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Large language models (LLMs) are helping millions of users write texts about diverse issues, and in doing so expose users to different ideas and perspectives. This creates concerns about issue bias, where an LLM tends to present just one…
Online conversations can go in many directions: some turn out poorly due to antisocial behavior, while others turn out positively to the benefit of all. Research on improving online spaces has focused primarily on detecting and reducing…
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 advent of social media transformed interpersonal communication and information consumption processes. This digital landscape accommodates user intentions, also resulting in an increase of offensive language and harmful behavior.…
People who share similar opinions towards controversial topics could form an echo chamber and may share similar political views toward other topics as well. The existence of such connections, which we call connected behavior, gives…
Web platforms have allowed political manifestation and debate for decades. Technology changes have brought new opportunities for expression, and the availability of longitudinal data of these debates entice new questions regarding who…
We encounter arguments everyday in the form of social media posts, presidential debates, news articles, and even advertisements. A ubiquitous, influential example is the opinion piece (op-ed). Opinion pieces can provide valuable…
X (formerly Twitter) has evolved into a contemporary agora, offering a platform for individuals to express opinions and viewpoints on current events. The majority of the topics discussed on Twitter are directly related to ongoing events,…
The classic influence maximization problem finds a limited number of influential seed users in a social network such that the expected number of influenced users in the network, following an influence cascade model, is maximized. The…
The World Wide Web is a complex interconnected digital ecosystem, where information and attention flow between platforms and communities throughout the globe. These interactions co-construct how we understand the world, reflecting and…
This discussion paper demonstrates how longitudinal sentiment analyses can depict intertemporal dynamics on social media platforms, what challenges are inherent and how further research could benefit from a longitudinal perspective.…
Online conversation understanding is an important yet challenging NLP problem which has many useful applications (e.g., hate speech detection). However, online conversations typically unfold over a series of posts and replies to those…
Engaging with diverse political views is important for reaching better collective decisions, however, users online tend to remain confined within ideologically homogeneous spaces. In this work, we study users who are members of these spaces…
A major task for moderators of online spaces is norm-setting, essentially creating shared norms for user behavior in their communities. Platform design principles emphasize the importance of highlighting norm-adhering examples and…
The 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization reshaped the reproductive rights landscape, introducing new uncertainty and barriers to abortion access. We present a large-scale computational analysis of…
Counterspeech has been demonstrated to be an efficacious approach for combating hate speech. While various conventional and controlled approaches have been studied in recent years to generate counterspeech, a counterspeech with a certain…
Automated ways to extract stance (denying vs. supporting opinions) from conversations on social media are essential to advance opinion mining research. Recently, there is a renewed excitement in the field as we see new models attempting to…
As large language models (LLMs) evolve into autonomous agents capable of acting in open-ended environments, ensuring behavioral alignment with human values becomes a critical safety concern. Existing benchmarks, focused on static,…
The recent escalation of the Iran Israel USA conflict in 2026 has triggered widespread global discussions across social media platforms. As people increasingly use these platforms for expressing opinions, analyzing public sentiment from…
Identifying and characterizing disinformation in political discourse on social media is critical to ensure the integrity of elections and democratic processes around the world. Persistent manipulation of social media has resulted in…