Related papers: Can We Fix Social Media? Testing Prosocial Interve…
User simulation is an emerging interdisciplinary topic with multiple critical applications in the era of Generative AI. It involves creating an intelligent agent that mimics the actions of a human user interacting with an AI system,…
The presence of political misinformation and ideological echo chambers on social media platforms is concerning given the important role that these sites play in the public's exposure to news and current events. Algorithmic systems employed…
Studying how recommendation systems reshape social networks is difficult on live platforms: confounds abound, and controlled experiments risk user harm. We present an agent-based simulator where content production, tie formation, and a…
Online social networks often create echo chambers where people only hear opinions reinforcing their beliefs. An echo chamber often generates polarization, leading to conflicts caused by people with radical opinions, such as the January 6,…
Far beyond its relevance for commercial and political marketings, opinion formation and decision making processes are central for representative democracy, government functioning, and state organization. In the present report, a stochastic…
Autonomous mechanisms have been proposed to regulate certain aspects of society and are already being used to regulate business organisations. We take seriously recent proposals for algorithmic regulation of society, and we identify the…
This paper deals with the modeling and estimation of the sociological phenomena called echo chambers and segregation in social networks. Specifically, we present a novel community-based graph model that represents the emergence of…
The rise of misinformation and fake news in online political discourse poses significant challenges to democratic processes and public engagement. While debunking efforts aim to counteract misinformation and foster fact-based dialogue,…
Social media platforms have been accused of causing a range of harms, resulting in dozens of lawsuits across jurisdictions. These lawsuits are situated within the context of a long history of American product safety litigation, suggesting…
In this work, we are interested in finding the most efficient use of a budget to promote an opinion by paying agents within a group to supplant their true opinions. We model opinions as continuous scalars ranging from 0 to 1 with 1 (0)…
We develop a model of social media in which users produce different types of content and choose whom to follow. Even when abstracting from algorithmic bias, linking costs shape networks and polarization. In the welfare-maximizing…
Polarized topics often spark discussion and debate on social media. Recent studies have shown that polarized debates have a specific clustered structure in the endorsement net- work, which indicates that users direct their endorsements…
Social network simulation plays a crucial role in addressing various challenges within social science. It offers extensive applications such as state prediction, phenomena explanation, and policy-making support, among others. In this work,…
Social media trolling is a powerful tactic to manipulate public opinion on issues with a high moral component. Troll farms, as evidenced in the past, created fabricated content to provoke or silence people to share their opinion on social…
This is a programmatic paper, marking out two directions in which the study of social media can contribute to broader problems of social science: understanding cultural evolution and understanding collective cognition. Under the first…
Social network simulation is developed to provide a comprehensive understanding of social networks in the real world, which can be leveraged for a wide range of applications such as group behavior emergence, policy optimization, and…
Online social platforms have become central in the political debate. In this context, the existence of echo chambers is a problem of primary relevance. These clusters of like-minded individuals tend to reinforce prior beliefs, elicit…
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled human-like social simulations at unprecedented scale and fidelity, offering new opportunities for computational social science. A key challenge, however, is the construction of…
AI-generated synthetic media are increasingly used in real-world scenarios, often with the purpose of spreading misinformation and propaganda through social media platforms, where compression and other processing can degrade fake detection…
Trending topics have become a significant part of modern social media, attracting users to participate in discussions of breaking events. However, they also bring in a new channel for poisoning attacks, resulting in negative impacts on…