Related papers: Right and left, partisanship predicts (asymmetric)…
Affective polarization, or, inter-party hostility, is increasingly recognized as a pervasive issue in democracies worldwide, posing a threat to social cohesion. The digital media ecosystem, now widely accessible and ever-present, has often…
Priority users (e.g., verified profiles on Twitter) are social media users whose content is promoted by recommendation algorithms. However, the impact of this heterogeneous user influence on opinion dynamics, such as polarization phenomena,…
What if misinformation is not an information problem at all? To understand the role of news publishers in potentially unintentionally propagating misinformation, we examine how far-right and fringe online groups share and leverage…
In this paper, we study the implications of the commonplace assumption that most social media studies make with respect to the nature of message shares (such as retweets) as a predominantly positive interaction. By analyzing two large…
The wide availability of user-provided content in online social media facilitates the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and narratives. Despite the enthusiastic rhetoric on the part of some that this process…
This study explores the geographic dependencies of echo-chamber communication on Twitter during the Brexit referendum campaign. We review the literature on filter bubbles, echo chambers, and polarization to test five hypotheses positing…
Increased sharing of untrustworthy information on social media platforms is one of the main challenges of our modern information society. Because information disseminated by political elites is known to shape citizen and media discourse, it…
Selective exposure, individuals' inclination to seek out information that supports their beliefs while avoiding information that contradicts them, plays an important role in the emergence of polarization and echo chambers. In the political…
It has been a widely shared concern that social media reinforces echo chambers of like-minded users and exacerbate political polarization. While fostering interactions across party lines is recognized as an important strategy to break echo…
Recent years have witnessed a swelling rise of hateful and abusive content over online social networks. While detection and moderation of hate speech have been the early go-to countermeasures, the solution requires a deeper exploration of…
Newsfeed algorithms frequently amplify misinformation and other low-quality content. How can social media platforms more effectively promote reliable information? Existing approaches are difficult to scale and vulnerable to manipulation. In…
Online misinformation has been a serious threat to public health and society. Social media users are known to reply to misinformation posts with counter-misinformation messages, which have been shown to be effective in curbing the spread of…
Polarized topics often spark discussion and debate on social media. Recent studies have shown that polarized debates have a specific clustered structure in the endorsement net- work, which indicates that users direct their endorsements…
Misinformation proliferation on social media platforms is a pervasive threat to the integrity of online public discourse. Genuine users, susceptible to others' influence, often unknowingly engage with, endorse, and re-share questionable…
We investigate how information-spreading mechanisms affect opinion dynamics and vice-versa via an agent-based simulation on adaptive social networks. First, we characterize the impact of reposting on user behavior with limited memory, a…
Though significant efforts such as removing false claims and promoting reliable sources have been increased to combat COVID-19 "misinfodemic", it remains an unsolved societal challenge if lacking a proper understanding of susceptible online…
Does polarization online reflect the state of polarization in society? We study ideological positions and attitudes on several issues in France, a country with documented issue nonalignment. We compare distributions on X/Twitter with a…
Modeling information cascades in a social network through the lenses of the ideological leaning of its users can help understanding phenomena such as misinformation propagation and confirmation bias, and devising techniques for mitigating…
In the era of social media, people frequently share their own opinions online on various issues and also in the way, get exposed to others' opinions. Be it for selective exposure of news feed recommendation algorithms or our own inclination…
Recent studies, targeting Facebook, showed the tendency of users to interact with information adhering to their preferred narrative and to ignore dissenting information. Primarily driven by confirmation bias, users tend to join polarized…