Related papers: Self-moderation in the decentralized era: decoding…
The "Decentralised Web" (DW) is an evolving concept, which encompasses technologies aimed at providing greater transparency and openness on the web. The DW relies on independent servers (aka instances) that mesh together in a peer-to-peer…
Behavioral health interventions, delivered through digital platforms, have the potential to significantly improve health outcomes, through education, motivation, reminders, and outreach. We study the problem of optimizing personalized…
Unlike the more observable phenomenon of group opinion reinforcement, self-censorship online has received comparatively less attention. Our goal in this work is to dissect the phenomena of self-censorship and to examine the implications of…
Decentralized optimization has become a standard paradigm for solving large-scale decision-making problems and training large machine learning models without centralizing data. However, this paradigm introduces new privacy and security…
In the context of blockchain systems, the importance of decentralization is undermined by the lack of a widely accepted methodology to measure it. To address this gap, we set out a systematization effort targeting the decentralization…
Social media platforms offer flagging, a technical feature that empowers users to report inappropriate posts or bad actors to reduce online harm. The deceptively simple flagging interfaces on nearly all major social media platforms disguise…
In centralized countries, not only population, media and economic power are concentrated, but people give more attention to central locations. While this is not inherently bad, this behavior extends to micro-blogging platforms: central…
Cyberbullying is a disturbing online misbehaviour with troubling consequences. It appears in different forms, and in most of the social networks, it is in textual format. Automatic detection of such incidents requires intelligent systems.…
Personalized recommendation systems often drive users towards more extreme content, exacerbating opinion polarization. While (content-aware) moderation has been proposed to mitigate these effects, such approaches risk curtailing the freedom…
We present a mechanism that puts users in the center of control and empowers them to dictate the access to their collections of data. Revisiting the fundamental mechanisms in security for providing protection, our solution uses…
The pervasiveness of online toxicity, including hate speech and trolling, disrupts digital interactions and online well-being. Previous research has mainly focused on post-hoc moderation, overlooking the real-time emotional dynamics of…
Does the decentralized nature of user behavior in interactive virtual communities help create rules promoting user engagement? Through scenarios like planting, this framework suggests a new paradigm for mutual influence that allows users to…
Decentralization is widely recognized as a crucial characteristic of blockchains that enables them to resist malicious attacks such as the 51% attack and the takeover attack. Prior research has primarily examined decentralization in…
Over the past decade, contrary to the early popular expectation that large-scale discourse in online communities would foster greater consensus, the large-scale structure of online discourse has been measured to be strongly polarized.…
As social media has become a predominant mode of communication globally, the rise of abusive content threatens to undermine civil discourse. Recognizing the critical nature of this issue, a significant body of research has been dedicated to…
One of the most expensive parts of maintaining a modern information-sharing platform (e.g., web search, social network) is the task of content-moderation-at-scale. Content moderation is the binary task of determining whether or not a given…
Online social networks represent a main source of communication and information exchange in today's life. They facilitate exquisitely news sharing, knowledge elicitation, and forming groups of same interests. Researchers in the last two…
Personalized content on social platforms can exacerbate negative phenomena such as polarization, partly due to the feedback interactions between recommendations and the users. In this paper, we present a control-theoretic recommender system…
Online discourse takes place in corporate-controlled spaces thought by users to be public realms. These platforms in name enable free speech but in practice implement varying degrees of censorship either by government edict or by uneven and…
The widespread adoption of social media has heightened interest in its psychological effects, particularly on mental health indicators such as anxiety, depression, loneliness, and sleep quality, as these platforms increasingly influence…