Related papers: Unifying the Extremes: Developing a Unified Model …
Even though the Internet and social media have increased the amount of news and information people can consume, most users are only exposed to content that reinforces their positions and isolates them from other ideological communities.…
We propose, develop, and analyze a mathematical model of intergroup attitudes in a community that is divided between two distinct social groups (which may be distinguished by religion, ethnicity, or some other socially distinguishing…
We live in an age of information abundance but know little about how this influences our opinions or attitudes. A common expectation is that people consulting numerous pieces of information, well balancing the different sides of an issue,…
The increased use of online social networks for the dissemination of information comes with the misuse of the internet for cyberbullying, cybercrime, spam, vandalism, amongst other things. To proactively identify abuse in the networks, we…
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…
The structure and the properties of complex networks essentially depend on the way how nodes get connected to each other. We assume here that each node has a feature which attracts the others. We model the situation by assigning two numbers…
Online incivility has emerged as a widespread and persistent problem in digital communities, imposing substantial social and psychological burdens on users. Although many platforms attempt to curb incivility through moderation and automated…
The rise in eating disorders, a condition with serious health complications, has been linked to the proliferation of idealized body images on social media platforms. However, the relationship between social media and eating disorders is…
Polarization, defined as the emergence of sharply divided groups with opposing and often extreme views, is an increasingly prominent feature of modern societies. While many studies analyze this phenomenon in the context of single issues,…
Hateful rhetoric is plaguing online discourse, fostering extreme societal movements and possibly giving rise to real-world violence. A potential solution to this growing global problem is citizen-generated counter speech where citizens…
The pervasive use of social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and X, has significantly amplified our electronic interconnectedness. Moreover, these platforms are now easily accessible from any location at any given time.…
Probabilistic models can learn users' preferences from the history of their item adoptions on a social media site, and in turn, recommend new items to users based on learned preferences. However, current models ignore psychological factors…
Understanding the social conditions that tend to increase or decrease polarization is important for many reasons. We study a network-structured agent-based model of opinion dynamics, extending a model previously introduced by Flache and…
Online forums are rich sources of information about user communication activity over time. Finding temporal patterns in online forum communication threads can advance our understanding of the dynamics of conversations. The main challenge of…
[Context] Researchers analyze underground forums to study abuse and cybercrime activities. Due to the size of the forums and the domain expertise required to identify criminal discussions, most approaches employ supervised machine learning…
Neo-fascism is a political and societal ideology that has been having remarkable growth in the last decade in the United States of America (USA), as well as in other Western societies. It poses a grave danger to democracy and the minorities…
Curbing online hate speech has become the need of the hour; however, a blanket ban on such activities is infeasible for several geopolitical and cultural reasons. To reduce the severity of the problem, in this paper, we introduce a novel…
This paper explores the use of language models to predict 20 human traits from users' Facebook status updates. The data was collected by the myPersonality project, and includes user statuses along with their personality, gender, political…
Cyberbullying and cyberaggression are increasingly worrisome phenomena affecting people across all demographics. More than half of young social media users worldwide have been exposed to such prolonged and/or coordinated digital harassment.…
Understanding political polarization on social platforms is important as public opinions may become increasingly extreme when they are circulated in homogeneous communities, thus potentially causing damage in the real world. Automatically…