Related papers: The Ranking Effect: How Algorithmic Rank Influence…
Platforms are increasingly relying on algorithms to curate the content within users' social media feeds. However, the growing prominence of proprietary, algorithmically curated feeds has concealed what factors influence the presentation of…
Social media plays a central role in shaping public opinion and behavior, yet performing experiments on these platforms and, in particular, on feed algorithms is becoming increasingly challenging. This guide offers practical recommendations…
This paper provides a simple theoretical framework to evaluate the effect of key parameters of ranking algorithms, namely popularity and personalization parameters, on measures of platform engagement, misinformation and polarization. The…
Many online platforms predominantly rank items by predicted user engagement. We believe that there is much unrealized potential in including non-engagement signals, which can improve outcomes both for platforms and for society as a whole.…
Online platforms have transformed the way in which individuals access and interact with news, with a high degree of trust particularly placed in search engine results. We use web tracked behavioral data across a 2-month period and analyze…
Unlike traditional media, social media typically provides quantified metrics of how many users have engaged with each piece of content. Some have argued that the presence of these cues promotes the spread of misinformation. Here we…
Social media is increasingly being used as a news-platform. To reach their intended audience, newspapers need for their articles to be well ranked by Facebook's news-feed algorithm. The number of likes, shares and other reactions determine…
At a time when information seekers first turn to digital sources for news and opinion, it is critical that we understand the role that social media plays in human behavior. This is especially true when information consumers also act as…
While social media feed rankings are primarily driven by engagement signals rather than any explicit value system, the resulting algorithmic feeds are not value-neutral: engagement may prioritize specific individualistic values. This paper…
The pervasive rise of digital platforms has reshaped how individuals engage with information, with algorithms and peer influence playing pivotal roles in these processes. This study investigates the effects of algorithmic curation and peer…
In a pre-registered algorithmic audit, we found that, relative to a reverse-chronological baseline, Twitter's engagement-based ranking algorithm amplifies emotionally charged, out-group hostile content that users say makes them feel worse…
Social media broadly refers to digital platforms and applications that simulate social interactions online. This study investigates the impact of social media platforms and their algorithms on political interest among users. As social media…
Today, social media platforms hold sole power to study the effects of feed ranking algorithms. We developed a platform-independent method that reranks participants' feeds in real-time and used this method to conduct a preregistered 10-day…
Algorithmic rankers have a profound impact on our increasingly data-driven society. From leisurely activities like the movies that we watch, the restaurants that we patronize; to highly consequential decisions, like making educational and…
Social media algorithms are thought to amplify variation in user beliefs, thus contributing to radicalization. However, quantitative evidence on how algorithms and user preferences jointly shape harmful online engagement is limited. I…
Peer recommendation is a crowdsourcing task that leverages the opinions of many to identify interesting content online, such as news, images, or videos. Peer recommendation applications often use social signals, e.g., the number of prior…
Ranking algorithms play a crucial role in online platforms ranging from search engines to recommender systems. In this paper, we identify a surprising consequence of popularity-based rankings: the fewer the items reporting a given signal,…
In this work, we introduce a novel metric for auditing group fairness in ranked lists. Our approach offers two benefits compared to the state of the art. First, we offer a blueprint for modeling of user attention. Rather than assuming a…
Users online tend to acquire information adhering to their system of beliefs and to ignore dissenting information. Such dynamics might affect page popularity. In this paper we introduce an algorithm, that we call PopRank, to assess both the…
At a time when information seekers first turn to digital sources for news and opinion, it is critical that we understand the role that social media plays in human behavior. This is especially true when information consumers also act as…