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The advent of social media platforms has revolutionized information consumption patterns, with individuals frequently engaging in these platforms for social interactions. This trend has fostered an environment where people gravitate towards…
Unlike traditional media, online news platforms allow users to consume content that suits their tastes and to facilitate interactions with other people. However, as more personalized consumption of information and interaction with…
The explosive growth of social media has not only revolutionized communication but also brought challenges such as political polarization, misinformation, hate speech, and echo chambers. This dissertation employs computational social…
Popularity dynamics in social media depend on a complex interplay of social influence between users and popularity-based recommendations that are provided by the platforms. In this work, we introduce a discrete-time dynamical system to…
Social media users post content on various topics. A defining feature of social media is that other users can provide feedback -- called community feedback -- to their content in the form of comments, replies, and retweets. We hypothesize…
This study uses sentiment analysis and the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) to characterise news content in social media and examine its association with user engagement. We employ Natural Language Processing to quantify the moral and…
Political polarization appears to be on the rise, as measured by voting behavior, general affect towards opposing partisans and their parties, and contents posted and consumed online. Research over the years has focused on the role of the…
Cryptocurrencies have recently experienced a new wave of price volatility and interest; activity within social media communities relating to cryptocurrencies has increased significantly. There is currently limited documented knowledge of…
In online social networks, users tend to select information that adhere to their system of beliefs and to form polarized groups of like minded people. Polarization as well as its effects on online social interactions have been extensively…
The Web has become the main source for news acquisition. At the same time, news discussion has become more social: users can post comments on news articles or discuss news articles on other platforms like Reddit. These features empower and…
User dynamics in online social networks have a significant impact on not only the online community but also real-world activities. As examples, we can mention explosive user dynamics triggered by social polarization, echo chamber phenomena,…
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains one of the most polarizing geopolitical issues, with the October 2023 escalation intensifying online debate. Social media platforms, particularly Telegram, have become central to real-time news…
In the political arena of social platforms, opposing factions of varying sizes show asymmetrical patterns, and elites and masses within these groups have divergent motivations and influence,challenging simplistic views of polarization. Yet,…
Social media are pervaded by unsubstantiated or untruthful rumors, that contribute to the alarming phenomenon of misinformation. The widespread presence of a heterogeneous mass of information sources may affect the mechanisms behind the…
In order to keep up with the demand of curating the deluge of crowd-sourced content, social media platforms leverage user interaction feedback to make decisions about which content to display, highlight, and hide. User interactions such as…
Language change is influenced by many factors, but often starts from synchronic variation, where multiple linguistic patterns or forms coexist, or where different speech communities use language in increasingly different ways. Besides…
Information-communication technology promotes collaborative environments like Wikipedia where, however, controversiality and conflicts can appear. To describe the rise, persistence, and resolution of such conflicts we devise an extended…
In this work we study, on a sample of 2.3 million individuals, how Facebook users consumed different information at the edge of political discussion and news during the last Italian electoral competition. Pages are categorized, according to…
The rise of misinformation and fake news in online political discourse poses significant challenges to democratic processes and public engagement. While debunking efforts aim to counteract misinformation and foster fact-based dialogue,…
Online toxic attacks, such as harassment, trolling, and hate speech have been linked to an increase in offline violence and negative psychological effects on victims. In this paper, we studied the impact of toxicity on users' online…