Related papers: Characterizing Attention Cascades in WhatsApp Grou…
In this work we study, on a sample of 2.3 million individuals, how Facebook users consumed different information at the edge of political discussion and news during the last Italian electoral competition. Pages are categorized, according to…
Fake news and misinformation are one of the most significant challenges brought about by advances in communication technologies. We chose to research the spread of fake news in Pakistan because of some unfortunate incidents that took place…
In recent years, reports and anecdotal evidence pointing at the role of WhatsApp in a variety of events, ranging from elections to collective violence, have emerged. While academic research should examine the validity of these claims,…
The ability to predict the size of information cascades in online social networks is crucial for various applications, including decision-making and viral marketing. However, traditional methods either rely on complicated time-varying…
Information diffusion is usually modeled as a process in which immutable pieces of information propagate over a network. In reality, however, messages are not immutable, but may be morphed with every step, potentially entailing large…
Conspiracy theories have long drawn public attention, but their explosive growth on platforms like Telegram during the COVID-19 pandemic raises pressing questions about their impact on societal trust, democracy, and public health. We…
Social media enables users to publish, disseminate, and access information easily. The downside is that it has fewer gatekeepers of what content is allowed to enter public circulation than the traditional media. In this paper, we present…
In India, people identify with a particular group based on certain attributes such as religion. The same religious groups are often provoked against each other. Previous studies show the role of provocation in increasing tensions between…
The paper addresses a method for spreading messages in social networks through an initial acceleration by Spreading Groups. These groups start the spread which eventually reaches a larger portion of the network. The use of spreading groups…
For a group of autonomous communicating agents, the ability to distinguish a meaningful input from disturbance, and come to collective agreement or disagreement in response to that input, is paramount for carrying out coordinated…
Social media have become the main vehicle of information production and consumption online. Millions of users every day log on their Facebook or Twitter accounts to get updates and news, read about their topics of interest, and become…
A common assumption in the literature on information diffusion is that populations are homogeneous regarding individuals' information acquisition and propagation process: Individuals update their informed and actively communicating state…
The widespread online misinformation could cause public panic and serious economic damages. The misinformation containment problem aims at limiting the spread of misinformation in online social networks by launching competing campaigns.…
We introduce WhaVax, a new expert-annotated dataset of vaccine-related WhatsApp messages collected from large Brazilian public groups spanning multiple pandemic years. The dataset was constructed through a rigorous, carefully designed…
As people rely on social media as their primary sources of news, the spread of misinformation has become a significant concern. In this large-scale study of news in social media we analyze eleven million posts and investigate propagation…
We examine how misinformation spreads in social networks composed of individuals with long-term offline relationships. Especially, we focus on why misinformation persists and diffuses despite being recognized by most as false. In our…
Social networks seeded, crystallized and structured by large-scale social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram and WeChat exhibit complicated epistemic structures and dynamics that arise from the nature of…
WhatsApp tiplines, first launched in 2019 to combat misinformation, enable users to interact with fact-checkers to verify misleading content. This study analyzes 580 unique claims (tips) from 451 users, covering both high-resource languages…
As breaking news unfolds people increasingly rely on social media to stay abreast of the latest updates. The use of social media in such situations comes with the caveat that new information being released piecemeal may encourage rumours,…
The deluge of digital information in our daily life -- from user-generated content, such as microblogs and scientific papers, to online business, such as viral marketing and advertising -- offers unprecedented opportunities to explore and…