Related papers: Online Group Dynamics Reveal New Gel Science
Though many aggregation theories exist for physical, chemical and biological systems, they do not account for the significant heterogeneity found, for example, in populations of living objects. This is unfortunate since understanding how…
Support for extremist entities - whether from the far right, or far left - often manages to survive globally online despite significant external pressure, and may ultimately inspire violent acts by individuals having no obvious prior…
Quantifying human group dynamics represents a unique challenge. Unlike animals and other biological systems, humans form groups in both real (offline) and virtual (online) spaces -- from potentially dangerous street gangs populated mostly…
Group interactions take place within a particular socio-temporal context, which should be taken into account when modelling interactions in online communities. We propose a method for jointly modelling community structure and language over…
There is a significant amount of online human activity which is either clandestine or illicit in nature, and hence where individuals operate under fear of exposure or capture. Yet there is little theoretical understanding of what models…
Society faces a fundamental global problem of understanding which individuals are currently developing strong support for some extremist entity such as ISIS (Islamic State) -- even if they never end up doing anything in the real world. The…
Many models have been proposed to explain opinion formation in groups of individuals; most of these models study opinion propagation as the interaction between nodes/agents in a social network. Opinion formation is a complex process and a…
The 'out of the blue' nature of recent terror attacks and the diversity of apparent motives, highlight the importance of understanding the online trajectories that individuals follow prior to developing high levels of extremist support.…
Social groups are fundamental elements of any social system. Their emergence and evolution are closely related to the structure and dynamics of a social system. Research on social groups was primarily focused on the growth and the structure…
Many complex systems are characterized by broad distributions capturing, for example, the size of firms, the population of cities or the degree distribution of complex networks. Typically this feature is explained by means of a preferential…
In the world, in which acceptance and the identification with social communities are highly desired, the ability to predict evolution of groups over time appears to be a vital but very complex research problem. Therefore, we propose a new,…
Online communities featuring 'anti-X' hate and extremism, somehow thrive online despite moderator pressure. We present a first-principles theory of their dynamics, which accounts for the fact that the online population comprises diverse…
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…
Easy access and vast amount of data, especially from long period of time, allows to divide social network into timeframes and create temporal social network. Such network enables to analyse its dynamics. One aspect of the dynamics is…
Many social and biological systems are characterized by enduring hierarchies, including those organized around prestige in academia, dominance in animal groups, and desirability in online dating. Despite their ubiquity, the general…
In the age of technology, individuals accelerate their biased gathering of information which in turn leads to a population becoming extreme and more polarized. Here we study a partial differential equation model for opinion dynamics that…
The continuous interest in the social network area contributes to the fast development of this field. The new possibilities of obtaining and storing data facilitate deeper analysis of the entire network, extracted social groups and single…
Online social media allows individuals to cluster around common interests - including hate. We show that tight-knit social clusters interlink to form resilient 'global hate highways' that bridge independent social network platforms,…
The proliferation of ideological movements into extremist factions via social media has become a global concern. While radicalization has been studied extensively within the context of specific ideologies, our ability to accurately…
Collectives adapt their network structure to the challenges they face. It has been hypothesized that collectives experiencing a real or imagined threat from an outgroup tend to consolidate behind a few influential group members, and that…