Related papers: Can Celebrities Burst Your Bubble?

Social media platforms significantly influence ideological divisions by enabling users to select information that aligns with their beliefs and avoid opposing viewpoints. Analyzing approximately 47 million Facebook posts, this study…

We explore a new mechanism to explain polarization phenomena in opinion dynamics in which agents evaluate alternative views on the basis of the social feedback obtained on expressing them. High support of the favored opinion in the social…

Polarisation research has demonstrated how people cluster in homogeneous groups with opposing opinions. However, this effect emerges not only through interaction between people, limiting communication between groups, but also between…

Vaccine hesitancy has been recognized as a major global health threat. Having access to any type of information in social media has been suggested as a potential powerful influence factor to hesitancy. Recent studies in other fields than…

Online social networks provide a medium for citizens to form opinions on different societal issues, and a forum for public discussion. They also expose users to viral content, such as breaking news articles. In this paper, we study the…

Polarization of opinion is an important feature of public debate on political, social and cultural topics. The availability of large internet databases of users' ratings has permitted quantitative analysis of polarization trends-for…

The rise in popularity of Twitter has led to a debate on its impact on public opinions. The optimists foresee an increase in online participation and democratization due to social media's personal and interactive nature. Cyber-pessimists,…

The topology of the hyperlink graph among pages expressing different opinions may influence the exposure of readers to diverse content. Structural bias may trap a reader in a polarized bubble with no access to other opinions. We model…

Recommender systems often rely on models which are trained to maximize accuracy in predicting user preferences. When the systems are deployed, these models determine the availability of content and information to different users. The gap…

We study a model of user decision-making in the context of recommender systems via numerical simulation. Our model provides an explanation for the findings of Nguyen, et. al (2014), where, in environments where recommender systems are…

An isolated massive star can blow a bubble, while a group of massive stars can blow superbubbles. In this paper, we examine three intriguing questions regarding bubbles and superbubbles: (1) why don't we see interstellar bubbles around…

Social media platforms often foster environments where users primarily engage with content that aligns with their existing beliefs, thereby reinforcing their views and limiting exposure to opposing viewpoints. In this paper, we analyze X…

Polarization of opinions has been empirically noted in many online social network platforms. Traditional models of opinion dynamics, based on statistical physics principles, do not account for the emergence of polarization and echo chambers…

In this paper, we present results of an auditing study performed over YouTube aimed at investigating how fast a user can get into a misinformation filter bubble, but also what it takes to "burst the bubble", i.e., revert the bubble…

Bridging content that brings together individuals with opposing viewpoints on social media remains elusive, overshadowed by echo chambers and toxic exchanges. We propose that algorithmic curation could surface such content by considering…

Studying mental models has recently received more attention, aiming to understand the cognitive aspects of human-computer interaction. However, there is not enough research on the elicitation of mental models in complex dynamic systems. We…

Social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter play a key role in disseminating both reliable and unreliable information about climate change. This study analyses the topology of interactions in Twitter and their relation to cross-platform…

Polarization among US political parties, media and elites is a widely studied topic. Prominent lines of prior research across multiple disciplines have observed and analyzed growing polarization in social media. In this paper, we present a…

Affective polarization has been central to political and social studies, with growing focus on social media, where partisan divisions are often exacerbated. Real-world studies tend to have limited scope, while simulated studies suffer from…

Political polarization is a significant issue in American politics, influencing public discourse, policy, and consumer behavior. While studies on polarization in news media have extensively focused on verbal content, non-verbal elements,…