Related papers: Experiments in Social Media
The importance of big data is a contested topic among social scientists. Proponents claim it will fuel a research revolution, but skeptics challenge it as unreliably measured and decontextualized, with limited utility for accurately…
The Turing test aimed to recognize the behavior of a human from that of a computer algorithm. Such challenge is more relevant than ever in today's social media context, where limited attention and technology constrain the expressive power…
Thanks to platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, people can know facts and events that otherwise would have been silenced. However, social media significantly contribute also to fast spreading biased and false news while targeting specific…
Identifying factors that affect human decision making and quantifying their influence remain essential and challenging tasks for the design and implementation of social and technological communication systems. We report results of a…
Data can be collected in scientific studies via a controlled experiment or passive observation. Big data is often collected in a passive way, e.g. from social media. In studies of causation great efforts are made to guard against bias and…
Technology is uniquely positioned to help us analyze large amounts of information to provide valuable insight during widespread public health concerns, like the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, information technology companies like Apple…
Social networking and micro-blogging services, such as Twitter, play an important role in sharing digital information. Despite the popularity and usefulness of social media, they are regularly abused by corrupt users. One of these nefarious…
Social media platforms have been widely linked to societal harms, including rising polarization and the erosion of constructive debate. Can these problems be mitigated through prosocial interventions? We address this question using a novel…
Estimation of social influence in networks can be substantially biased in observational studies due to homophily and network correlation in exposure to exogenous events. Randomized experiments, in which the researcher intervenes in the…
Regulation of tobacco products is rapidly evolving. Understanding public sentiment in response to changes is very important as authorities assess how to effectively protect population health. Social media systems are widely recognized to be…
Science is a fundamental human activity and we trust its results because it has several error-correcting mechanisms. Its is subject to experimental tests that are replicated by independent parts. Given the huge amount of information…
This paper reports on the challenges and lessons we learned while running controlled experiments in crowdsourcing platforms. Crowdsourcing is becoming an attractive technique to engage a diverse and large pool of subjects in experimental…
Social networks such as Facebook (FB) and Instagram are known for tracking user online behaviour for commercial gain. To this day, there is practically no other way of achieving privacy in said platforms other than renouncing their use.…
Online and in the real world, communities are bonded together by emotional consensus around core issues. Emotional responses to scientific findings often play a pivotal role in these core issues. When there is too much diversity of opinion…
Social media platforms allow users to create polls to gather public opinion on diverse topics. However, we know little about what such polls are used for and how reliable they are, especially in significant contexts like elections. Focusing…
Social media, once hailed as a vehicle for democratization and the promotion of positive social change across the globe, are under attack for becoming a tool of political manipulation and spread of disinformation. A case in point is the…
Computational propaganda deploys social or political bots to try to shape, steer and manipulate online public discussions and influence decisions. Collective behaviour of populations of social bots has not been yet widely studied, though…
Privacy in Social Network Sites (SNSs) like Facebook or Instagram is closely related to people's self-disclosure decisions and their ability to foresee the consequences of sharing personal information with large and diverse audiences.…
Social bots are currently regarded an influential but also somewhat mysterious factor in public discourse and opinion making. They are considered to be capable of massively distributing propaganda in social and online media and their…
Large-scale social networks are thought to contribute to polarization by amplifying people's biases. However, the complexity of these technologies makes it difficult to identify the mechanisms responsible and to evaluate mitigation…