Related papers: Setting the Record Straighter on Shadow Banning
The proliferation of harmful content and misinformation on social networks necessitates content moderation policies to maintain platform health. One such policy is shadow banning, which limits content visibility. The danger of shadow…
In recent years, the opaque design and the limited public understanding of social networks' recommendation algorithms have raised concerns about potential manipulation of information exposure. Reducing content visibility, aka shadow…
We quantify Facebook's ability to build shadow profiles by tracking individuals across the web, irrespective of whether they are users of the social network. For a representative sample of US Internet users, we find that Facebook is able to…
We consider the problem of how a platform designer, owner, or operator can improve the design and operation of a digital platform by leveraging a computational cognitive model that represents users's folk theories about a platform as a…
Twitter bot detection has become an important and challenging task to combat misinformation and protect the integrity of the online discourse. State-of-the-art approaches generally leverage the topological structure of the Twittersphere,…
Operators of online social networks are increasingly sharing potentially sensitive information about users and their relationships with advertisers, application developers, and data-mining researchers. Privacy is typically protected by…
Social media is an area where users often experience censorship through a variety of means such as the restriction of search terms or active and retroactive deletion of messages. In this paper we examine the feasibility of automatically…
Automated social agents, or bots, are increasingly becoming a problem on social media platforms. There is a growing body of literature and multiple tools to aid in the detection of such agents on online social networking platforms. We…
How can we detect suspicious users in large online networks? Online popularity of a user or product (via follows, page-likes, etc.) can be monetized on the premise of higher ad click-through rates or increased sales. Web services and social…
Online platforms rely on moderation interventions to curb harmful behavior such hate speech, toxicity, and the spread of mis- and disinformation. Yet research on the effects and possible biases of such interventions faces multiple…
Subgraph densities play a crucial role in network analysis, especially for the identification and interpretation of meaningful substructures in complex graphs. Localized subgraph densities, in particular, can provide valuable insights into…
Link prediction is one of the fundamental research problems in network analysis. Intuitively, it involves identifying the edges that are most likely to be added to a given network, or the edges that appear to be missing from the network…
Dark patterns, which are user interface designs in online services, induce users to take unintended actions. Recently, dark patterns have been raised as an issue of privacy and fairness. Thus, a wide range of research on detecting dark…
Network inference is the process of deciding what is the true unknown graph underlying a set of interactions between nodes. There is a vast literature on the subject, but most known methods have an important drawback: the inferred graph is…
The massive presence of silent members in online communities, the so-called lurkers, has long attracted the attention of researchers in social science, cognitive psychology, and computer-human interaction. However, the study of lurking…
Twitter is one of the most prominent Online Social Networks. It covers a significant part of the online worldwide population~20% and has impressive growth rates. The social graph of Twitter has been the subject of numerous studies since it…
The problem of online privacy is often reduced to individual decisions to hide or reveal personal information in online social networks (OSNs). However, with the increasing use of OSNs, it becomes more important to understand the role of…
Many works related to Twitter aim at characterizing its users in some way: role on the service (spammers, bots, organizations, etc.), nature of the user (socio-professional category, age, etc.), topics of interest , and others. However, for…
The idea that social media platforms like Twitter are inhabited by vast numbers of social bots has become widely accepted in recent years. Social bots are assumed to be automated social media accounts operated by malicious actors with the…
Fads, product adoption, mobs, rumors, memes, and emergent norms are diverse social contagions that have been modeled as network cascades. Empirical study of these cascades is vulnerable to what we describe as the "opacity problem": the…