Related papers: Bow-Tie Structures of Twitter Discursive Communiti…
In the intricate landscape of social media, genuine content dissemination may be altered by a number of threats. Coordinated Behavior (CB), defined as orchestrated efforts by entities to deceive or mislead users about their identity and…
Misinformation entails the dissemination of falsehoods that leads to the slow fracturing of society via decreased trust in democratic processes, institutions, and science. The public has grown aware of the role of social media as a…
Obesity and diabetes epidemics are affecting about a third and tenth of US population, respectively, capturing the attention of the nation and its institutions. Social media provides an open forum for communication between individuals and…
We present an exploration of cultural norms surrounding online disclosure of information about one's interpersonal relationships (such as information about family members, colleagues, friends, or lovers) on Twitter. The literature…
Background: Social media chatter in 2020 has been largely dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Existing research shows that COVID-19 discourse is highly politicized, with political preferences linked to beliefs and disbeliefs about the…
Computer-mediated communication is driving fundamental changes in the nature of written language. We investigate these changes by statistical analysis of a dataset comprising 107 million Twitter messages (authored by 2.7 million unique user…
Social news websites, such as Reddit, have evolved into prominent platforms for sharing and discussing news. A key issue on social news websites sites is the formation of echo chambers, which often lead to the spread of highly biased or…
COVID-19 has become one of the most widely talked about topics on social media. This research characterizes risk communication patterns by analyzing the public discourse on the novel coronavirus from four Asian countries: South Korea, Iran,…
Controversial posts are those that split the preferences of a community, receiving both significant positive and significant negative feedback. Our inclusion of the word "community" here is deliberate: what is controversial to some…
Social media conversations frequently suffer from toxicity, creating significant issues for users, moderators, and entire communities. Events in the real world, like elections or conflicts, can initiate and escalate toxic behavior online.…
Online manipulation is a pressing concern for democracies, but the actions and strategies of coordinated inauthentic accounts, which have been used to interfere in elections, are not well understood. We analyze a five million-tweet…
Recent advances in NLP have improved our ability to understand the nuanced worldviews of online communities. Existing research focused on probing ideological stances treats liberals and conservatives as separate groups. However, this fails…
Bridging content that brings together individuals with opposing viewpoints on social media remains elusive, overshadowed by echo chambers and toxic exchanges. We propose that algorithmic curation could surface such content by considering…
Toxic and uncivil politics is widely seen as a growing threat to democratic values and governance, yet our understanding of the drivers and evolution of political incivility remains limited. Leveraging a novel dataset of nearly 18 million…
Background: Online toxicity, encompassing behaviors such as harassment, bullying, hate speech, and the dissemination of misinformation, has become a pressing social concern in the digital age. The 2022 Mpox outbreak, initially termed…
We use structural topic modeling to examine racial bias in data collected to train models to detect hate speech and abusive language in social media posts. We augment the abusive language dataset by adding an additional feature indicating…
Social media users post content on various topics. A defining feature of social media is that other users can provide feedback -- called community feedback -- to their content in the form of comments, replies, and retweets. We hypothesize…
During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media has become a home ground for misinformation. To tackle this infodemic, scientific oversight, as well as a better understanding by practitioners in crisis management, is needed. We have conducted an…
Bots have become increasingly prevalent in the digital sphere and have taken up a proactive role in shaping democratic processes. While previous studies have focused on their influence at the individual level, their potential macro-level…
Conspiracy theories have long drawn public attention, but their explosive growth on platforms like Telegram during the COVID-19 pandemic raises pressing questions about their impact on societal trust, democracy, and public health. We…