Related papers: Estimating Online Influence Needs Causal Modeling!…
Recent years have witnessed the rise of misinformation campaigns that spread specific narratives on social media to manipulate public opinions on different areas, such as politics and healthcare. Consequently, an effective and efficient…
Estimating influence on social media networks is an important practical and theoretical problem, especially because this new medium is widely exploited as a platform for disinformation and propaganda. This paper introduces a novel approach…
An important problem in econometrics and marketing is to infer the causal impact that a designed market intervention has exerted on an outcome metric over time. This paper proposes to infer causal impact on the basis of a…
Inferring causal relationships between event pairs in a temporal sequence is applicable in many domains such as healthcare, manufacturing, and transportation. Most existing work on causal inference primarily focuses on event types within…
Many years after online social networks exceeded our collective attention, social influence is still built on attention capital. Quality is not a prerequisite for viral spreading, yet large diffusion cascades remain the hallmark of a social…
Many empirical studies estimate causal effects in environments where economic units interact through spatial or network connections. In such settings, outcomes are jointly determined, and treatment induced shocks propagate across…
Mastering the dynamics of social influence requires separating, in a database of information propagation traces, the genuine causal processes from temporal correlation, i.e., homophily and other spurious causes. However, most studies to…
Social media engagement prediction is a central challenge in computational social science, particularly for understanding how users interact with misinformation. Existing approaches often treat engagement as a homogeneous time-series…
This paper presents a randomization-based framework for estimating causal effects under interference between units, motivated by challenges that arise in analyzing experiments on social networks. The framework integrates three components:…
Unlike traditional media, social media typically provides quantified metrics of how many users have engaged with each piece of content. Some have argued that the presence of these cues promotes the spread of misinformation. Here we…
A great deal of empirical research has examined who falls for misinformation and why. Here, we introduce a formal game-theoretic model of engagement with news stories that captures the strategic interplay between (mis)information consumers…
Statistical methods applied to social media posts shed light on the dynamics of online dialogue. For example, users' wording choices predict their persuasiveness and users adopt the language patterns of other dialogue participants. In this…
We consider a causal inference model in which individuals interact in a social network and they may not comply with the assigned treatments. In particular, we suppose that the form of network interference is unknown to researchers. To…
The fundamental building block of social influence is for one person to elicit a response in another. Researchers measuring a "response" in social media typically depend either on detailed models of human behavior or on platform-specific…
Randomized experiments, or A/B tests are used to estimate the causal impact of a feature on the behavior of users by creating two parallel universes in which members are simultaneously assigned to treatment and control. However, in social…
No man is an island, as individuals interact and influence one another daily in our society. When social influence takes place in experiments on a population of interconnected individuals, the treatment on a unit may affect the outcomes of…
Social media is nearly ubiquitous in modern life, raising concerns about its societal impacts -- from mental health and polarization to violence and democratic disruption. Yet research on its causal effects is still inconclusive: Various…
In social media platforms, user behavior is often influenced by interactions with other users, complicating the accurate estimation of causal effects in traditional A/B experiments. This study investigates situations where an individual's…
Human interactions are mediated by social influence. During crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, social influence determines whether life-saving information is adopted or immunization campaigns meet their targets. The literature on online…
Estimation of causal effects is the core objective of many scientific disciplines. However, it remains a challenging task, especially when the effects are estimated from observational data. Recently, several promising machine learning…