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The suggestions generated by most existing recommender systems are known to suffer from a lack of diversity, and other issues like popularity bias. As a result, they have been observed to promote well-known "blockbuster" items, and to…
This study investigates echo chambers in social networks through an analysis of Twitter news accounts. Utilizing bias labels from the AllSides website, we construct a dataset representing six dimensions of news bias. Through manual…
Polarization is a growing, global problem. As such, many social media based solutions have been proposed in order to reduce it. In this study, we propose a new solution that recommends topics to celebrities to encourage them to join a…
The emerging social network platforms enable users to share their own opinions, as well as to exchange opinions with others. However, adversarial network perturbation, where malicious users intentionally spread their extreme opinions,…
Echo chambers, i.e., situations where one is exposed only to opinions that agree with their own, are an increasing concern for the political discourse in many democratic countries. This paper studies the phenomenon of political echo…
Members of different political groups not only disagree about issues but also dislike and distrust each other. While social media can amplify this emotional divide -- called affective polarization by political scientists -- there is a lack…
The intensification of affective polarization worldwide has raised new questions about how social media platforms might be further fracturing an already-divided public sphere. As opposed to ideological polarization, affective polarization…
The topology of the hyperlink graph among pages expressing different opinions may influence the exposure of readers to diverse content. Structural bias may trap a reader in a polarized bubble with no access to other opinions. We model…
Imagine a food recommender system -- how would we check if it is \emph{causing} and fostering unhealthy eating habits or merely reflecting users' interests? How much of a user's experience over time with a recommender is caused by the…
The advent of social media platforms has revolutionized information consumption patterns, with individuals frequently engaging in these platforms for social interactions. This trend has fostered an environment where people gravitate towards…
Social Network sites are fertile ground for several polluting phenomena affecting online and offline spaces. Among these phenomena are included echo chambers, closed systems in which the opinions expressed by the people inside are…
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…
This paper deals with the modeling and estimation of the sociological phenomena called echo chambers and segregation in social networks. Specifically, we present a novel community-based graph model that represents the emergence of…
As problems in political polarization and the spread of misinformation become serious, belief propagation on a social network becomes an important question to explore. Previous breakthroughs have been made in algorithmic approaches to…
In micro-blogging platforms, people connect and interact with others. However, due to cognitive biases, they tend to interact with like-minded people and read agreeable information only. Many efforts to make people connect with those who…
Social media has emerged as a significant source of information for people. As agents interact with each other through social media platforms, they create numerous complex social networks. Within these networks, information spread among…
Social media platforms are online fora where users engage in discussions, share content, and build connections. This review explores the dynamics of social interactions, user-generated contents, and biases within the context of social media…
The Friedkin-Johnsen (FJ) model is a popular opinion dynamics model that explains the disagreement that can occur even among closely interacting individuals. Cluster consensus is a special type of disagreement, where agents in a network…
Nowadays, artificial intelligence algorithms are used for targeted and personalized content distribution in the large scale as part of the intense competition for attention in the digital media environment. Unfortunately, targeted…
This paper studies how a centralized planner can modify the structure of a social or information network to reduce polarization. First, polarization is found to be highly dependent on degree and structural properties of the network --…