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The ability for individuals to constructively engage with one another across lines of difference is a critical feature of a healthy pluralistic society. This is also true in online discussion spaces like social media platforms. To date,…
General intellectual humility (GIH) -- the recognition that one's beliefs may be fallible and revisable -- is associated with improved reasoning, learning, and social discourse, yet is widely regarded as a stable trait resistant to…
People's collectively shared beliefs can have significant social implications, including on democratic processes and policies. Unfortunately, as people interact with peers to form and update their beliefs, various cognitive and social…
The proliferation of online social networks has significantly reshaped the way individuals access and engage with information. While these platforms offer unprecedented connectivity, they may foster environments where users are increasingly…
Incivility on platforms such as Twitter (now X) and Reddit complicates the development of AI systems that can support productive, rhetorically sound political argumentation. We present experiments with \textit{GPT-3.5 Turbo} fine-tuned on…
The Internet and online forums such as Reddit have become an increasingly popular medium for citizens to engage in political conversations. However, the online disinhibition effect resulting from the ability to use pseudonymous identities…
Online spaces provide individuals with the opportunity to engage in discussions on important topics and make collective decisions, regardless of their geographic location or time zone. However, without adequate support and careful design,…
The rise of social media has been argued to intensify uncivil and hostile online political discourse. Yet, to date, there is a lack of clarity on what incivility means in the political sphere. In this work, we utilize a multidimensional…
The increasing sophistication of large language models (LLMs) has sparked growing concerns regarding their potential role in exacerbating ideological polarization through the automated generation of persuasive and biased content. This study…
The concept of homophily is pervasive in online social media. While many empirical studies have relied on external sociodemographic traits to investigate it, significantly less is known about homophily at the cognitive level, that is, at…
Multidimensional scaling in networks allows for the discovery of latent information about their structure by embedding nodes in some feature space. Ideological scaling for users in social networks such as Twitter is an example, but similar…
Online communities play a critical role in shaping societal discourse and influencing collective behavior in the real world. The tendency for people to connect with others who share similar characteristics and views, known as homophily,…
Optimism about the Internet's potential to bring the world together has been tempered by concerns about its role in inflaming the 'culture wars'. Via mass selection into like-minded groups, online society may be becoming more fragmented and…
The prevalent perspective in quantitative research on opinion dynamics flattens the landscape of the online political discourse into a traditional left--right dichotomy. While this approach helps simplify the analysis and modeling effort,…
A rapidly increasing amount of human conversation occurs online. But divisiveness and conflict can fester in text-based interactions on social media platforms, in messaging apps, and on other digital forums. Such toxicity increases…
Political online participation in the form of discussing political issues and exchanging opinions among citizens is gaining importance with more and more formats being held digitally. To come to a decision, a thorough discussion and…
When discussing difficult topics online, is it common to meaningfully engage with people from diverse perspectives? Why or why not? Could features of the online environment be redesigned to encourage civil conversation across difference? In…
Political debate nowadays takes place mainly on online social media, with election periods amplifying ideological engagement. Reddit is generally considered more resistant to polarization and echo chamber effects than platforms like Twitter…
The increasing polarization of online political discourse calls for computational tools that automatically detect and monitor ideological divides in social media. We introduce a minimally supervised method that leverages the network…
Modern democracies face a critical issue of declining citizen participation in decision-making. Online discussion forums are an important avenue for enhancing citizen participation. This thesis proposal 1) identifies the challenges involved…