Related papers: Uncovering the Interaction Equation: Quantifying t…
Platforms are increasingly relying on algorithms to curate the content within users' social media feeds. However, the growing prominence of proprietary, algorithmically curated feeds has concealed what factors influence the presentation of…
Social media feeds have become central to the Internet. Among the most visible are trending feeds, which rank content deemed timely and relevant. To examine how feed signals influence behaviors and perceptions, we conducted a randomized…
Social media broadly refers to digital platforms and applications that simulate social interactions online. This study investigates the impact of social media platforms and their algorithms on political interest among users. As social media…
In order to keep up with the demand of curating the deluge of crowd-sourced content, social media platforms leverage user interaction feedback to make decisions about which content to display, highlight, and hide. User interactions such as…
Accurately estimating how users respond to moderation interventions is paramount for developing effective and user-centred moderation strategies. However, this requires a clear understanding of which user characteristics are associated with…
The pervasive rise of digital platforms has reshaped how individuals engage with information, with algorithms and peer influence playing pivotal roles in these processes. This study investigates the effects of algorithmic curation and peer…
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…
Users increasingly rely on social media feeds for consuming daily information. The items in a feed, such as news, questions, songs, etc., usually result from the complex interplay of a user's social contacts, her interests and her actions…
Most modern recommendation algorithms are data-driven: they generate personalized recommendations by observing users' past behaviors. A common assumption in recommendation is that how a user interacts with a piece of content (e.g., whether…
Social media feed algorithms infer user preferences from their past behaviors. Yet what drives engagement often diverges from what users value. We examine this gap between stated preferences (what users say they prefer) and revealed…
On social media algorithms for content promotion, accounting for users preferences, might limit the exposure to unsolicited contents. In this work, we study how the same contents (videos) are consumed on different platforms -- i.e. Facebook…
Social media platforms shape public discourse through two fundamental design choices that naturally co-occur in any field investigation: platform architecture, which defines what types of actors exist and how they interact, and…
Microblogging platforms constitute a popular means of real-time communication and information sharing. They involve such a large volume of user-generated content that their users suffer from an information deluge. To address it, numerous…
Search engines play a crucial role as digital gatekeepers, shaping the visibility of Web and social media content through algorithmic curation. This study investigates how search engines like Google selectively promotes or suppresses…
As an increasingly large number of people turn to platforms like Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc. for financial advice, generating insights about the content generated and interactions taking place within these platforms have…
This study proposes content and interaction analysis techniques for a large repository created from social media content. Though we have presented our study for a large platform dedicated to discussions around financial topics, the proposed…
We report the first direct comparisons of multiple alternative social media algorithms on multiple platforms on outcomes of societal interest. We used a browser extension to modify which posts were shown to desktop social media users,…
User activities can influence their subsequent interactions with a post, generating interest in the user. Typically, users interact with posts from friends by commenting and using reaction emojis, reflecting their level of interest on…
Recommendation algorithms for social media feeds often function as black boxes from the perspective of users. We aim to detect whether social media feed recommendations are personalized to users, and to characterize the factors contributing…
In today's cross-platform social media landscape, understanding factors that drive engagement for multimodal content, especially text paired with visuals, remains complex. This study investigates how rewriting Reddit post titles adapted…