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Online social media has become increasingly popular in recent years due to its ease of access and ability to connect with others. One of social media's main draws is its anonymity, allowing users to share their thoughts and opinions without…
Social media play a key role in mobilizing collective action, holding the potential for studying the pathways that lead individuals to actively engage in addressing global challenges. However, quantitative research in this area has been…
We investigate how the overall response to a piece of information (a story or an article) evolves and relaxes as a function of time in social networks like Reddit, Digg and Youtube. This response or popularity is measured in terms of the…
Humans make decisions based on the information they obtain from several major sources, among which the comments of others in Internet forums play an increasing role. Such forums cover a wide spectrum of topics and represent an essential…
Online platforms face pressure to keep their communities civil and respectful. Thus, the bannings of problematic online communities from mainstream platforms like Reddit and Facebook are often met with enthusiastic public reactions.…
With increasing attention to online anti-social behaviors such as personal attacks and bigotry, it is critical to have an accurate accounting of how widespread anti-social behaviors are. In this paper, we empirically measure the prevalence…
While much attention has been devoted to the causes of opinion change, little is known about its consequences. Our study sheds a light on the relationship between one user's opinion change episode and subsequent behavioral change on an…
We often treat social media as a lens onto society. How might that lens distort the popularity of political and social viewpoints? We examine discrepancies between publicly posted and privately surveyed opinions within communities,…
Existing studies of how information diffuses across social networks have thus far concentrated on analysing and recovering the spread of deterministic innovations such as URLs, hashtags, and group membership. However investigating how…
Music engagement spans diverse interactions with music, from selection and emotional response to its impact on behavior, identity, and social connections. Social media platforms provide spaces where such engagement can be observed in…
The creation and sharing of memes is a common modality of online social interactions. The goal of the present work is to better understand the collective dynamics of memes in this accelerating and competitive environment. By taking an…
Social media users post content on various topics. A defining feature of social media is that other users can provide feedback -- called community feedback -- to their content in the form of comments, replies, and retweets. We hypothesize…
Today, users are reading the news through social platforms. These platforms are built to facilitate crowd engagement, but not necessarily disseminate useful news to inform the masses. Hence, the news that is highly engaged with may not be…
We study the evolution of long-lived controversial debates as manifested on Twitter from 2011 to 2016. Specifically, we explore how the structure of interactions and content of discussion varies with the level of collective attention, as…
Social media, regarded as two-layer networks consisting of users and items, turn out to be the most important channels for access to massive information in the era of Web 2.0. The dynamics of human activity and item popularity is a crucial…
The advent of the era of Big Data has allowed many researchers to dig into various socio-technical systems, including social media platforms. In particular, these systems have provided them with certain verifiable means to look into certain…
We analyze gendered communities defined in three different ways: text, users, and sentiment. Differences across these representations reveal facets of communities' distinctive identities, such as social group, topic, and attitudes. Two…
Online volunteers are an uncompensated yet valuable labor force for many social platforms. For example, volunteer content moderators perform a vast amount of labor to maintain online communities. However, as social platforms like Reddit…
Online communities are a global phenomenon, but assessing their actual geographical spread requires accurate and scalable measurement. We propose and evaluate methods that infer the time zone of online communities solely from their temporal…
The algorithms and the interactions facilitated by online platforms have been used by radical groups to recruit vulnerable individuals to their cause. This has resulted in the sharp growth of violent events and deteriorating online…