Related papers: Queuing for Civility: Regulating Emotions and Redu…
Online harms are a growing problem in digital spaces, putting user safety at risk and reducing trust in social media platforms. One of the most persistent forms of harm is hate speech. To address this, we need tools that combine the speed…
This report provides an engagement analysis of counternarratives against online toxicity. Between February 2020 and July 2021, we observed over 15 million toxic messages on social media identified by our fine-grained, multilingual detection…
A growing share of human interactions now occurs online, where the expression and perception of emotions are often amplified and distorted. Yet, the interplay between different emotions and the extent to which they are driven by external…
Social media platforms have become critical spaces for discussing mental health concerns, including eating disorders. While these platforms can provide valuable support networks, they may also amplify harmful content that glorifies…
This paper investigates how content moderation affects content creation in an ideologically diverse online environments. We develop a model in which users act as both creators and consumers, differing in their ideological affiliation and…
This paper investigates the use of machine learning models for the classification of unhealthy online conversations containing one or more forms of subtler abuse, such as hostility, sarcasm, and generalization. We leveraged a public dataset…
Urban transit agencies increasingly turn to social media to monitor emerging service risks such as crowding, delays, and safety incidents, yet the signals of concern are sparse, short, and easily drowned by routine chatter. We address this…
The explosive growth of social media has not only revolutionized communication but also brought challenges such as political polarization, misinformation, hate speech, and echo chambers. This dissertation employs computational social…
We investigate users' perspectives on an online reflective question activity (RQA) that prompts people to externalize their underlying emotions on a troubling situation. Inspired by principles of cognitive behavioral therapy, our 15-minute…
Online communities rely on a mix of platform policies and community-authored rules to define acceptable behavior and maintain order. However, these rules vary widely across communities, evolve over time, and are enforced inconsistently,…
Interpersonal communication plays a key role in managing people's emotions, especially on digital platforms. Studies have shown that people use social media and consume online content to regulate their emotions and find support for rest and…
In recent years, online social networks have allowed worldwide users to meet and discuss. As guarantors of these communities, the administrators of these platforms must prevent users from adopting inappropriate behaviors. This verification…
Social media platforms have become central to modern communication, yet they also harbor offensive content that challenges platform safety and inclusivity. While prior research has primarily focused on textual indicators of offense, the…
In online communities, antisocial behavior such as trolling disrupts constructive discussion. While prior work suggests that trolling behavior is confined to a vocal and antisocial minority, we demonstrate that ordinary people can engage in…
Online texts with toxic content are a clear threat to the users on social media in particular and society in general. Although many platforms have adopted various measures (e.g., machine learning-based hate-speech detection systems) to…
The intensification of affective polarization worldwide has raised new questions about how social media platforms might be further fracturing an already-divided public sphere. As opposed to ideological polarization, affective polarization…
Content moderation is the process of flagging content based on pre-defined platform rules. There has been a growing need for AI moderators to safeguard users as well as protect the mental health of human moderators from traumatic content.…
Social media platforms are often blamed for exacerbating political polarization and worsening public dialogue. Many claim that hyperpartisan users post pernicious content, slanted to their political views, inciting contentious and toxic…
To meet the demands of content moderation, online platforms have resorted to automated systems. Newer forms of real-time engagement($\textit{e.g.}$, users commenting on live streams) on platforms like Twitch exert additional pressures on…
Understanding affective polarization in online discourse is crucial for evaluating the societal impact of social media interactions. This study presents a novel framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) and domain-informed…