Related papers: Strategic Expression, Popularity Traps, and Welfar…
Despite extensive research, the mechanisms through which online platforms shape extremism and polarization remain poorly understood. We identify and test a mechanism, grounded in empirical evidence, that explains how ranking algorithms can…
In order to truly understand how social media might shape online discourses or contribute to societal polarization, we need refined models of platform choice, that is: models that help us understand why users prefer one social media…
Strategic voting, or manipulation, is the process by which a voter misrepresents his preferences in an attempt to elect an outcome that he considers preferable to the outcome under sincere voting. It is generally agreed that manipulation is…
Opinion dynamics models how the publicly expressed opinions of users in a social network coevolve according to their neighbors as well as their own intrinsic opinion. Motivated by the real-world manipulation of social networks during the…
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…
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…
We develop a model of social media in which users produce different types of content and choose whom to follow. Even when abstracting from algorithmic bias, linking costs shape networks and polarization. In the welfare-maximizing…
Social learning is a fundamental mechanism shaping decision-making across numerous social networks, including social trading platforms. In those platforms, investors combine traditional investing with copying the behavior of others.…
Members of social networks are given opportunities to bestow positive recognition upon one another by means of constructs such as "likes" and "retweets." Although recipients no doubt experience utility from these actions, one might question…
Recent work in iterative voting has defined the additive dynamic price of anarchy (ADPoA) as the difference in social welfare between the truthful and worst-case equilibrium profiles resulting from repeated strategic manipulations. While…
Members of different political groups not only disagree about issues but also dislike and distrust each other. While social media can amplify this emotional divide -- called affective polarization by political scientists -- there is a lack…
When consequential decisions are informed by algorithmic input, individuals may feel compelled to alter their behavior in order to gain a system's approval. Models of agent responsiveness, termed "strategic manipulation," analyze the…
Online socio-technical systems can be studied as proxy of the real world to investigate human behavior and social interactions at scale. Here we focus on Instagram, a media-sharing online platform whose popularity has been rising up to…
We explore a new mechanism to explain polarization phenomena in opinion dynamics in which agents evaluate alternative views on the basis of the social feedback obtained on expressing them. High support of the favored opinion in the social…
Large-scale hazards affect societies not only through direct physical impacts but also through emotions that spread across populations. Fueled by social amplification and networked communication, collective emotions often diverge markedly…
The flourishing of fake news is favored by recommendation algorithms of online social networks which, based on previous users activity, provide content adapted to their preferences and so create filter bubbles. We introduce an analytically…
Affective polarization has been central to political and social studies, with growing focus on social media, where partisan divisions are often exacerbated. Real-world studies tend to have limited scope, while simulated studies suffer from…
Users online tend to join polarized groups of like-minded peers around shared narratives, forming echo chambers. The echo chamber effect and opinion polarization may be driven by several factors including human biases in information…
The ever-increasing amount of information flowing through Social Media forces the members of these networks to compete for attention and influence by relying on other people to spread their message. A large study of information propagation…
We investigate the dynamics of opinion formation on social networking platforms, focusing on how individual opinions, influenced by both social connections and platform algorithms, evolve. We model this process using a differential…