Related papers: Investigating Human Values in Online Communities
Many researchers studying online communities seek to make them better. However, beyond a small set of widely-held values, such as combating misinformation and abuse, determining what 'better' means can be challenging, as community members…
Making online social communities 'better' is a challenging undertaking, as online communities are extraordinarily varied in their size, topical focus, and governance. As such, what is valued by one community may not be valued by another.…
A major task for moderators of online spaces is norm-setting, essentially creating shared norms for user behavior in their communities. Platform design principles emphasize the importance of highlighting norm-adhering examples and…
The value alignment of sociotechnical systems has become a central debate, but progress depends on how human values are perceived in the content these systems surface and how such perceptions can be measured at scale. Social media platforms…
Advice forums are a crowdsourced way to reinforce cultural norms and moral behavior. Sites like Reddit contain massive amounts of natural language human interaction, with rules and norms unique to each individual subreddit community. To…
This study introduces ValueScope, a framework leveraging language models to quantify social norms and values within online communities, grounded in social science perspectives on normative structures. We employ ValueScope to dissect and…
Optimism about the Internet's potential to bring the world together has been tempered by concerns about its role in inflaming the 'culture wars'. Via mass selection into like-minded groups, online society may be becoming more fragmented and…
A growing number of software-intensive systems are being accused of violating or ignoring human values (e.g., privacy, inclusion, and social responsibility), and this poses great difficulties to individuals and society. Such violations…
Most social network analysis works at the level of interactions between users. But the vast growth in size and complexity of social networks enables us to examine interactions at larger scale. In this work we use a dataset of 76M…
Understanding the sociodemographic composition of online platforms is essential for accurately interpreting digital behavior and its societal implications. Yet, current methods often lack the transparency and reliability required, risking…
Increasingly people form opinions based on information they consume on online social media. As a result, it is crucial to understand what type of content attracts people's attention on social media and drive discussions. In this paper we…
Rules are a critical component of the functioning of nearly every online community, yet it is challenging for community moderators to make data-driven decisions about what rules to set for their communities. The connection between a…
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…
Online disagreements often fail to produce understanding, instead reinforcing existing positions or escalating conflict. Prior work on predictors of successful persuasion in online discourse has largely focused on surface features such as…
We analyze gendered communities defined in three different ways: text, users, and sentiment. Differences across these representations reveal facets of communities' distinctive identities, such as social group, topic, and attitudes. Two…
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…
Online communities provide a fertile ground for analyzing people's behavior and improving our understanding of social processes. Because both people and communities change over time, we argue that analyses of these communities that take…
Content moderation is the process of flagging content based on pre-defined platform rules. There has been a growing need for AI moderators to safeguard users as well as protect the mental health of human moderators from traumatic content.…
Humans need a sense of community (SOC), and social media platforms afford opportunities to address this need by providing users with a sense of virtual community (SOVC). This paper explores SOVC on Reddit and is motivated by two goals: (1)…
Emotional support dialogue systems aim to reduce help-seekers' distress and help them overcome challenges. While human values$\unicode{x2013}$core beliefs that shape an individual's priorities$\unicode{x2013}$are increasingly emphasized in…