Related papers: Algorithms vs. Peers: Shaping Engagement with Nove…
Individuals of modern societies share ideas and participate in collective processes within a pervasive, variable, and mostly hidden ecosystem of content filtering technologies that determine what information we see online. Despite the…
User participation in online communities is driven by the intertwinement of the social network structure with the crowd-generated content that flows along its links. These aspects are rarely explored jointly and at scale. By looking at how…
Social media algorithms are thought to amplify variation in user beliefs, thus contributing to radicalization. However, quantitative evidence on how algorithms and user preferences jointly shape harmful online engagement is limited. I…
Despite extensive research, the mechanisms through which online platforms shape extremism and polarization remain poorly understood. We identify and test a mechanism, grounded in empirical evidence, that explains how ranking algorithms can…
People regularly share items using online social media. However, people's decisions around sharing---who shares what to whom and why---are not well understood. We present a user study involving 87 pairs of Facebook users to understand how…
Users of social media platforms based on recommendation systems (e.g. TikTok, X, YouTube) strategically interact with platform content to influence future recommendations. On some such platforms, users have been documented to form…
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…
The rise of social media and recommendation algorithms has sparked concerns about their role in fostering opinion polarization and echo chambers. We study these phenomena using an adaptive voter model to compare two connection mechanisms:…
How can online communities execute a focused vision for their space? Curation offers one approach, where community leaders manually select content to share with the community. Curation enables leaders to shape a space that matches their…
Recent studies suggest that social media usage -- while linked to an increased diversity of information and perspectives for users -- has exacerbated user polarization on many issues. A popular theory for this phenomenon centers on the…
In the age of information abundance, attention is a coveted resource. Social media platforms vigorously compete for users' engagement, influencing the evolution of their opinions on a variety of topics. With recommendation algorithms often…
It is widely believed that one's peers influence product adoption behaviors. This relationship has been linked to the number of signals a decision-maker receives in a social network. But it is unclear if these same principles hold when the…
As algorithmic tools increasingly aid experts in making consequential decisions, the need to understand the precise factors that mediate their influence has grown commensurately. In this paper, we present a crowdsourcing vignette study…
In micro-blogging platforms, people connect and interact with others. However, due to cognitive biases, they tend to interact with like-minded people and read agreeable information only. Many efforts to make people connect with those who…
Human visual attention is susceptible to social influences. In education, peer effects impact student learning, but their precise role in modulating attention remains unclear. Our experiment (N=311) demonstrates that displaying peer visual…
Online Mental Health Communities (OMHCs), such as Reddit, have witnessed a surge in popularity as go-to platforms for seeking information and support in managing mental health needs. Platforms like Reddit offer immediate interactions with…
In addition to seamless connectivity and smartness, the objects in the Internet of Things (IoT) are expected to have the social capabilities -- these objects are termed as ``social objects''. In this paper, an intuitive paradigm of social…
Recommender systems shape online interactions by matching users with creators content to maximize engagement. Creators, in turn, adapt their content to align with users preferences and enhance their popularity. At the same time, users…
Algorithms that favor popular items are used to help us select among many choices, from engaging articles on a social media news feed to songs and books that others have purchased, and from top-raked search engine results to highly-cited…
This study explores the impact of peer acknowledgement on learner engagement and implicit psychological attributes in written annotations on an online social reading platform. Participants included 91 undergraduates from a large North…