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Understanding the impact of digital platforms on user behavior presents foundational challenges, including issues related to polarization, misinformation dynamics, and variation in news consumption. Comparative analyses across platforms and…
How does network structure affect diffusion? Recent studies suggest that the answer depends on the type of contagion. Complex contagions, unlike infectious diseases (simple contagions), are affected by social reinforcement and homophily.…
How communities respond to diverse societal challenges, from economic crises to political upheavals, is shaped by their collective minds - shared representations of ongoing events and current topics. In turn, collective minds are shaped by…
Complex networks have non-trivial characteristics and appear in many real-world systems. Such networks are vitally important, but their full underlying dynamics are not completely understood. Utilizing new data sources, however, can unveil…
Understanding collective decision making at a large-scale, and elucidating how community organization and community dynamics shape collective behavior are at the heart of social science research. In this work we study the behavior of…
Relations among species in ecosystems can be represented by complex networks where both negative (competition) and positive (mutualism) interactions are concurrently present. Recently, it has been shown that many ecosystems can be cast into…
Memes are a powerful tool for communication over social media. Their affinity for evolving across politics, history, and sociocultural phenomena makes them an ideal communication vehicle. To comprehend the subtle message conveyed within a…
In an online community, new words come and go: today's "haha" may be replaced by tomorrow's "lol." Changes in online writing are usually studied as a social process, with innovations diffusing through a network of individuals in a speech…
In an online community, new words come and go: today's "haha" may be replaced by tomorrow's "lol." Changes in online writing are usually studied as a social process, with innovations diffusing through a network of individuals in a speech…
The relationship between crime and the media has long been a focal point of academic research, with traditional media playing a significant role in shaping public perceptions of safety and community well-being. However, the advent of social…
Developing AI literacy is increasingly urgent as generative AI reshapes creative practice. Yet most AI literacy frameworks are top-down and expert-driven, overlooking how literacy emerges organically in creative communities. To address this…
Today, social media provide the means by which billions of people experience news and events happening around the world. However, the absence of traditional journalistic gatekeeping allows information to flow unencumbered through these…
Online memes are a powerful yet challenging medium for content moderation, often masking harmful intent behind humor, irony, or cultural symbolism. Conventional moderation systems "especially those relying on explicit text" frequently fail…
Community rules play a key part in enabling or constraining the behaviors of members in online communities. However, little is unknown regarding whether and to what degree changing rules actually affects community dynamics. In this paper,…
This article presents evidence of performance deterioration in online user sessions quantified by studying a massive dataset containing over 55 million comments posted on Reddit in April 2015. After segmenting the sessions (i.e., periods of…
Micro-blogging systems such as Twitter expose digital traces of social discourse with an unprecedented degree of resolution of individual behaviors. They offer an opportunity to investigate how a large-scale social system responds to…
We study the effect of the number of users on the activity of communities within the online content sharing and discussion platform Reddit, called subreddits. We found that comment activity on Reddit has a heavy-tailed distribution, where a…
Rules are a critical component of the functioning of nearly every online community, yet it is challenging for community moderators to make data-driven decisions about what rules to set for their communities. The connection between a…
Users organize themselves into communities on web platforms. These communities can interact with one another, often leading to conflicts and toxic interactions. However, little is known about the mechanisms of interactions between…
In the past few years, Reddit -- a community-driven platform for submitting, commenting and rating links and text posts -- has grown exponentially, from a small community of users into one of the largest online communities on the Web. To…