Related papers: Cascade-based Echo Chamber Detection
I study how strategic communication among voters shapes both political outcomes and parties' advertising strategies in a model of informative campaign advertising. Two main results are derived. First, echo chambers arise endogenously.…
In order to truly understand how social media might shape online discourses or contribute to societal polarization, we need refined models of platform choice, that is: models that help us understand why users prefer one social media…
Homophily -- our tendency to surround ourselves with others who share our perspectives and opinions about the world -- is both a part of human nature and an organizing principle underpinning many of our digital social networks. However,…
The daily exposure of social media users to propaganda and disinformation campaigns has reinvigorated the need to investigate the local and global patterns of diffusion of different (mis)information content on social media. Echo chambers…
Recent years have witnessed a swelling rise of hateful and abusive content over online social networks. While detection and moderation of hate speech have been the early go-to countermeasures, the solution requires a deeper exploration of…
Understanding and mitigating political bias in online social media platforms are crucial tasks to combat misinformation and echo chamber effects. However, characterizing political bias temporally using computational methods presents…
Large-scale social networks are thought to contribute to polarization by amplifying people's biases. However, the complexity of these technologies makes it difficult to identify the mechanisms responsible and to evaluate mitigation…
An ability to infer the political leaning of social media users can help in gathering opinion polls thereby leading to a better understanding of public opinion. While there has been a body of research attempting to infer the political…
Society is often polarized by controversial issues, that split the population into groups of opposing views. When such issues emerge on social media, we often observe the creation of 'echo chambers', i.e., situations where like-minded…
Social media platforms have been widely linked to societal harms, including rising polarization and the erosion of constructive debate. Can these problems be mitigated through prosocial interventions? We address this question using a novel…
Vaccination hesitancy is a major obstacle to achieving and maintaining herd immunity. It is therefore of prime importance for public health authorities to understand the dynamics of an anti-vaccine opinion in the population. We introduce a…
The flow of information reaching us via the online media platforms is optimized not by the information content or relevance but by popularity and proximity to the target. This is typically performed in order to maximise platform usage. As a…
Multidimensional scaling in networks allows for the discovery of latent information about their structure by embedding nodes in some feature space. Ideological scaling for users in social networks such as Twitter is an example, but similar…
Predicting the flow of information in dynamic social environments is relevant to many areas of the contemporary society, from disseminating health care messages to meme tracking. While predicting the growth of information cascades has been…
Estimating the political leanings of social media users is a challenging and ever more pressing problem given the increase in social media consumption. We introduce Retweet-BERT, a simple and scalable model to estimate the political…
Polarization of opinions has been empirically noted in many online social network platforms. Traditional models of opinion dynamics, based on statistical physics principles, do not account for the emergence of polarization and echo chambers…
The diffusion of complex opinions is severely hindered in multilayer social networks by echo chambers and cognitive consistency mechanisms. We investigate Influence Maximization strategies within the 3-state multilayer q-voter model.…
Political misinformation, astroturfing and organised trolling are online malicious behaviours with significant real-world effects. Many previous approaches examining these phenomena have focused on broad campaigns rather than the small…
Polarization is a ubiquitous phenomenon in social systems. Empirical studies document substantial evidence for opinion polarization across social media, showing a typical bipolarized pattern devising individuals into two groups with…
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…