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Understanding the factors that impact the popularity dynamics of social media can drive the design of effective information services, besides providing valuable insights to content generators and online advertisers. Taking YouTube as case…
The rapid growth of social media as a news platform has raised significant concerns about the influence and societal impact of biased and unreliable news on these platforms. While much research has explored user engagement with news on…
Cascades of information-sharing are a primary mechanism by which content reaches its audience on social media, and an active line of research has studied how such cascades, which form as content is reshared from person to person, develop…
The modern news cycle has been fundamentally reshaped by the rapid exchange of information online. As a result, media framing shifts dynamically as new information, political responses, and social reactions emerge. Understanding how these…
Emotions play an important role in interpersonal interactions and social conflict, yet their function in the development of controversy and disagreement in online conversations has not been explored. To address this gap, we study…
In a stylized voting model, we establish that increasing the share of critical thinkers -- individuals who are aware of the ambivalent nature of a certain issue -- in the population increases the efficiency of surveys (elections) but might…
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…
An increasing portion of modern socializing takes place via online social networks. Members of these communities often play distinct roles that can be deduced from observations of users' online activities. One such activity is the sharing…
The #MeToo movement has catalyzed widespread public discourse surrounding sexual harassment and assault, empowering survivors to share their stories and holding perpetrators accountable. While the movement has had a substantial and largely…
In the age of information abundance, attention is a coveted resource. Social media platforms vigorously compete for users' engagement, influencing the evolution of their opinions on a variety of topics. With recommendation algorithms often…
In this work we study the dynamical features of editorial wars in Wikipedia (WP). Based on our previously established algorithm, we build up samples of controversial and peaceful articles and analyze the temporal characteristics of the…
Social media is increasingly being used as a news-platform. To reach their intended audience, newspapers need for their articles to be well ranked by Facebook's news-feed algorithm. The number of likes, shares and other reactions determine…
News consumption on social media has become ubiquitous, yet how different forms of engagement shape psychosocial outcomes remains unclear. To address this gap, we leveraged a large-scale dataset of ~26M posts and ~45M comments on the…
In this paper, we explore salient questions about user interests, conversations and friendships in the Facebook social network, using a novel latent space model that integrates several data types. A key challenge of studying Facebook's data…
The advent of WWW changed the way we can produce and access information. Recent studies showed that users tend to select information that is consistent with their system of beliefs, forming polarized groups of like-minded people around…
Social media is profoundly changing our society with its unprecedented spreading power. Due to the complexity of human behaviors and the diversity of massive messages, the information spreading dynamics are complicated, and the reported…
On-line social networks publish information on a high volume of real-world events almost instantly, becoming a primary source for breaking news. Some of these real-world events can end up having a very strong impact on on-line social…
Social media has played an important role in shaping political discourse over the last decade. At the same time, it is often perceived to have increased political polarization, thanks to the scale of discussions and their public nature. In…
How do European publics debate a geopolitical crisis on social media, and do they inhabit a shared informational reality? We analyze over 38 million geolocated tweets from 20 European countries during the first eight months of the Russian…
As public discourse continues to move and grow online, conversations about divisive topics on social media platforms have also increased. These divisive topics prompt both contentious and non-contentious conversations. Although what…