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Millions of people use online social networks to reinforce their sense of belonging, for example by giving and asking for feedback as a form of social validation and self-recognition. It is common to observe disagreement among people…
Online users discuss and converse about all sorts of topics on social networks. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit are among many other networks where users can have this freedom of information sharing. The abundance of information shared over these…
Polarized topics often spark discussion and debate on social media. Recent studies have shown that polarized debates have a specific clustered structure in the endorsement net- work, which indicates that users direct their endorsements…
While cross-partisan conversations are central to a vibrant democracy, these are hard conversations to have, especially in the United States amidst unprecedented levels of partisan animosity. Such interactions often devolve into…
When discussing difficult topics online, is it common to meaningfully engage with people from diverse perspectives? Why or why not? Could features of the online environment be redesigned to encourage civil conversation across difference? In…
This research investigates how people engage with data visualizations when commenting on the social platform Reddit. There has been considerable research on collaborative sensemaking with visualizations and the personal relation of people…
The proliferation of social media platforms has afforded social scientists unprecedented access to vast troves of data on human interactions, facilitating the study of online behavior at an unparalleled scale. These platforms typically…
Selective exposure is the main driver for the economy of attention when consuming online content. We select information adhering to our system of beliefs and ignore dissenting information. However, even personal interest is likely to play a…
Engaging with diverse political views is important for reaching better collective decisions, however, users online tend to remain confined within ideologically homogeneous spaces. In this work, we study users who are members of these spaces…
The suggestions generated by most existing recommender systems are known to suffer from a lack of diversity, and other issues like popularity bias. As a result, they have been observed to promote well-known "blockbuster" items, and to…
As the rate of content production grows, we must make a staggering number of daily decisions about what information is worth acting on. For any flourishing online social media system, users can barely keep up with the new content shared by…
Social media platforms are like giant arenas where users can rely on different content and express their opinions through likes, comments, and shares. However, do users welcome different perspectives or only listen to their preferred…
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…
This paper studies the dynamics of opinion formation and polarization in social media. We investigate whether users' stance concerning contentious subjects is influenced by the online discussions they are exposed to and interactions with…
We often treat social media as a lens onto society. How might that lens distort the popularity of political and social viewpoints? We examine discrepancies between publicly posted and privately surveyed opinions within communities,…
Social media is very popular for facilitating conversations about important topics and bringing forth insights and issues related to these topics. Reddit serves as a platform that fosters social interactions and hosts engaging discussions…
Online forums provide rich environments where users may post questions and comments about different topics. Understanding how people behave in online forums may shed light on the fundamental mechanisms by which collective thinking emerges…
What kinds of arguments do people make, and what effect do they have on others? Normative constraints on argument-making are as old as philosophy itself, but little is known about the diversity of arguments made in practice. We use NLP…
The Web has evolved to a dominant platform where everyone has the opportunity to express their opinions, to interact with other users, and to debate on emerging events happening around the world. On the one hand, this has enabled the…
The prevalent perspective in quantitative research on opinion dynamics flattens the landscape of the online political discourse into a traditional left--right dichotomy. While this approach helps simplify the analysis and modeling effort,…