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In this article, we quantitatively analyze how the term "fake news" is being shaped in news media in recent years. We study the perception and the conceptualization of this term in the traditional media using eight years of data collected…
News media is expected to uphold unbiased reporting. Yet they may still affect public opinion by selectively including or omitting events that support or contradict their ideological positions. Prior work in NLP has only studied media bias…
Election poll reporting often focuses on mean values and only subordinately discusses the underlying uncertainty. Subsequent interpretations are too often phrased as certain. Moreover, media coverage rarely adequately takes into account the…
Information about world events is disseminated through a wide variety of news channels, each with specific considerations in the choice of their reporting. Although the multiplicity of these outlets should ensure a variety of viewpoints,…
In March 2025, Meta announced a new AI system to rank the order of the comments shown to Instagram users. With existing research showing how feed personalization systems can lead to increased polarization, the introduction of this new…
Homophily -- our tendency to surround ourselves with others who share our perspectives and opinions about the world -- is both a part of human nature and an organizing principle underpinning many of our digital social networks. However,…
The abundance of information on social media has reshaped public discussions, shifting attention to the mechanisms that drive online discourse. This study analyzes large-scale Twitter (now X) data from three global debates--Climate Change,…
Opinion Dynamics is an interdisciplinary area of research. Psychology and Sociology have proposed models of how individuals form opinions and how social interactions influence this process. Socio-Physicists have interpreted patterns in…
With the spread of high-speed Internet and portable smart devices, the way people access and consume information has drastically changed. However, this presents many challenges, including information overload, personal data leakage, and…
Citizens and Emergency Managers need to be able to distinguish ''fake'' (untrue) news posts from real news posts on social media during disasters. This paper is based on an online survey conducted in 2018 that produced 341 responses from…
Online social networks provide users with unprecedented opportunities to engage with diverse opinions. At the same time, they enable confirmation bias on large scales by empowering individuals to self-select narratives they want to be…
In recent years, scholars have raised concerns on the effects that unreliable news, or "fake news," has on our political sphere, and our democracy as a whole. For example, the propagation of fake news on social media is widely believed to…
Vaccine hesitancy has been recognized as a major global health threat. Having access to any type of information in social media has been suggested as a potential powerful influence factor to hesitancy. Recent studies in other fields than…
In an era marked by an abundance of news sources, access to information significantly influences public opinion. Notably, the bias of news sources often serves as an indicator of individuals' political leanings. This study explores this…
In recent years, industry leaders and researchers have proposed to use technical provenance standards to address visual misinformation spread through digitally altered media. By adding immutable and secure provenance information such as…
News organizations are increasingly using social media to reach out to their audience aimed at raising their attention and engagement with news. Given the continuous decrease in subscription rates and audience trust in news media, it is…
A key question of collective social behavior is related to the influence of Mass Media on public opinion. Different approaches have been developed to address quantitatively this issue, ranging from field experiments to mathematical models.…
Does polarization online reflect the state of polarization in society? We study ideological positions and attitudes on several issues in France, a country with documented issue nonalignment. We compare distributions on X/Twitter with a…
Misinformation proliferation on social media platforms is a pervasive threat to the integrity of online public discourse. Genuine users, susceptible to others' influence, often unknowingly engage with, endorse, and re-share questionable…
In a stylized voting model, we establish that increasing the share of critical thinkers -- individuals who are aware of the ambivalent nature of a certain issue -- in the population increases the efficiency of surveys (elections) but might…