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The recent wave of mobilizations in the Arab world and across Western countries has generated much discussion on how digital media is connected to the diffusion of protests. We examine that connection using data from the surge of…
Social media is profoundly changing our society with its unprecedented spreading power. Due to the complexity of human behaviors and the diversity of massive messages, the information spreading dynamics are complicated, and the reported…
Contagion effect refers to the causal effect of peers' behavior on the outcome of an individual in social networks. Contagion can be confounded due to latent homophily which makes contagion effect estimation very hard: nodes in a homophilic…
Contagion, broadly construed, refers to anything that can spread infectiously from peer to peer. Examples include communicable diseases, rumors, misinformation, ideas, innovations, bank failures, and electrical blackouts. Sometimes, as in…
Infectious disease transmission in human populations has a complex two-way interaction with changes in host behaviour. It is increasingly recognised that incorporating adaptive behavioural change into epidemic models is important for…
Large-scale hazards affect societies not only through direct physical impacts but also through emotions that spread across populations. Fueled by social amplification and networked communication, collective emotions often diverge markedly…
Recent advances in artificial intelligence have led to the proliferation of artificial agents in social contexts, ranging from education to online social media and financial markets, among many others. The increasing rate at which…
Contemporary social media networks can be viewed as a break to the early two-step flow model in which influential individuals act as intermediaries between the media and the public for information diffusion. Today's social media platforms…
Understanding how complex behaviors, opinions, and innovations spread in online social networks remains a central challenge in computational social science. Existing models of complex contagion typically rely on stylized threshold…
Addictive behavior spreads through social networks via feedback among choice, peer pressure, and shifting ties, a process that eludes standard epidemic models. We present a comprehensive multi-state network model that integrates…
Incorporating social factors into disease prevention and control efforts is an important undertaking of behavioral epidemiology. The interplay between disease transmission and human health behaviors, such as vaccine uptake, results in…
It is widely believed that information spread on social media is a percolation process, with parallels to phase transitions in theoretical physics. However, evidence for this hypothesis is limited, as phase transitions have not been…
On-line social networks publish information on a high volume of real-world events almost instantly, becoming a primary source for breaking news. Some of these real-world events can end up having a very strong impact on on-line social…
The spread of new products in a networked population is often modeled as an epidemic. However, in the case of `complex' contagion, these models {do not capture nuanced, dynamic social reinforcement effects in adoption behavior}. In this…
We build, deploy, and evaluate Paper Skygest, a custom personalized social feed for scientific content posted by a user's network on Bluesky and the AT Protocol. We leverage a new capability on emerging decentralized social media platforms:…
Although ubiquitous, interactions of groups of individuals (e.g., modern messaging applications, group meetings, or even a parliament discussion) are not yet thoroughly studied. Frequently, single-groups are modeled as critical-mass…
We address the problem of using observational data to estimate peer contagion effects, the influence of treatments applied to individuals in a network on the outcomes of their neighbors. A main challenge to such estimation is that homophily…
Complex contagion models that involve contagion along higher-order structures, such as simplicial complexes and hypergraphs, yield new classes of mean-field models. Interestingly, the differential equations arising from many such models…
Selective exposure, individuals' inclination to seek out information that supports their beliefs while avoiding information that contradicts them, plays an important role in the emergence of polarization and echo chambers. In the political…
Social media usage is often cited as a potential driver behind the rising suicide rates. However, distinguishing the causal effect - whether social media increases the risk of suicide - from reverse causality, where individuals already at…