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Conversational scams, such as romance and investment scams, are emerging as a major form of online fraud. Unlike one-shot scam lures such as fake lottery or unpaid toll messages, they unfold through multi-turn conversations in which…
In online communities, antisocial behavior such as trolling disrupts constructive discussion. While prior work suggests that trolling behavior is confined to a vocal and antisocial minority, we demonstrate that ordinary people can engage in…
User response to contributed content in online social media depends on many factors. These include how the site lays out new content, how frequently the user visits the site, how many friends the user follows, how active these friends are,…
Social media platforms are often criticized for fostering antisocial behavior rather than prosocial behavior. Yet, testing interventions to encourage prosocial dispositions, such as open-mindedness, has been hindered by researchers' limited…
Different measures have been proposed to predict whether individuals will adopt a new behavior in online social networks, given the influence produced by their neighbors. In this paper, we show one can achieve significant improvement over…
In recent years, Online Social Networks have become an important medium for people who suffer from mental disorders to share moments of hardship, and receive emotional and informational support. In this work, we analyze how discussions in…
The quality of daily spontaneous conversations is of importance towards both our well-being as well as the development of interactive social agents. Prior research directly studying the quality of social conversations has operationalized it…
Online conversations can sometimes take a turn for the worse, either due to systematic cultural differences, accidental misunderstandings, or mere malice. Automatically forecasting derailment in public online conversations provides an…
Argumentative dialogues across political divides can reduce polarization, yet opportunities for citizens to engage with opposing views in accessible and structured ways remain limited. AI dialogue partners offer a scalable framework for…
Social media comprises interactive applications and platforms for creating, sharing and exchange of user-generated contents. The past ten years have brought huge growth in social media, especially online social networking services, and it…
Trustfulness -- one's general tendency to have confidence in unknown people or situations -- predicts many important real-world outcomes such as mental health and likelihood to cooperate with others such as clinicians. While data-driven…
State-of-the-art conversational AI systems raise concerns due to their potential risks of generating unsafe, toxic, unethical, or dangerous content. Previous works have developed datasets to teach conversational agents the appropriate…
Persuasion and argumentation are possibly among the most complex examples of the interplay between multiple human subjects. With the advent of the Internet, online forums provide wide platforms for people to share their opinions and…
Societal events shape the Internet's behavior. The death of a prominent public figure, a software launch, or a major sports match can trigger sudden demand surges that overwhelm peering points and content delivery networks. Although these…
Mental illness is one of the most pressing public health issues of our time. While counseling and psychotherapy can be effective treatments, our knowledge about how to conduct successful counseling conversations has been limited due to lack…
As the online world continues its exponential growth, interpersonal communication has come to play an increasingly central role in opinion formation and change. In order to help users better engage with each other online, we study a…
Hate speech is plaguing the cyberspace along with user-generated content. This paper investigates the role of conversational context in the annotation and detection of online hate and counter speech, where context is defined as the…
Conversations among online users sometimes derail, i.e., break down into personal attacks. Such derailment has a negative impact on the healthy growth of cyberspace communities. The ability to predict whether ongoing conversations are…
The interaction between social norms and gender roles prescribes gender-specific behaviors that influence moral judgments. Here, we study how moral judgments are biased by the gender of the protagonist of a story. Using data from r/AITA, a…
Positive feedback via likes and awards is central to online governance, yet which attributes of users' posts elicit rewards -- and how these vary across authors and communities -- remains unclear. To examine this, we combine…