cascades of…
Fringe communities promoting conspiracy theories and extremist ideologies have thrived on mainstream platforms, raising questions about the mechanisms driving their growth. Here, we hypothesize and study a possible mechanism: new members…
Asking effective questions is a powerful social skill. In this paper we seek to build computational models that learn to discriminate effective questions from ineffective ones. Armed with such a capability, future advanced systems can…
Online discussion threads are important means for individual decision-making and for aggregating collective judgments, e.g. the `wisdom of crowds'. Empirical investigations of the wisdom of crowds are currently ambivalent about the role…
The present study investigates the role of source characteristics, evidence quality, crowdsourcing platform, and prior beliefs of the topic in adult readers' credibility evaluations of short healthrelated social media posts. Researchers…
Peer recommendation is a crowdsourcing task that leverages the opinions of many to identify interesting content online, such as news, images, or videos. Peer recommendation applications often use social signals, e.g., the number of prior…
Research from a variety of fields including psychology and linguistics have found correlations and patterns in personal attributes and behavior, but efforts to understand the broader heterogeneity in human behavior have not yet integrated…
Online news has made dissemination of information a faster and more efficient process. Additionally, the shift from a print medium to an online interface has enabled user interactions, creating a space to mutually understand the reader…
User contributions in the form of posts, comments, and votes are essential to the success of online communities. However, allowing user participation also invites undesirable behavior such as trolling. In this paper, we characterize…
We evaluate homophily and heterophily among ideological and demographic groups in a typical opinion formation context: online discussions of current news. We analyze user interactions across five years in the r/news community on Reddit, one…
The massive amount of text data on the web has facilitated research on the quantitative analysis of public opinion, which could not be visualized earlier. In this paper, we propose a new opinion dynamics theory. This theory that is intended…
Social media users give rise to social trends as they share about common interests, which can be triggered by different reasons. In this work, we explore the types of triggers that spark trends on Twitter, introducing a typology with…
How do European publics debate a geopolitical crisis on social media, and do they inhabit a shared informational reality? We analyze over 38 million geolocated tweets from 20 European countries during the first eight months of the Russian…
People's interests and people's social relationships are intuitively connected, but understanding their interplay and whether they can help predict each other has remained an open question. We examine the interface of two decisive…