Related papers: Characterizing Sociolinguistic Variation in the Co…
Disinformation, irrespective of domain or language, aims to deceive or manipulate public opinion, typically through employing advanced persuasion techniques. Qualitative and quantitative research on the weaponisation of persuasion…
The rise of misinformation and fake news in online political discourse poses significant challenges to democratic processes and public engagement. While debunking efforts aim to counteract misinformation and foster fact-based dialogue,…
Due to the worldwide accessibility to the Internet along with the continuous advances in mobile technologies, physical and digital worlds have become completely blended, and the proliferation of social media platforms has taken a leading…
Social media research on mental health has focused predominantly on detecting and diagnosing conditions at the individual level. In this work, we shift attention to \emph{intergroup} behavior, examining how two prominent neurodivergent…
Social influence characterizes the change of an individual's stances in a complex social environment towards a topic. Two factors often govern the influence of stances in an online social network: endogenous influences driven by an…
Epidemics occur in all shapes and forms: infections propagating in our sparse sexual networks, rumours and diseases spreading through our much denser social interactions, or viruses circulating on the Internet. With the advent of large…
The framing of political issues can influence policy and public opinion. Even though the public plays a key role in creating and spreading frames, little is known about how ordinary people on social media frame political issues. By creating…
Violence-provoking speech -- speech that implicitly or explicitly promotes violence against the members of the targeted community, contributed to a massive surge in anti-Asian crimes during the pandemic. While previous works have…
Online manipulation is a pressing concern for democracies, but the actions and strategies of coordinated inauthentic accounts, which have been used to interfere in elections, are not well understood. We analyze a five million-tweet…
Background. In Italy, in recent years, vaccination coverage for key immunizations as MMR has been declining to worryingly low levels. In 2017, the Italian Gov't expanded the number of mandatory immunizations introducing penalties to…
Information dissemination intricately intertwines with the dynamics of infectious diseases in the contemporary interconnected world. Recognizing the critical role of public awareness, individual vaccination choices appear to be an essential…
We investigate the birth and diffusion of lexical innovations in a large dataset of online social communities. We build on sociolinguistic theories and focus on the relation between the spread of a novel term and the social role of the…
Designing effective strategies for controlling epidemic spread by vaccination is an important question in epidemiology, especially in the early stages when vaccines are limited. This is a challenging question when the contact network is…
Understanding the impact of digital platforms on user behavior presents foundational challenges, including issues related to polarization, misinformation dynamics, and variation in news consumption. Comparative analyses across platforms and…
A long line of work in social psychology has studied variations in people's susceptibility to persuasion -- the extent to which they are willing to modify their opinions on a topic. This body of literature suggests an interesting…
Understanding how different online communities engage with COVID-19 misinformation is critical for public health response, as misinformation confined to a small, isolated community of users poses a different public health risk than…
Considering the raising socio-economic burden of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), timely and evidence-driven public policy decision making and communication of the latest guidelines pertaining to the treatment and management of the disorder…
Social media has been a paramount arena for election campaigns for political actors. While many studies have been paying attention to the political campaigns related to partisanship, politicians also can conduct different campaigns…
With the growth of social media usage, social activists try to leverage this platform to raise the awareness related to a social issue and engage the public worldwide. The broad use of social media platforms in recent years, made it easier…
Understanding the dynamics of language toxicity on social media is important for us to investigate the propagation of misinformation and the development of echo chambers for political scenarios such as U.S. presidential elections. Recent…