Related papers: Shockwaves and turbulence across social media
We present a minimal yet empirically-grounded theory for the spread of online harms (e.g. misinformation, hate) across current multi-platform social media and future Metaverses. New physics emerges from the interplay between the intrinsic…
A better understanding of how support evolves online for undesirable behaviors such as extremism and hate, could help mitigate future harms. Here we show how the highly irregular growth curves of groups supporting two high-profile extremism…
Online social media allows individuals to cluster around common interests - including hate. We show that tight-knit social clusters interlink to form resilient 'global hate highways' that bridge independent social network platforms,…
The sudden emergence of large-scale riots in otherwise unconnected cities across the UK in summer 2024 came as a shock for both government officials and citizens. Irrespective of these riots' specific trigger, a key question is how the…
Support for extremist entities - whether from the far right, or far left - often manages to survive globally online despite significant external pressure, and may ultimately inspire violent acts by individuals having no obvious prior…
The advent and proliferation of social media have led to the development of mathematical models describing the evolution of beliefs/opinions in an ecosystem composed of socially interacting users. The goal is to gain insights into…
Recent grassroots movements have suggested that online social networks might play a key role in their organization, as adherents have a fast, many-to-many, communication channel to help coordinate their mobilization. The structure and…
The boundaries between physical and social networks have narrowed with the advent of the Internet and its pervasive platforms. This has given rise to a complex adaptive information ecosystem where individuals and machines compete for…
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…
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…
In the era of social media, every day billions of individuals produce content in socio-technical systems resulting in a deluge of information. However, human attention is a limited resource and it is increasingly challenging to consume the…
The massive amount of text data on the web has facilitated research on the quantitative analysis of public opinion, which could not be visualized earlier. In this paper, we propose a new opinion dynamics theory. This theory that is intended…
We investigate opinion dynamics and information spreading on networks under the influence of content filtering technologies. The filtering mechanism, present in many online social platforms, reduces individuals' exposure to disagreeing…
Social media platforms such as Twitter (now known as X) have revolutionized how the public engage with important societal and political topics. Recently, climate change discussions on social media became a catalyst for political…
Calls are escalating for social media platforms to do more to mitigate extreme online communities whose views can lead to real-world harms, e.g., mis/disinformation and distrust that increased Covid-19 fatalities, and now extend to…
This research presents a framework for analyzing the dynamics of online communities in social media platforms, utilizing a temporal fusion of text and network data. By combining text classification and dynamic social network analysis, we…
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,…
How communities respond to diverse societal challenges, from economic crises to political upheavals, is shaped by their collective minds - shared representations of ongoing events and current topics. In turn, collective minds are shaped by…
Online platforms provide an infrastructure for social movements, leaving digital traces that can be modelled as networks to quantify how information, participation, and coordination emerge during episodes of collective action and evolve…
Online communications, and in particular social media, are a key component of how society interacts with and promotes content online. Collective attention on such content can vary wildly. The majority of breaking topics quickly fade into…