Related papers: The Evolution of the Manosphere Across the Web
Anti-social behaviors in social media can happen both at user and community levels. While a great deal of attention is on the individual as an 'aggressor,' the banning of entire Reddit subcommunities (i.e., subreddits) demonstrates that…
Understanding the emergence of strong controversial issues in modern societies is a key issue in opinion studies. A commonly diffused idea is the fact that the increasing of homophily in social networks, due to the modern ICT, can be a…
We present a study of the properties of network of political discussions on one of the most popular Polish Internet forums. This provides the opportunity to study the computer mediated human interactions in strongly bipolar environment. The…
The proliferation of ideological movements into extremist factions via social media has become a global concern. While radicalization has been studied extensively within the context of specific ideologies, our ability to accurately…
In the past few years, Reddit -- a community-driven platform for submitting, commenting and rating links and text posts -- has grown exponentially, from a small community of users into one of the largest online communities on the Web. To…
The rise and fall of online social networks recently generated an enormous amount of interest among people, both inside and outside of academia. Gillette [Businessweek magazine, 2011] did a detailed analysis of MySpace, which started losing…
Social media has become an everyday means of interaction and information sharing on the Internet. However, posts on social networks are often aggressive and toxic, especially when the topic is controversial or politically charged.…
A better understanding of how support evolves online for undesirable behaviors such as extremism and hate, could help mitigate future harms. Here we show how the highly irregular growth curves of groups supporting two high-profile extremism…
Memes are popular in the modern world and are distributed primarily for entertainment. However, harmful ideologies such as misogyny can be propagated through innocent-looking memes. The detection and understanding of why a meme is…
A new wave of growing antisemitism, driven by fringe Web communities, is an increasingly worrying presence in the socio-political realm. The ubiquitous and global nature of the Web has provided tools used by these groups to spread their…
Data confidentiality policies at major social network providers have severely limited researchers' access to large-scale datasets. The biggest impact has been on the study of network dynamics, where researchers have studied citation graphs…
AI-companionship platforms are rapidly reshaping how people form emotional, romantic, and parasocial bonds with non-human agents, raising new questions about how these relationships intersect with gendered online behavior and exposure to…
Many societies are organized in networks that are formed by people who meet and interact over time. In this paper, we present a first model to capture the micro-foundations of social networks evolution, where boundedly rational agents of…
Over the past decade, specialized social networking applications have become a cornerstone of life for many gay men in China. This paper employs a longitudinal mixed-methods approach to investigate how Chinese men who have sex with men…
Online communities play a critical role in shaping societal discourse and influencing collective behavior in the real world. The tendency for people to connect with others who share similar characteristics and views, known as homophily,…
The aim of this paper is to present methods to systematically analyze individual and group behavioral patterns observed in community driven discussion platforms like Reddit where users exchange information and views on various topics of…
With the wide adoption of the multi-community setting in many popular social media platforms, the increasing user engagements across multiple online communities warrant research attention. In this paper, we introduce a novel analogy between…
Over the past decade, contrary to the early popular expectation that large-scale discourse in online communities would foster greater consensus, the large-scale structure of online discourse has been measured to be strongly polarized.…
In this paper we present a benchmark dataset generated as part of a project for automatic identification of misogyny within online content, which focuses in particular on memes. The benchmark here described is composed of 800 memes…
Online platforms like Reddit are increasingly becoming popular for individuals sharing personal experiences of leaving behind social, ideological, and political groups. Specifically, a series of "ex-" subreddits on Reddit allow users to…