Related papers: Hatemongers ride on echo chambers to escalate hate…
Online hate speech is responsible for violent attacks such as, e.g., the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018, thereby posing a significant threat to vulnerable groups and society in general. However, little is known about what makes hate…
In recent years, malicious information had an explosive growth in social media, with serious social and political backlashes. Recent important studies, featuring large-scale analyses, have produced deeper knowledge about this phenomenon,…
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…
Hate speech (HS) erodes the inclusiveness of online users and propagates negativity and division. Counterspeech has been recognized as a way to mitigate the harmful consequences. While some research has investigated the impact of…
The online hate speech is proliferating with several organization and countries implementing laws to ban such harmful speech. While these restrictions might reduce the amount of such hateful content, it does so by restricting freedom of…
Online social platforms are beset with hateful speech - content that expresses hatred for a person or group of people. Such content can frighten, intimidate, or silence platform users, and some of it can inspire other users to commit…
Background: Social media chatter in 2020 has been largely dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Existing research shows that COVID-19 discourse is highly politicized, with political preferences linked to beliefs and disbeliefs about the…
Online hate messaging is a pervasive issue plaguing the well-being of social media users. This research empirically investigates a novel theory positing that online hate may be driven primarily by the pursuit of social approval rather than…
This study investigates echo chambers in social networks through an analysis of Twitter news accounts. Utilizing bias labels from the AllSides website, we construct a dataset representing six dimensions of news bias. Through manual…
Echo chambers in online social networks, whereby users' beliefs are reinforced by interactions with like-minded peers and insulation from others' points of view, have been decried as a cause of political polarization. Here, we investigate…
A common assumption in the literature on information diffusion is that populations are homogeneous regarding individuals' information acquisition and propagation process: Individuals update their informed and actively communicating state…
Social media systems allow Internet users a congenial platform to freely express their thoughts and opinions. Although this property represents incredible and unique communication opportunities, it also brings along important challenges.…
Social media and the internet have become an integral part of how people spread and consume information. Over a period of time, social media evolved dramatically, and almost half of the population is using social media to express their…
Social platforms such as Gab and Parler, branded as `free-speech' networks, have seen a significant growth of their user base in recent years. This popularity is mainly attributed to the stricter moderation enforced by mainstream platforms…
Over the past decade, contrary to the early popular expectation that large-scale discourse in online communities would foster greater consensus, the large-scale structure of online discourse has been measured to be strongly polarized.…
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…
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…
Despite echo chambers in social media have been under considerable scrutiny, general models for their detection and analysis are missing. In this work, we aim to fill this gap by proposing a probabilistic generative model that explains…
On social media algorithms for content promotion, accounting for users preferences, might limit the exposure to unsolicited contents. In this work, we study how the same contents (videos) are consumed on different platforms -- i.e. Facebook…
The spread of hate speech on social media space is currently a serious issue. The undemanding access to the enormous amount of information being generated on these platforms has led people to post and react with toxic content that…