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It has been a widely shared concern that social media reinforces echo chambers of like-minded users and exacerbate political polarization. While fostering interactions across party lines is recognized as an important strategy to break echo…
Content moderation is a central mechanism through which platforms attempt to balance user engagement with community governance. Yet existing research has largely treated moderation as a uniform intervention, overlooking how moderator…
Anti-social behaviors in social media can happen both at user and community levels. While a great deal of attention is on the individual as an 'aggressor,' the banning of entire Reddit subcommunities (i.e., subreddits) demonstrates that…
The aim of this paper is to present methods to systematically analyze individual and group behavioral patterns observed in community driven discussion platforms like Reddit where users exchange information and views on various topics of…
Rules are a critical component of the functioning of nearly every online community, yet it is challenging for community moderators to make data-driven decisions about what rules to set for their communities. The connection between a…
Increasing rates of opioid drug abuse and heightened prevalence of online support communities underscore the necessity of employing data mining techniques to better understand drug addiction using these rapidly developing online resources.…
We present the first large-scale comparative analysis of Truth Social and the most popular conservative Reddit communities, r/Conservative, r/conservatives, and r/Republican. Using topic modeling with FASTopic and LLM-assisted refinement,…
Generative AI chatbots have proven surprisingly effective at persuading people to change their beliefs and attitudes in lab settings. However, the practical implications of these findings are not yet clear. In this work, we explore the…
Online communities serve as essential support channels for People Who Use Drugs (PWUD), providing access to peer support and harm reduction information. The moderation of these communities involves consequential decisions affecting member…
This article presents a systematic analysis of the patterns of behavior of individuals as well as groups observed in community-driven platforms for discussion like Reddit, where users usually exchange information and viewpoints on their…
Social media platforms have become pivotal as self-help forums, enabling individuals to share personal experiences and seek support. However, on topics as sensitive as depression, what are the consequences of online self-disclosure? Here,…
Online platforms like Reddit are increasingly becoming popular for individuals sharing personal experiences of leaving behind social, ideological, and political groups. Specifically, a series of "ex-" subreddits on Reddit allow users to…
We study the effect of the number of users on the activity of communities within the online content sharing and discussion platform Reddit, called subreddits. We found that comment activity on Reddit has a heavy-tailed distribution, where a…
We study the impact of content moderation policies in online communities. In our theoretical model, a platform chooses a content moderation policy and individuals choose whether or not to participate in the community according to the…
Online communities often overlap and coexist, despite incongruent norms and approaches to content moderation. When communities diverge, decentralized and federated communities may pursue group-level sanctions, including defederation…
Developing a strong community requires empowered leadership capable of overcoming governance challenges. New online platforms have given users opportunities to practice governance through content moderation roles. The over 2.8 million…
Social Network sites are fertile ground for several polluting phenomena affecting online and offline spaces. Among these phenomena are included echo chambers, closed systems in which the opinions expressed by the people inside are…
Community-level bans are a common tool against groups that enable online harassment and harmful speech. Unfortunately, the efficacy of community bans has only been partially studied and with mixed results. Here, we provide a flexible…
The emergence of toxic information on social networking sites, such as Twitter, Parler, and Reddit, has become a growing concern. Consequently, this study aims to assess the level of toxicity in COVID-19 discussions on Twitter, Parler, and…
While much attention has been devoted to the causes of opinion change, little is known about its consequences. Our study sheds a light on the relationship between one user's opinion change episode and subsequent behavioral change on an…