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When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, much of life moved online. Platforms of all types reported surges of activity, and people remarked on the various important functions that online platforms suddenly fulfilled. However, researchers lack a…
In their 2005 study, Adamic and Glance coined the memorable phrase "divided they blog", referring to a trend of cyberbalkanization in the political blogosphere, with liberal and conservative blogs tending to link to other blogs with a…
As millions of people use ChatGPT for tasks such as education, writing assistance, and health advice, concerns have grown about how personal prompts and data are stored and used. This study explores how Reddit users collectively negotiate…
Group segregation or cohesion can emerge from micro-level communication, and AI-assisted messaging may shape this process. Here, we report a preregistered online experiment (N = 557 across 60 sessions) in which participants discussed…
We investigate feedback mechanisms in political communication by testing whether politicians adapt the sentiment of their messages in response to public engagement. Using over 1.5 million tweets from Members of Parliament in the United…
Global events like wars and pandemics can intensify online discussions, fostering information sharing and connection among individuals. However, the divisive nature of such events may lead to polarization within online communities, shaping…
Social media systems rely on user feedback and rating mechanisms for personalization, ranking, and content filtering. However, when users evaluate content contributed by fellow users (e.g., by liking a post or voting on a comment), these…
Recent research brought awareness of the issue of bots on social media and the significant risks of mass manipulation of public opinion in the context of political discussion. In this work, we leverage Twitter to study the discourse during…
Social news websites, such as Reddit, have evolved into prominent platforms for sharing and discussing news. A key issue on social news websites sites is the formation of echo chambers, which often lead to the spread of highly biased or…
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…
The impact of culture on how people express distress in online support communities is increasingly a topic of interest within Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). In the United States, distinct…
Online social networks have become primary means of communication. As they often exhibit undesirable effects such as hostility, polarisation or echo chambers, it is crucial to develop analytical tools that help us better understand them. In…
Social media may create echo chambers that reaffirm users' beliefs and opinions through repeated exposure of similar notions. Whilst the formation and effect of echo chambers have been intensively examined in thread-based platforms 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…
Deplatforming, the permanent banning of entire communities, is a primary tool for content moderation on mainstream platforms. While prior research examines effects on banned communities or source platform health, the impact on alternative…
Studies of online social influence have demonstrated that friends have important effects on many types of behavior in a wide variety of settings. However, we know much less about how influence works among relative strangers in digital…
This work extends a model of simulating influence in a network of stochastic edge dynamics to account for polarization. The model built upon is termed Dynamic Communicators and seeks to understand the process which produces low volume, high…
When toxic online communities on mainstream platforms face moderation measures, such as bans, they may migrate to other platforms with laxer policies or set up their own dedicated websites. Previous work suggests that within mainstream…
We study the impact of content moderation policies in online communities. In our theoretical model, a platform chooses a content moderation policy and individuals choose whether or not to participate in the community according to the…
Many children in foster care experience trauma that is rooted in unstable family relationships. Other members of the foster care system like foster parents and social workers face secondary trauma. Drawing on 10 years of Reddit data, we…