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The increased proliferation of abusive content on social media platforms has a negative impact on online users. The dread, dislike, discomfort, or mistrust of lesbian, gay, transgender or bisexual persons is defined as…
Young people worldwide are participating in ever-increasing numbers in online fan communities. Far from mere shallow repositories of pop culture, these sites are accumulating significant evidence that sophisticated informal learning is…
Opinion dynamics is of paramount importance as it provides insights into the complex dynamics of opinion propagation and social relationship adjustment. It is assumed in most of the previous works that social relationships evolve much…
Online communities featuring 'anti-X' hate and extremism, somehow thrive online despite moderator pressure. We present a first-principles theory of their dynamics, which accounts for the fact that the online population comprises diverse…
We provide a mathematical model for networks based on similarities (homophily) and evolving by mutual imitation (mimesis). We show that such social networks will converge to a state of segregation, where the in-group interactions will be…
Web 2.0 is transforming the internet: Information consumers become information producers and consumers at the same time. In virtual places like Facebook, Youtube, discussion boards and weblogs diversificated topics, groups and issues are…
We study the joint evolution of worldviews by proposing a model of opinion dynamics, which is inspired in notions from evolutionary ecology. Agents update their opinion on a specific issue based on their propensity to change -- asserted by…
Far beyond its relevance for commercial and political marketings, opinion formation and decision making processes are central for representative democracy, government functioning, and state organization. In the present report, a stochastic…
There appears to be a dilemma between the freedom of expression and protection from the adverse effects of uncivil political expression online. While previous studies have revealed various factors that affect attitudes toward freedom of…
Ad hominem attacks are those that target some feature of a person's character instead of the position the person is maintaining. These attacks are harmful because they propagate implicit biases and diminish a person's credibility. Since…
Authors of malicious software are not hiding as much as one would assume: they have a visible online footprint. Apart from online forums, this footprint appears in software development platforms, where authors create publicly-accessible…
The evolution of the Internet has manifested itself in many ways: the traffic characteristics, the interconnection topologies and the business relationships among the autonomous components. It is important to understand why (and how) this…
Social Media has seen a tremendous growth in the last decade and is continuing to grow at a rapid pace. With such adoption, it is increasingly becoming a rich source of data for opinion mining and sentiment analysis. The detection and…
The problems of online hate speech and cyberbullying have significantly worsened since the increase in popularity of social media platforms such as YouTube and Twitter (X). Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques have proven to provide…
Social norms have traditionally been difficult to quantify. In any particular society, their sheer number and complex interdependencies often limit a system-level analysis. One exception is that of the network of norms that sustain the…
Calls are escalating for social media platforms to do more to mitigate extreme online communities whose views can lead to real-world harms, e.g., mis/disinformation and distrust that increased Covid-19 fatalities, and now extend to…
The migration of Twitter users to Mastodon following Elon Musk's acquisition presents a unique opportunity to study collective behavior and gain insights into the drivers of coordinated behavior in online media. We analyzed the social…
Today's society faces widening disagreement and conflicts among constituents with incompatible views. Escalated views and opinions are seen not only in radical ideology or extremism but also in many other scenes of our everyday life. Here…
How communities respond to diverse societal challenges, from economic crises to political upheavals, is shaped by their collective minds - shared representations of ongoing events and current topics. In turn, collective minds are shaped by…
Online communities have increased in size and importance dramatically over the last decade. The fact that many communities are online means that it is possible to extract information about these communities and the connections between their…