Related papers: Big Tech's Tightening Grip on Internet Speech
This document focuses on the threats, especially near-term threats, that Artificial Intelligence (AI) brings to society. Most of the threats discussed here can result from any algorithmic process, not just AI; in addition, defining AI is…
Public participation is indispensable for an insightful understanding of the ethics issues raised by AI technologies. Twitter is selected in this paper to serve as an online public sphere for exploring discourse on AI ethics, facilitating…
Despite global connectivity, societies seem to be increasingly polarized and fragmented. This phenomenon is rooted in the underlying complex structure and dynamics of social systems. Far from homogeneously mixing or adopting conforming…
Online social networks are the perfect test bed to better understand large-scale human behavior in interacting contexts. Although they are broadly used and studied, little is known about how their terms of service and posting rules affect…
The technology of Conversational AI has made significant advancements over the last eighteen months. As a consequence, conversational agents are likely to be deployed in the near future that are designed to pursue targeted influence…
The Internet revolution in 1990, followed by the data-driven and information revolution, has transformed the world as we know it. Nowadays, what seam to be 10 to 20 years ago, a science fiction idea (i.e., machines dominating the world) is…
Social media has become an indispensable part of the everyday lives of millions of people around the world. It provides a platform for expressing opinions and beliefs, communicated to a massive audience. However, this ease with which people…
This review examines how AI technologies are transforming democratic representation, focusing on citizen participation and algorithmic decision-making. The analysis reveals that AI technologies are reshaping democratic processes in…
The old mantra of decentralizing the Internet is coming again with fanfare, this time around the blockchain technology hype. We have already seen a technology supposed to change the nature of the Internet: peer-to-peer. The reality is that…
Understanding the impact of digital platforms on user behavior presents foundational challenges, including issues related to polarization, misinformation dynamics, and variation in news consumption. Comparative analyses across platforms and…
Information overload has become an ubiquitous problem in modern society. Social media users and microbloggers receive an endless flow of information, often at a rate far higher than their cognitive abilities to process the information. In…
The architecture of public discourse has been profoundly reshaped by social media platforms, which mediate interactions at an unprecedented scale and complexity. This study analyzes user behavior across six platforms over 33 years,…
The prevalence of online hate and abuse is a pressing global concern. While tackling such societal harms is a priority for research across the social sciences, it is a difficult task, in part because of the magnitude of the problem. User…
Amidst widespread reports of digital influence operations during major elections, policymakers, scholars, and journalists have become increasingly interested in the political impact of social media 'bots.' Most recently, platform companies…
Social media platforms provide a rich environment for analyzing user behavior. Recently, deep learning-based methods have been a mainstream approach for social media analysis models involving complex patterns. However, these methods are…
In the last decades an increasing deal of research has investigated the phenomenon of opinion misperception in human communities and, more recently, in social media. Opinion misperception is the wrong evaluation by community's members of…
This paper investigates early legislative deliberations over Artificial Intelligence in the United States through a thematic analysis of the 2023-2024 Oversight of AI hearings held by the Senate Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on…
The broad adoption of the web as a communication medium has made it possible to study social behavior at a new scale. With social media networks such as Twitter, we can collect large data sets of online discourse. Social science researchers…
In this new era of social media, social networks are becoming increasingly important sources of user-generated content on the internet. These kinds of information resources, which include a lot of people's feelings, opinions, feedback, and…
Studies in the social capital literature have documented two stylised facts: first, a decline in measures of social participation has occurred in many OECD countries. Second, and more recently, the success of social networking sites (SNSs)…