Related papers: Softening online extremes organically and at scale
Social media platforms have evolved rapidly in modernity without strong regulation. One clear obstacle faced by current users is that of toxicity. Toxicity on social media manifests through a number of forms, including harassment,…
Unlike the more observable phenomenon of group opinion reinforcement, self-censorship online has received comparatively less attention. Our goal in this work is to dissect the phenomena of self-censorship and to examine the implications of…
When toxic online communities on mainstream platforms face moderation measures, such as bans, they may migrate to other platforms with laxer policies or set up their own dedicated websites. Previous work suggests that within mainstream…
In the digital age, hate speech poses a threat to the functioning of social media platforms as spaces for public discourse. Top-down approaches to moderate hate speech encounter difficulties due to conflicts with freedom of expression and…
Social media have great potential for enabling public discourse on important societal issues. However, adverse effects, such as polarization and echo chambers, greatly impact the benefits of social media and call for algorithms that…
Online Radicalization (also called Cyber-Terrorism or Extremism or Cyber-Racism or Cyber- Hate) is widespread and has become a major and growing concern to the society, governments and law enforcement agencies around the world. Research…
Social media is nearly ubiquitous in modern life, raising concerns about its societal impacts -- from mental health and polarization to violence and democratic disruption. Yet research on its causal effects is still inconclusive: Various…
Polarization, declining trust, and wavering support for democratic norms are pressing threats to U.S. democracy. Exposure to verified and quality news may lower individual susceptibility to these threats and make citizens more resilient to…
The social web has linked people on a global scale, transforming how we communicate and interact. The massive interconnectedness has created new vulnerabilities in the form of social manipulation and misinformation. As the social web…
The proliferation of harmful content on online platforms is a major societal problem, which comes in many different forms including hate speech, offensive language, bullying and harassment, misinformation, spam, violence, graphic content,…
Online platforms like Reddit, Wikipedia, and Facebook are integral to modern life, enabling content creation and sharing through posts, comments, and discussions. Despite their virtual and often anonymous nature, these platforms need rules…
Recent years have seen increased interest in the online presence of extreme right groups. Although originally composed of dedicated websites, the online extreme right milieu now spans multiple networks, including popular social media…
Online social networking sites are experimenting with the following crowd-powered procedure to reduce the spread of fake news and misinformation: whenever a user is exposed to a story through her feed, she can flag the story as…
Deplatforming, or banning malicious accounts from social media, is a key tool for moderating online harms. However, the consequences of deplatforming for the wider social media ecosystem have been largely overlooked so far, due to the…
Since 2016, the amount of academic research with the keyword "misinformation" has more than doubled [2]. This research often focuses on article headlines shown in artificial testing environments, yet misinformation largely spreads through…
Social media platforms struggle to protect users from harmful content through content moderation. These platforms have recently leveraged machine learning models to cope with the vast amount of user-generated content daily. Since moderation…
Why is distrust (e.g. of medical expertise) now flourishing online despite the surge in mitigation schemes being implemented? We analyze the changing discourse in the Facebook ecosystem of approximately 100 million users who pre-pandemic…
Social media has brought a revolution on how people are consuming news. Beyond the undoubtedly large number of advantages brought by social-media platforms, a point of criticism has been the creation of echo chambers and filter bubbles,…
User-generated content online is shaped by many factors, including endogenous elements such as platform affordances and norms, as well as exogenous elements, in particular significant events. These impact what users say, how they say it,…
A rapidly increasing amount of human conversation occurs online. But divisiveness and conflict can fester in text-based interactions on social media platforms, in messaging apps, and on other digital forums. Such toxicity increases…