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Positive feedback via likes and awards is central to online governance, yet which attributes of users' posts elicit rewards -- and how these vary across authors and communities -- remains unclear. To examine this, we combine…
Virtual influencers~(VIs) -- digitally constructed social-media personas -- are becoming increasingly visible in online culture, marketing, and identity formation. Yet it remains unclear whether audiences respond to them through the same…
Online social networks are growing and becoming denser. The social connections of a given person may have very high variability: from close friends and relatives to acquaintances to people who hardly know. Inferring the strength of social…
Understanding social dynamics that govern human phenomena, such as communications and social relationships is a major problem in current computational social sciences. In particular, given the unprecedented success of online social networks…
We study the structure of social networks of students by examining the graphs of Facebook "friendships" at five American universities at a single point in time. We investigate each single-institution network's community structure and employ…
E-communities, social groups interacting online, have recently become an object of interdisciplinary research. As with face-to-face meetings, Internet exchanges may not only include factual information but also emotional information - how…
Social world knowledge is a key ingredient in effective communication and information processing by humans and machines alike. As of today, there exist many knowledge bases that represent factual world knowledge. Yet, there is no resource…
This thesis investigates geographic dialect alignment in place-informed social media communities, focussing on New Zealand-related Reddit communities. By integrating qualitative analyses of user perceptions with computational methods, the…
Large-scale quantitative analyses have shown that individuals frequently talk to each other about similar things in different online spaces. Why do these overlapping communities exist? We provide an answer grounded in the analysis of 20…
In online discussion communities, users can interact and share information and opinions on a wide variety of topics. However, some users may create multiple identities, or sockpuppets, and engage in undesired behavior by deceiving others or…
While liking or upvoting a post on a mobile app is easy to do, replying with a written note is much more difficult, due to both the cognitive load of coming up with a meaningful response as well as the mechanics of entering the text. Here…
Advice forums are a crowdsourced way to reinforce cultural norms and moral behavior. Sites like Reddit contain massive amounts of natural language human interaction, with rules and norms unique to each individual subreddit community. To…
Social fragmentation caused by widening differences among constituents has recently become a highly relevant issue to our modern society. Theoretical models of social fragmentation using the adaptive network framework have been proposed and…
Widespread conspiracy theories, like those motivating anti-vaccination attitudes or climate change denial, propel collective action and bear society-wide consequences. Yet, empirical research has largely studied conspiracy theory adoption…
Social media platforms promise to enable rich and vibrant conversations online; however, their potential is often hindered by antisocial behaviors. In this paper, we study the relationship between structure and toxicity in conversations on…
The quality of daily spontaneous conversations is of importance towards both our well-being as well as the development of interactive social agents. Prior research directly studying the quality of social conversations has operationalized it…
Online knowledge communities (OKC) such as Stack Exchange, Reddit, and Zhihu have long functioned as socio technical infrastructures for collective problem solving. The rapid adoption of Generative AI (GenAI) introduces both complementarity…
Participation research in online community has concentrated on popularity and social interactions. In this paper the attention is shifted to the conversational trees as the focus of analysis in order to achieve a measure of deliberative…
Community detection in online social networks is typically based on the analysis of the explicit connections between users, such as "friends" on Facebook and "followers" on Twitter. But online users often have hundreds or even thousands of…
COVID-19 poses disproportionate mental health consequences to the public during different phases of the pandemic. We use a computational approach to capture the specific aspects that trigger an online community's anxiety about the pandemic…