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After Twitter's ownership change and policy shifts, many users reconsidered their go-to social media outlets and platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads became attractive alternatives in the battle for users. Based on the data from…
Early substance use during adolescence increases the risk of later substance use disorders and mental health problems, yet the emotional and contextual factors driving these behaviors remain poorly understood. This study analyzed 23000…
Social media platforms are revolutionizing the way users communicate by increasing the exposure to highly stigmatized issues in the society. Sexual abuse is one such issue that recently took over social media via attaching the hashtag…
Accurately estimating how users respond to moderation interventions is paramount for developing effective and user-centred moderation strategies. However, this requires a clear understanding of which user characteristics are associated with…
Widespread conspiracy theories may significantly impact our society. This paper focuses on the QAnon conspiracy theory, a consequential conspiracy theory that started on and disseminated successfully through social media. Our work…
In this work, we examine the influence of unreliable information on political incivility and toxicity on the social media platform Reddit. We show that comments on articles from unreliable news websites are posted more often in…
In this dataset paper, we present a three-stage process to collect Reddit comments that are removed comments by moderators of several subreddits, for violating subreddit rules and guidelines. Other than the fact that these comments were…
Decentralized online social networks have evolved from experimental stages to operating at unprecedented scale, with broader adoption and more active use than ever before. Platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, Hive, and Nostr have seen notable…
Echo chambers in online social networks, whereby users' beliefs are reinforced by interactions with like-minded peers and insulation from others' points of view, have been decried as a cause of political polarization. Here, we investigate…
Opioid use disorder (OUD) is a leading health problem that affects individual well-being as well as general public health. Due to a variety of reasons, including the stigma faced by people using opioids, online communities for recovery and…
Online communities such as drug-related subreddits serve as safe spaces for people who use drugs (PWUD), fostering discussions on substance use experiences, harm reduction, and addiction recovery. Users' shared narratives on these forums…
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.…
In health-related topics, user toxicity in online discussions frequently becomes a source of social conflict or promotion of dangerous, unscientific behaviour; common approaches for battling it include different forms of detection, flagging…
Generative AI is altering how we work, learn, communicate, and participate in online communities. How might online communities be changed by generative AI? To start addressing this question, we focused on online community moderators'…
As the number and the diversity of news outlets on the Web grow, so does the opportunity for "alternative" sources of information to emerge. Using large social networks like Twitter and Facebook, misleading, false, or agenda-driven…
Prior research on transparency in content moderation has demonstrated the benefits of offering post-removal explanations to sanctioned users. In this paper, we examine whether the influence of such explanations transcends those who are…
The proliferation of social media platforms and online communities has inadvertently catalyzed the spread of cyberbullying, hate speech, and other forms of online toxicity, making the effective governance of such harm a critical societal…
Social media platforms have transformed the dynamics of collective opinion formation, enabling rapid, large-scale interactions while simultaneously exposing online discourse to polarization and manipulation. Traditional models of opinion…
Inspired by diachronic word analysis from the field of natural language processing, we propose an approach for uncovering temporal insights regarding user roles from social networks using graph embedding methods. Specifically, we apply the…
The rapid integration of the Internet into our daily lives has led to many benefits but also to a number of new, wide-spread threats such as online hate, trolling, bullying, and generally aggressive behaviours. While research has…