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Personalization algorithms are ubiquitous in modern social computing systems, yet their effects on comment sections remain underexplored. In this work, we conducted an algorithmic auditing experiment to examine comment personalization on…
An increasing reliance on recommender systems has led to concerns about the creation of filter bubbles on social media, especially on short video platforms like TikTok. However, their formation is still not entirely understood due to the…
Short-form video platforms like TikTok reshape how politicians communicate and have become important tools for electoral campaigning. Yet it remains unclear what kinds of political messages gain traction in these fast-paced, algorithmically…
Opaque algorithms disseminate and mediate the content that users consume on online social media platforms. This algorithmic mediation serves users with contents of their liking, on the other hand, it may cause several inadvertent risks to…
TikTok is a music-based video sharing social media app famous for users creating short meme and dance videos. TikTok videos are largely based on popular song snippets, which is why lip syncing and dance moves evolve as significant user…
Online platforms play an increasingly important role in shaping democracy by influencing the distribution of political information to the electorate. In recent years, political campaigns have spent heavily on the platforms' algorithmic…
Understanding the social and behavioral forces behind event participation is not only interesting from the viewpoint of social science, but also has important applications in the design of personalized event recommender systems. This paper…
Visual social media platforms have become primary venues for political discourse, yet we know little about how moralization operates differently across platforms and topics. Analyzing 2,027,595 TikToks and 1,126,972 Instagram posts during…
Social media platforms have become an integral part of everyday life, serving as a primary source of news and information for many users. These platforms increasingly rely on personalised recommendation systems that shape what users see and…
Social scientists have long sought to understand why certain people, items, or options become more popular than others. One seemingly intuitive theory is that inherent value drives popularity. An alternative theory claims that popularity is…
Many human-facing algorithms -- including those that power recommender systems or hiring decision tools -- are trained on data provided by their users. The developers of these algorithms commonly adopt the assumption that the data…
Human activities increasingly take place in online environments, providing novel opportunities for relating individual behaviours to population-level outcomes. In this paper, we introduce a simple generative model for the collective…
Peer recommendation is a crowdsourcing task that leverages the opinions of many to identify interesting content online, such as news, images, or videos. Peer recommendation applications often use social signals, e.g., the number of prior…
Purpose: This research investigates controversial online marketing techniques that involve buying hundreds or even thousands of upvotes, likes, comments, etc. Methodology: Observation and categorization of 7,426 campaigns posted on the…
The 2024 U.S. presidential election has sparked widespread online discussions about the presidential candidates. Joe Biden's withdrawal from the race and Kamala Harris's subsequent entry as the Democratic candidate likely alter the dynamics…
Previous research pays attention to how users strategically understand and consciously interact with algorithms but mainly focuses on an individual level, making it difficult to explore how users within communities could develop a…
We consider a causal inference problem frequently encountered in online advertising systems, where a publisher (e.g., Instagram, TikTok) interacts repeatedly with human users and advertisers by sporadically displaying to each user an…
Recommender systems on social media increasingly mediate how users encounter mental health content, yet it remains unclear whether they distinguish help-seeking from distress expression. We conduct a controlled 7-day audit of TikTok's "For…
In Twitter, and other microblogging services, the generation of new content by the crowd is often biased towards immediacy: what is happening now. Prompted by the propagation of commentary and information through multiple mediums, users on…
Modern social media platforms, such as TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube, rely on recommendation systems to personalize content for users based on user interactions with endless streams of content, such as "For You" pages. However, these…