Related papers: Examining the consumption of radical content on Yo…
Video-sharing social media platforms, such as TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, implement content moderation policies aimed at reducing exposure to harmful videos among minor users. As video has become the dominant and most immersive form of…
Understanding the factors that impact the popularity dynamics of social media can drive the design of effective information services, besides providing valuable insights to content generators and online advertisers. Taking YouTube as case…
Politics in different countries show diverse degrees of polarization, which tends to be stronger on social media, given how easy it became to connect and engage with like-minded individuals on the web. A way of reducing polarization would…
Short-form video platforms such as YouTube Shorts increasingly shape how information is consumed, yet the effects of engagement-driven algorithms on content exposure remain poorly understood. This study investigates how different viewing…
Using nationally representative data from the 2020 and 2024 American National Election Studies (ANES), this paper traces how the U.S. social media landscape has shifted across platforms, demographics, and politics. Overall platform use has…
Political news on social media rarely circulates in isolation: audiences actively engage, react, and clash. Whether these interactions reflect agreement or conflict may depend on the ideological discrepancy between publishers and the news…
The negative effects of misinformation filter bubbles in adaptive systems have been known to researchers for some time. Several studies investigated, most prominently on YouTube, how fast a user can get into a misinformation filter bubble…
This paper aims to shed light on alternative news media ecosystems that are believed to have influenced opinions and beliefs by false and/or biased news reporting during the 2016 US Presidential Elections. We examine a large, professionally…
Online political discourse is increasingly shaped not by a few dominant platforms but by a fragmented ecosystem of social media spaces, each with its own user base, target audience, and algorithmic mediation of discussion. Such…
Optimism about the Internet's potential to bring the world together has been tempered by concerns about its role in inflaming the 'culture wars'. Via mass selection into like-minded groups, online society may be becoming more fragmented and…
This paper makes three contributions. First, via a substantial corpus of 1,419,047 comments posted on 3,161 YouTube news videos of major US cable news outlets, we analyze how users engage with LGBTQ+ news content. Our analyses focus both on…
In a pre-registered algorithmic audit, we found that, relative to a reverse-chronological baseline, Twitter's engagement-based ranking algorithm amplifies emotionally charged, out-group hostile content that users say makes them feel worse…
TikTok is a major force among social media platforms with over a billion monthly active users worldwide and 170 million in the United States. The platform's status as a key news source, particularly among younger demographics, raises…
In the last years, hundreds of new Youtube channels have been creating and sharing videos targeting children, with themes related to animation, superhero movies, comics, etc. Unfortunately, many of these videos are inappropriate for…
Sentiment Analysis is currently a vital area of research. With the advancement in the use of the internet, the creation of social media, websites, blogs, opinions, ratings, etc. has increased rapidly. People express their feedback and…
Online platforms have transformed the way in which individuals access and interact with news, with a high degree of trust particularly placed in search engine results. We use web tracked behavioral data across a 2-month period and analyze…
YouTube Kids (YTK) is one of the most popular kids' applications used by millions of kids daily. However, various studies have highlighted concerns about the videos on the platform, like the over-presence of entertaining and commercial…
In today's digital age, concerns about online security and privacy have become paramount. However, addressing these issues can be difficult, especially within the context of family relationships, wherein parents and children may have…
Search engines are used and trusted by hundreds of millions of people every day. However, the algorithms used by search engines to index, filter, and rank web content are inherently biased, and will necessarily prefer some views and…
Recent studies have confirmed a growing trend, especially among youngsters, of using Online Social Media as favourite information platform at the expense of traditional mass media. Indeed, they can easily reach a wide audience at a high…