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Independent media are central to democratic decision-making, yet recent technological developments, such as social media, pseudonymous identities, and generative AI, have made them more vulnerable to coordinated influence campaigns--usually…
With the rise of computational social science, many scholars utilize data analysis and natural language processing tools to analyze social media, news articles, and other accessible data sources for examining political and social discourse.…
When learning from others, people tend to focus their attention on those with similar views. This is often attributed to flawed reasoning, and thought to slow learning and polarize beliefs. However, we show that echo chambers are a rational…
Misinformation spreads rapidly on social media, causing serious damage by influencing public opinion, promoting dangerous behavior, or eroding trust in reliable sources. It spreads too fast for traditional fact-checking, stressing the need…
Recent studies suggest that social media usage -- while linked to an increased diversity of information and perspectives for users -- has exacerbated user polarization on many issues. A popular theory for this phenomenon centers on the…
Online social network platforms have a problem with misinformation. One popular way of addressing this problem is via the use of machine learning based automated misinformation detection systems to classify if a post is misinformation.…
Verifying rumors on social media is critical for mitigating the spread of false information. The stances of conversation replies often provide important cues to determine a rumor's veracity. However, existing models struggle to jointly…
This paper investigates the communication styles and structures of Twitter (X) communities within the vaccination context. While mainstream research primarily focuses on the echo-chamber phenomenon, wherein certain ideas are reinforced and…
In today's digital era, the rapid spread of misinformation poses threats to public well-being and societal trust. As online misinformation proliferates, manual verification by fact checkers becomes increasingly challenging. We introduce…
Social interactions influence people's opinions. In some situations, these interactions eventually yield a consensus opinion; in others, they can lead to opinion fragmentation and the formation of different opinion groups in the form of…
The diffusion of complex opinions is severely hindered in multilayer social networks by echo chambers and cognitive consistency mechanisms. We investigate Influence Maximization strategies within the 3-state multilayer q-voter model.…
Social media has become a critical source of situational awareness during disasters, providing real-time insights into evolving impacts and emerging needs. To support crisis response at scale, recent work has increasingly leveraged large…
Online users tend to select claims that adhere to their system of beliefs and to ignore dissenting information. Confirmation bias, indeed, plays a pivotal role in viral phenomena. Furthermore, the wide availability of content on the web…
We present a novel model for the effect of echo chambers, filter bubbles, and reinforcement on election results. Our model extends the well known voter model with zealots to include reinforcement. We analyze the behaviour of the model,…
To curb the spread of fake news on social media platforms, recent studies have considered an online crowdsourcing fact-checking approach as one possible intervention method to reduce misinformation. However, it remains unclear under what…
The spread of misinformation poses a threat to the social media ecosystem. Effective countermeasures to mitigate this threat require that social media platforms be able to accurately detect low-credibility accounts even before the content…
News feeds in virtually all social media platforms include engagement metrics, such as the number of times each post is liked and shared. We find that exposure to these social engagement signals increases the vulnerability of users to…
With rapid increase in online information consumption, especially via social media sites, there have been concerns on whether people are getting selective exposure to a biased subset of the information space, where a user is receiving more…
Susceptibility to misinformation describes the degree of belief in unverifiable claims, a latent aspect of individuals' mental processes that is not observable. Existing susceptibility studies heavily rely on self-reported beliefs, which…
Vaccination hesitancy is a major obstacle to achieving and maintaining herd immunity. It is therefore of prime importance for public health authorities to understand the dynamics of an anti-vaccine opinion in the population. We introduce a…