Related papers: Characterizing Engagement Dynamics across Topics o…
We set up a simple mathematical model for the dynamics of public interest in terms of media coverage and social interactions. We test the model on a series of events related to violence in the US during 2020, using the volume of tweets and…
Measuring the impact and success of human performance is common in various disciplines, including art, science, and sports. Quantifying impact also plays a key role on social media, where impact is usually defined as the reach of a user's…
The COVID-19 pandemic brought upon a massive wave of disinformation, exacerbating polarization in the increasingly divided landscape of online discourse. In this context, popular social media users play a major role, as they have the…
Online social media provide multiple ways to find interesting content. One important method is highlighting content recommended by user's friends. We examine this process on one such site, the news aggregator Digg. With a stochastic model…
Using empirical data from a social media site (Twitter) and on trading volumes of financial securities, we analyze the correlated human activity in massive social organizations. The activity, typically excited by real-world events and…
Social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter play a key role in disseminating both reliable and unreliable information about climate change. This study analyses the topology of interactions in Twitter and their relation to cross-platform…
The rising attention to the spreading of fake news and unsubstantiated rumors on online social media and the pivotal role played by confirmation bias led researchers to investigate different aspects of the phenomenon. Experimental evidence…
News consumption behavior is shaped by the coupling between temporal dynamics and content selection. This study proposes a multi-scale temporal-content framework and validates it on two large real-world news datasets, MIND and Adressa.…
Social media enabled a direct path from producer to consumer of contents changing the way users get informed, debate, and shape their worldviews. Such a {\em disintermediation} weakened consensus on social relevant issues in favor of…
The rise of social media has fundamentally transformed how people engage in public discourse and form opinions. While these platforms offer unprecedented opportunities for democratic engagement, they have been implicated in increasing…
Echo chambers are defined by the simultaneous presence of opinion polarization with respect to a controversial topic and homophily, i.e. the preference of individuals to interact with like-minded peers. While recent efforts have been…
This paper analyses changes in public opinion by tracking political discussions in which people voluntarily engage online. Unlike polls or surveys, our approach does not elicit opinions but approximates what the public thinks by analysing…
We present an analysis of user conversations in on-line social media and their evolution over time. We propose a dynamic model that accurately predicts the growth dynamics and structural properties of conversation threads. The model…
Polarization is a troubling phenomenon that can lead to societal divisions and hurt the democratic process. It is therefore important to develop methods to reduce it. We propose an algorithmic solution to the problem of reducing…
While existing works have emphasized how elites shape mass opinion, we ask whether the reverse also holds: do audience reactions on social media actively shape elite behavior? We examine this question through the lens of cross-partisan…
In online social media systems users are not only posting, consuming, and resharing content, but also creating new and destroying existing connections in the underlying social network. While each of these two types of dynamics has…
Polarisation research has demonstrated how people cluster in homogeneous groups with opposing opinions. However, this effect emerges not only through interaction between people, limiting communication between groups, but also between…
We study learning on social media with an equilibrium model of users interacting with shared news stories. Rational users arrive sequentially, observe an original story (i.e., a private signal) and a sample of predecessors' stories in a…
Opinion dynamics models describe the evolution of behavioral changes within social networks and are essential for informing strategies aimed at fostering positive collective changes, such as climate action initiatives. When applied to…
The rising popularity of social media has radically changed the way news content is propagated, including interactive attempts with new dimensions. To date, traditional news media such as newspapers, television and radio have already…