Related papers: How Decentralization Affects User Agency on Social…
Pollution of online social spaces caused by rampaging d/misinformation is a growing societal concern. However, recent decisions to reduce access to social media APIs are causing a shortage of publicly available, recent, social media data,…
Community-level blocklists are key to content moderation practices in decentralized social media. These blocklists enable moderators to prevent other communities, such as those acting in bad faith, from interacting with their own -- and, if…
Social media platforms moderate content for each user by incorporating the outputs of both platform-wide content moderation systems and, in some cases, user-configured personal moderation preferences. However, it is unclear (1) how end…
Decentralising the Web is a desirable but challenging goal. One particular challenge is achieving decentralised content moderation in the face of various adversaries (e.g. trolls). To overcome this challenge, many Decentralised Web (DW)…
Bluesky is a decentralized, Twitter-like social media platform that has rapidly gained popularity. Following an invite-only phase, it officially opened to the public on February 6th, 2024, leading to a significant expansion of its user…
Decentralized systems are a subset of distributed systems where multiple authorities control different components and no authority is fully trusted by all. This implies that any component in a decentralized system is potentially…
Blockchain technology promises to democratize finance and promote social equity through decentralization, but questions remain about whether current implementations advance or hinder these goals. Through a mixed-methods study combining…
Digital societies come with a design paradox: On the one hand, technologies, such as Internet of Things, pervasive and ubiquitous systems, allow a distributed local intelligence in interconnected devices of our everyday life such as smart…
While the Internet was conceived as a decentralized network, the most widely used web applications today tend toward centralization. Control increasingly rests with centralized service providers who, as a consequence, have also amassed…
Decentralization initiatives like Solid enable data owners to control who has access to their data and to stimulate innovation by creating both application and data markets. Once data owners share their data with others, though, it is no…
Smart recommendation algorithms have revolutionized content delivery and improved efficiency across various domains. However, concerns about user agency arise from the algorithms' inherent opacity (information asymmetry) and one-way output…
Online political discourse is increasingly shaped not by a few dominant platforms but by a fragmented ecosystem of social media spaces, each with its own user base, target audience, and algorithmic mediation of discussion. Such…
Calls to decentralize feed-based social media have been driven by concerns about the concentrated power of centralized platforms and their societal impact. In response, numerous decentralized social media protocols have emerged, each…
This paper examines the potential of the Fediverse, a federated network of social media and content platforms, to counter the centralization and dominance of commercial platforms on the social Web. We gather evidence from the technology…
We investigate the dynamics of opinion formation on social networking platforms, focusing on how individual opinions, influenced by both social connections and platform algorithms, evolve. We model this process using a differential…
Decentralized social media platforms like Bluesky Social (Bluesky) have made it possible to publicly disclose some user behaviors with millisecond-level precision. Embracing Bluesky's principles of open-source and open-data, we present the…
As an alternative to Twitter and other centralized social networks, the Fediverse is growing in popularity. The recent, and polemical, takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk has exacerbated this trend. The Fediverse includes a growing number of…
Facebook uses Artificial Intelligence for targeting users with advertisements based on the events in which they engage like sharing, liking, making comments, posts by a friend, a group creation, etcetera. Each user interacts with these…
The emergence of decentralized social media platforms presents new opportunities and challenges for real-time analysis of public discourse. This study introduces CognitiveSky, an open-source and scalable framework designed for sentiment,…
For AI technology to fulfill its full promises, we must have effective means to ensure Responsible AI behavior and curtail potential irresponsible use, e.g., in areas of privacy protection, human autonomy, robustness, and prevention of…