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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…
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…
Online commenting platforms have commonly developed systems to address online harms by removing and down-ranking content. An alternative, under-explored approach is to focus on up-ranking content to proactively prioritize prosocial…
Reducing the spread of misinformation is challenging. AI-based fact verification systems offer a promising solution by addressing the high costs and slow pace of traditional fact-checking. However, the problem of how to effectively…
We investigate how crises alter societies by analyzing the timing and channels of change using a longitudinal multi-wave survey of a representative sample of Americans throughout 2020. This methodology allows us to overcome some of the…
The problem of how to effectively mitigate the flow of misinformation remains a significant challenge. The classical approach to this is public disapproval of claims or "debunking." The approach is still widely used on social media, but it…
In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the…
Studies of online social influence have demonstrated that friends have important effects on many types of behavior in a wide variety of settings. However, we know much less about how influence works among relative strangers in digital…
Thanks to platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, people can know facts and events that otherwise would have been silenced. However, social media significantly contribute also to fast spreading biased and false news while targeting specific…
Recently a simple military exercise on the Internet was perceived as the beginning of a new civil war in the US. Social media aggregate people around common interests eliciting a collective framing of narratives and worldviews. However, the…
Polarization, declining trust, and wavering support for democratic norms are pressing threats to U.S. democracy. Exposure to verified and quality news may lower individual susceptibility to these threats and make citizens more resilient to…
Social networking and micro-blogging services, such as Twitter, play an important role in sharing digital information. Despite the popularity and usefulness of social media, they are regularly abused by corrupt users. One of these nefarious…
In this paper, the influence of the social media on the opinion formation process is modeled during an election campaign. In the proposed model, peer- to-peer interactions and targeted online propaganda messages are assumed to be the…
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…
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…
Users online tend to join polarized groups of like-minded peers around shared narratives, forming echo chambers. The echo chamber effect and opinion polarization may be driven by several factors including human biases in information…
Corrections given by ordinary social media users, also referred to as Social Correction have emerged as a viable intervention against misinformation as per the recent literature. However, little is known about how often users give disputing…
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…
Americans spend about a third of their time online, with many participating in online conversations on social and political issues. We hypothesize that social media arguments on such issues may be more engaging and persuasive than…
Despite their playful purpose social media changed the way users access information, debate, and form their opinions. Recent studies, indeed, showed that users online tend to promote their favored narratives and thus to form polarized…