Related papers: Explaining the Relationship between Internet and D…
The technological revolution of the Internet has digitized the social, economic, political, and cultural activities of billions of humans. While researchers have been paying due attention to concerns of misinformation and bias, these…
Humans have been arguing about the benefits of dictatorial versus democratic regimes for millennia. Despite drastic differences between the dictatorships in the world, one of the key common features is the \emph{Dictator's Dilemma} as…
Opinion evolution and judgment revision are mediated through social influence. Based on a large crowdsourced in vitro experiment (n=861), it is shown how a consensus model can be used to predict opinion evolution in online collective…
In this study, I present a theoretical social learning model to investigate how confirmation bias affects opinions when agents exchange information over a social network. Hence, besides exchanging opinions with friends, agents observe a…
Identifying the real causes of democracy is an ongoing debate. We contribute to the literature by examining the robustness of a comprehensive list of 42 potential determinants of democracy. We take a step forward and employ Instrumental…
There has been concern within the artificial intelligence (AI) community and the broader society regarding the potential lack of fairness of AI-based decision-making systems. Surprisingly, there is little work quantifying and guaranteeing…
Nowadays, we live in a society where people often form their opinion by accessing and discussing contents shared on social networking websites. While these platforms have fostered information access and diffusion, they represent optimal…
Digital divide has been a common concern during the past two or three decades; traditionally, it refers to a gap between developed and developing countries in the adoption and use of digital technologies. Given the importance of the topic,…
Following recent policy changes by X (Twitter) and other social media platforms, user interaction data has become increasingly difficult to access. These restrictions are impeding robust research pertaining to social and political phenomena…
Measuring social influence is difficult due to the lack of counter-factuals and comparisons. By combining machine learning-based modeling and network science, we present general properties of social value, a recent measure for social…
In this work, we investigate the evolution of polarization, influence, and domination in online interaction networks. Twitter data collected before and during the 2022 Brazilian elections is used as a case study. From a theoretical…
The growth of the Internet and its associated technologies; including digital services have tremendously impacted our society. However, scholars have noted a trend in data flow and collection; and have alleged mass surveillance and digital…
As we increasingly delegate decision-making to algorithms, whether directly or indirectly, important questions emerge in circumstances where those decisions have direct consequences for individual rights and personal opportunities, as well…
Search engines play a crucial role in shaping public discourse by influencing how information is accessed and framed. While prior research has extensively examined various dimensions of search bias -- such as content prioritization,…
With the rapid growth of online social media, people become increasingly overwhelmed by the volume and the content of the information present in the environment. The threshold model is currently one of the most common methods to capture the…
Various models of the information society have been developed so far and they are so different from country to country that it would be rather unwise to look for a single, allencompassing definition. In our time a number of profound…
Innovations in AI have focused primarily on the questions of "what" and "how"-algorithms for finding patterns in web searches, for instance-without adequate attention to the possible harms (such as privacy, bias, or manipulation) and…
Online social networks provide users with unprecedented opportunities to engage with diverse opinions. At the same time, they enable confirmation bias on large scales by empowering individuals to self-select narratives they want to be…
Language model alignment research often attempts to ensure that models are not only helpful and harmless, but also truthful and unbiased. However, optimizing these objectives simultaneously can obscure how improving one aspect might impact…
Polarization is a troubling phenomenon that can lead to societal divisions and hurt the democratic process. It is therefore important to develop methods to reduce it. We propose an algorithmic solution to the problem of reducing…