Related papers: Social Influence and Radicalization: A Social Data…
Social influence plays a significant role in shaping individual sentiments and actions, particularly in a world of ubiquitous digital interconnection. The rapid development of generative AI has engendered well-founded concerns regarding the…
Increasing levels of far-right extremist violence have generated public concern about the spread of radicalization in the United States. Previous research suggests that radicalized individuals are destabilized by various environmental (or…
Social networks have become an increasingly common abstraction to capture the interactions of individual users in a number of everyday activities and applications. As a result, the analysis of such networks has attracted lots of attention…
Radical right influencers routinely use social media to spread highly divisive, disruptive and anti-democratic messages. Assessing and countering the challenge that such content poses is crucial for ensuring that online spaces remain open,…
Social media algorithms are thought to amplify variation in user beliefs, thus contributing to radicalization. However, quantitative evidence on how algorithms and user preferences jointly shape harmful online engagement is limited. I…
The spread of radical ideologies is a key to fanaticism, recruitment and terrorist activities. Hence, preventing such activities requires predictive models capable of identifying areas and agents before occurrence of catastrophic terrorist…
People often stick to their existing beliefs, ignoring contradicting evidence or only interacting with those who reinforce their views. Social media platforms often facilitate such tendencies of homophily and echo-chambers as they promote…
Despite extensive research, the mechanisms through which online platforms shape extremism and polarization remain poorly understood. We identify and test a mechanism, grounded in empirical evidence, that explains how ranking algorithms can…
The rapid expansion of cyberspace has greatly facilitated the strategic shift of traditional crimes to online platforms. This has included malicious actors, such as extremist organisations, making use of online networks to disseminate…
Recent years have seen a marked increase in the spread of misinformation, a phenomenon which has been accelerated and amplified by social media such as Facebook and Twitter. While some actors spread misinformation to push a specific agenda,…
The evolution of opinions in a population of individuals who constantly interact with a common source of user-generated content (i.e. the internet) and are also subject to propaganda is analyzed using computer simulations. The model is…
Recommendations algorithms of social media platforms are often criticized for placing users in "rabbit holes" of (increasingly) ideologically biased content. Despite these concerns, prior evidence on this algorithmic radicalization is…
In recent years, radicalization is being increasingly attempted on video-sharing platforms. Previous studies have been proposed to identify online radicalization using generic social context analysis, without taking into account…
Online extremists in social networks pose a new form of threat to the general public. These extremists range from cyberbullies who harass innocent users to terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) that use…
Polarization is implicated in the erosion of democracy and the progression to violence, which makes the polarization properties of large algorithmic content selection systems (recommender systems) a matter of concern for peace and security.…
Influence maximization is the problem of finding a set of users in a social network, such that by targeting this set, one maximizes the expected spread of influence in the network. Most of the literature on this topic has focused…
Online social networks have become an important platform for people to communicate, share knowledge and disseminate information. Given the widespread usage of social media, individuals' ideas, preferences and behavior are often influenced…
This paper addresses influence pathway discovery, a key emerging problem in today's online media. We propose a discovery algorithm that leverages recently published work on unsupervised interpretable ideological embedding, a mapping of…
Social Media is a key aspect of modern society where people share their thoughts, views, feelings and sentiments. Over the last few years, the inflation in popularity of social media has resulted in a monumental increase in data. Users use…
Social media platforms have become critical infrastructures for public communication, where large-scale interaction can both support socially beneficial collective pressure and amplify polarization and conflict. While opinion-dynamics…