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Political astroturfing and organised trolling are online malicious behaviours with significant real-world effects. Common approaches examining these phenomena focus on broad campaigns rather than the small groups responsible. To reveal…
Lurking is a complex user-behavioral phenomenon that occurs in all large-scale online communities and social networks. It generally refers to the behavior characterizing users that benefit from the information produced by others in the…
Popular hypotheses about the origins of collective adaptation are related to two basic behaviours: protection from predators and a combined search for food resources. Among the anti-predator explanations, the predator confusion hypothesis…
Young people worldwide are participating in ever-increasing numbers in online fan communities. Far from mere shallow repositories of pop culture, these sites are accumulating significant evidence that sophisticated informal learning is…
Many organisms in nature use local interactions to generate global cooperative phenomena. To unravel how the behavior of individuals generates effective interactions within a group, we introduce a simple model, wherein each agent senses the…
Modeling crowds has many important applications in games and computer animation. Inspired by the emergent following effect in real-life crowd scenarios, in this work, we develop a method for implicitly grouping moving agents. We achieve…
Predicting the future direction of community evolution is a problem with high theoretical and practical significance. It allows to determine which characteristics describing communities have importance from the point of view of their future…
Members of different political groups not only disagree about issues but also dislike and distrust each other. While social media can amplify this emotional divide -- called affective polarization by political scientists -- there is a lack…
Large-scale online campaigns, malicious or otherwise, require a significant degree of coordination among participants, which sparked interest in the study of coordinated online behavior. State-of-the-art methods for detecting coordinated…
Online extremists in social networks pose a new form of threat to the general public. These extremists range from cyberbullies who harass innocent users to terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) that use…
Exclusive social groups are ones in which the group members decide whether or not to admit a candidate to the group. Examples of exclusive social groups include academic departments and fraternal organizations. In the present paper we…
We introduce a growing network evolution model with nodal attributes. The model describes the interactions between potentially violent V and non-violent N agents who have different affinities in establishing connections within their own…
Opinion evolution and judgment revision are mediated through social influence. Based on a large crowdsourced in vitro experiment (n=861), it is shown how a consensus model can be used to predict opinion evolution in online collective…
Research on human online activities usually assumes that total activity $T$ increases linearly with active population $P$, that is, $T\propto P^{\gamma}(\gamma=1)$. However, we find examples of systems where total activity grows faster than…
We present a novel explanation for the group polarization effect whereby discussion among like-minded individuals induces shifts toward the extreme. Our theory distinguishes between a quantitative policy under debate and the discussion's…
We present a many-body theory that explains and reproduces recent observations of population polarization dynamics, is supported by controlled human experiments, and addresses the controversy surrounding the Internet's impact. It predicts…
The study of human interactions is of central importance for understanding the behavior of individuals, groups and societies. Here, we observe the formation and evolution of networks by monitoring the addition of all new links and we…
The massive amounts of data that social media generates has facilitated the study of online human behavior on a scale unimaginable a few years ago. At the same time, the much discussed apparent randomness with which people interact online…
The complexity of human behaviour can lead to very unpredictable patterns in social activity and structure. Here we demonstrate the instability of a community network controlled by majority ruling, where an element adopts the most popular…
The ways in which natural selection can allow the proliferation of cooperative behavior have long been seen as a central problem in evolutionary biology. Most of the literature has focused on interactions between pairs of individuals and on…