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Recommendation systems have been integrated into the majority of large online systems to filter and rank information according to user profiles. It thus influences the way users interact with the system and, as a consequence, bias the…
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…
Recommender systems are one of the most widely used services on several online platforms to suggest potential items to the end-users. These services often use different machine learning techniques for which fairness is a concerning factor,…
With the spread of false and misleading information in current news, many algorithmic tools have been introduced with the aim of assessing bias and reliability in written content. However, there has been little work exploring how effective…
Positive feedback via likes and awards is central to online governance, yet which attributes of users' posts elicit rewards -- and how these vary across authors and communities -- remains unclear. To examine this, we combine…
Popularity bias and positivity bias are two prominent sources of bias in recommender systems. Both arise from input data, propagate through recommendation models, and lead to unfair or suboptimal outcomes. Popularity bias occurs when a…
Online experiments (A/B tests) are widely regarded as the gold standard for evaluating recommender system variants and guiding launch decisions. However, a variety of biases can distort the results of the experiment and mislead…
The prevalence of online hate and abuse is a pressing global concern. While tackling such societal harms is a priority for research across the social sciences, it is a difficult task, in part because of the magnitude of the problem. User…
Many policy evaluations using instrumental variable (IV) methods include individuals who interact with each other, potentially violating the standard IV assumptions. This paper defines and partially identifies direct and spillover effects…
We investigate opinion dynamics and information spreading on networks under the influence of content filtering technologies. The filtering mechanism, present in many online social platforms, reduces individuals' exposure to disagreeing…
In this paper, we compare methodological approaches for comparing student and staff perceptions, and ask: how much do these measures vary across different approaches? We focus on the case of AI perceptions, which are generally assessed via…
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…
This paper presents a study of user voting on three websites: Imdb, Amazon and BookCrossings. It reports on an expert evaluation of the voting mechanisms of each website and a quantitative data analysis of users' aggregate voting behavior.…
Estimating effects of spatially structured exposures is complicated by unmeasured spatial confounders, which undermine identifiability in spatial linear regression models unless structural assumptions are imposed. We develop a general…
How to robustly rank the aesthetic quality of given images has been a long-standing ill-posed topic. Such challenge stems mainly from the diverse subjective opinions of different observers about the varied types of content. There is a…
Uncertainty in the estimation of the causal effect in observational studies is often due to unmeasured confounding, i.e., the presence of unobserved covariates linking treatments and outcomes. Instrumental Variables (IV) are commonly used…
In this paper, we present an empirical study of the opinion dynamics of a large-scale sample of online social network users. We estimate opinions of users as continuous scalars based on their subscriptions to information sources and analyze…
Individuals increasingly rely on social networking platforms to form opinions. However, these platforms typically aim to maximize engagement, which may not align with social good. In this paper, we introduce an opinion dynamics model where…
The Internet has significantly affected the increase of social media users. Nowadays, informative content is presented along with entertainment on the web. Highlighting environmental issues on social networks is crucial, given their…
News recommender systems are used by online news providers to alleviate information overload and to provide personalized content to users. However, algorithmic news curation has been hypothesized to create filter bubbles and to intensify…