Related papers: A Framework for Quantifying Controversy of Social …
Online users tend to select claims that adhere to their system of beliefs and to ignore dissenting information. Confirmation bias, indeed, plays a pivotal role in viral phenomena. Furthermore, the wide availability of content on the web…
In recent years, offensive, abusive and hateful language, sexism, racism and other types of aggressive and cyberbullying behavior have been manifesting with increased frequency, and in many online social media platforms. In fact, past…
Polarization, declining trust, and wavering support for democratic norms are pressing threats to U.S. democracy. Exposure to verified and quality news may lower individual susceptibility to these threats and make citizens more resilient to…
Social media platforms have transformed the dynamics of collective opinion formation, enabling rapid, large-scale interactions while simultaneously exposing online discourse to polarization and manipulation. Traditional models of opinion…
Polarization is implicated in the erosion of democracy and the progression to violence, which makes the polarization properties of large algorithmic content selection systems (recommender systems) a matter of concern for peace and security.…
Estimating influence on social media networks is an important practical and theoretical problem, especially because this new medium is widely exploited as a platform for disinformation and propaganda. This paper introduces a novel approach…
Given the stated preferences of several people over a number of proposals regarding public policy initiatives, some of those proposals might be judged to be more ``divisive'' than others. When designing online participatory platforms to…
It is widely believed that society is becoming increasingly polarized around important issues, a dynamic that does not align with common mathematical models of opinion formation in social networks. In particular, measures of polarization…
The explosive growth of social media has not only revolutionized communication but also brought challenges such as political polarization, misinformation, hate speech, and echo chambers. This dissertation employs computational social…
This paper provides a simple theoretical framework to evaluate the effect of key parameters of ranking algorithms, namely popularity and personalization parameters, on measures of platform engagement, misinformation and polarization. The…
Social media have quickly become a prevalent channel to access information, spread ideas, and influence opinions. However, it has been suggested that social and algorithmic filtering may cause exposure to less diverse points of view, and…
In micro-blogging platforms, people connect and interact with others. However, due to cognitive biases, they tend to interact with like-minded people and read agreeable information only. Many efforts to make people connect with those who…
Social media have great potential to support diverse information sharing, but there is widespread concern that platforms like Twitter do not result in communication between those who hold contradictory viewpoints. Because users can choose…
We study the connections between network structure, opinion dynamics, and an adversary's power to artificially induce disagreements. We approach these questions by extending models of opinion formation in the social sciences to represent…
The flow of information reaching us via the online media platforms is optimized not by the information content or relevance but by popularity and proximity to the target. This is typically performed in order to maximise platform usage. As a…
In this work, we present a novel quantification of conflict in online discussion. Unlike previous studies on conflict dynamics, which model conflict as a binary phenomenon, our measure is continuous-valued, which we validate with manually…
In this paper we present new methods of measuring polarisation in social networks. We use Random Dot Product Graphs to embed social networks in metric spaces. Singular Value Decomposition of this social network then provider an embedded…
The daily exposure of social media users to propaganda and disinformation campaigns has reinvigorated the need to investigate the local and global patterns of diffusion of different (mis)information content on social media. Echo chambers…
A distinguishing property of communities in networks is that cycles are more prevalent within communities than across communities. Thus, the detection of these communities may be aided through the incorporation of measures of the local…
A distinguishing property of communities in networks is that cycles are more prevalent within communities than across communities. Thus, the detection of these communities may be aided through the incorporation of measures of the local…