Related papers: Softening online extremes organically and at scale
The overreaches of mainstream social media platforms have been extensively reported and studied. For activist communities, these platforms pose risks of surveillance, censorship, or erasure. Decentralized social networks (DSNs) serve as…
A growing share of human interactions now occurs online, where the expression and perception of emotions are often amplified and distorted. Yet, the interplay between different emotions and the extent to which they are driven by external…
Social media platforms are known to optimize user engagement with the help of algorithms. It is widely understood that this practice gives rise to echo chambers\emdash users are mainly exposed to opinions that are similar to their own. In…
This paper examines how social media algorithms and filter bubbles contribute to the fragmentation of online discourse, fostering ideological divides and undermining shared understanding. Drawing on Michael Sandels philosophical emphasis on…
To address the vaccine hesitancy which impairs the efforts of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, it is imperative to understand public vaccination attitudes and timely grasp their changes. In spite of reliability and trustworthiness,…
Online communities can serve as meaningful sources of social support, particularly for marginalized and vulnerable groups. Disclosure of personal information facilitates integration into online communities but may also expose individuals to…
Ideologically homogeneous online environments - often described as "echo chambers" or "filter bubbles" - are widely seen as drivers of polarization, radicalization, and misinformation. A central debate asks whether such homophily stems…
It is part of our daily social-media experience that seemingly ordinary items (videos, news, publications, etc.) unexpectedly gain an enormous amount of attention. Here we investigate how unexpected these events are. We propose a method…
The rich and dynamic information environment of social media provides researchers, policy makers, and entrepreneurs with opportunities to learn about social phenomena in a timely manner. However, using these data to understand social…
Do online platforms facilitate the consumption of potentially harmful content? Using paired behavioral and survey data provided by participants recruited from a representative sample in 2020 (n=1,181), we show that exposure to alternative…
Facebook and Twitter recently announced community-based review platforms to address misinformation. We provide an overview of the potential affordances of such community-based approaches to content moderation based on past research and…
Misinformation spread through social media has become a fundamental challenge in modern society. Recent studies have evaluated various strategies for addressing this problem, such as by modifying social media platforms or educating people…
In the era of social media, people frequently share their own opinions online on various issues and also in the way, get exposed to others' opinions. Be it for selective exposure of news feed recommendation algorithms or our own inclination…
The pervasiveness of online toxicity, including hate speech and trolling, disrupts digital interactions and online well-being. Previous research has mainly focused on post-hoc moderation, overlooking the real-time emotional dynamics of…
Large-scale quantitative analyses have shown that individuals frequently talk to each other about similar things in different online spaces. Why do these overlapping communities exist? We provide an answer grounded in the analysis of 20…
We restrict the propagation of misinformation in a social-media-like environment while preserving the spread of correct information. We model the environment as a random network of users in which each news item propagates in the network in…
Social media platforms provide a rich environment for analyzing user behavior. Recently, deep learning-based methods have been a mainstream approach for social media analysis models involving complex patterns. However, these methods are…
The impact of social media on critical issues such as echo chambers needs to be addressed, as these phenomena can have disruptive consequences for our society. Traditional research often oversimplifies emotional tendencies and opinion…
Diffusion of information and viral content, social contagion and influence are still topics of broad evaluation. We have studied the information epidemic in a social networking platform in order compare different campaign setups. The goal…
Reddit has found its communities playing a prominent role in originating and propagating problematic socio-political discourse. Reddit administrators have generally struggled to prevent or contain such discourse for several reasons…