Related papers: Auditing Algorithmic Personalization in TikTok Com…

Opinion mining plays a critical role in understanding public sentiment and preferences, particularly in the context of political elections. Traditional polling methods, while useful, can be expensive and less scalable. Social media offers…

Data generated by audits of social media websites have formed the basis of our understanding of the biases presented in algorithmic content recommendation systems. As legislators around the world are beginning to consider regulating the…

This study investigates how high school-aged youth engage in algorithm auditing to identify and understand biases in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) tools they encounter daily. With AI/ML technologies being increasingly…

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…

Amidst the rapid normalization of generative artificial intelligence (GAI), intelligent systems have come to dominate political discourse across information media. However, internalized political biases stemming from training data skews,…

TikTok is a music-based video sharing social media app famous for users creating short meme and dance videos. TikTok videos are largely based on popular song snippets, which is why lip syncing and dance moves evolve as significant user…

On social media algorithms for content promotion, accounting for users preferences, might limit the exposure to unsolicited contents. In this work, we study how the same contents (videos) are consumed on different platforms -- i.e. Facebook…

The short-form video-sharing service TikTok has become an important platform in the social media landscape, with much of its popularity owed to its algorithmically-driven "For You Page" (FYP). This feature serves as the "home screen" for…

Recent research brought awareness of the issue of bots on social media and the significant risks of mass manipulation of public opinion in the context of political discussion. In this work, we leverage Twitter to study the discourse during…

Recent studies show that users often interpret social media algorithms as mystical or spiritual because of their unpredictability. This invites new questions about how such perceptions affect the content that creators create and the…

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…

While there is widespread interest in supporting young people to critically evaluate machine learning-powered systems, there is little research on how we can support them in inquiring about how these systems work and what their limitations…

Like other social media, TikTok is embracing its use as a search engine, developing search products to steer users to produce searchable content and engage in content discovery. Their recently developed product search recommendations are…

Personalized recommendation systems tailor content based on user attributes, which are either provided or inferred from private data. Research suggests that users often hypothesize about reasons behind contents they encounter (e.g., "I see…

This paper aims to explore two competing data science methodologies to attempt answering the question, "Which issues contributed most to voters' choice in the 2024 presidential election?" The methodologies involve novel empirical evidence…

YouTube Shorts and other short-form video platforms now influence how billions engage with content, yet their recommendation systems remain largely opaque. Small shifts in promoted content can significantly impact user exposure, especially…

Politicization is a social phenomenon studied by political science characterized by the extent to which ideas and facts are given a political tone. A range of topics, such as climate change, religion and vaccines has been subject to…

YouTube has today become the primary news source for many users, which raises concerns about the role its recommendation algorithm can play in the spread of misinformation and political polarization. Prior work in this area has mainly…

With YouTube's growing importance as a news platform, its recommendation system came under increased scrutiny. Recognizing YouTube's recommendation system as a broadcaster of media, we explore the applicability of laws that require…

In online discussion communities, users can interact and share information and opinions on a wide variety of topics. However, some users may create multiple identities, or sockpuppets, and engage in undesired behavior by deceiving others or…