Related papers: Algorithmic Cultivation: How Social Media Feeds Sh…

Understanding the impact of digital platforms on user behavior presents foundational challenges, including issues related to polarization, misinformation dynamics, and variation in news consumption. Comparative analyses across platforms and…

Social media feeds have become central to the Internet. Among the most visible are trending feeds, which rank content deemed timely and relevant. To examine how feed signals influence behaviors and perceptions, we conducted a randomized…

News consumption on social media has become ubiquitous, yet how different forms of engagement shape psychosocial outcomes remains unclear. To address this gap, we leveraged a large-scale dataset of ~26M posts and ~45M comments on the…

Personalized recommendation algorithms deliver content to the user on most major social media platforms. While these algorithms are crucial for helping users find relevant content, users lack meaningful control over them. This reduces…

Social media users have repeatedly advocated for control over the currently opaque operations of feed algorithms. Large language models (LLMs) now offer the promise of custom-defined feeds--but users often fail to foresee the gaps and edge…

Bluesky is a nascent Twitter-like and decentralized social media network with novel features and unprecedented data access. This paper provides a characterization of its interaction network, studying the political leaning, polarization,…

We investigate the predictive power behind the language of food on social media. We collect a corpus of over three million food-related posts from Twitter and demonstrate that many latent population characteristics can be directly predicted…

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…

The psycholinguistic theory of communication accommodation accounts for the general observation that participants in conversations tend to converge to one another's communicative behavior: they coordinate in a variety of dimensions…

Social media feeds use predictive models to maximize engagement, often misaligning how people consume content with how they wish to. We introduce Bonsai, a system that enables people to build personalized and intentional feeds. Bonsai…

Computer-mediated communication is driving fundamental changes in the nature of written language. We investigate these changes by statistical analysis of a dataset comprising 107 million Twitter messages (authored by 2.7 million unique user…

Social media is often criticized for amplifying toxic discourse and discouraging constructive conversations. But designing social media platforms to promote better conversations is inherently challenging. This paper asks whether simulating…

Online political discourse is increasingly shaped not by a few dominant platforms but by a fragmented ecosystem of social media spaces, each with its own user base, target audience, and algorithmic mediation of discussion. Such…

Large language models (LLMs) are used by over a billion people globally, most often to assist with writing. In this work, we demonstrate that LLMs not only alter the voice and tone of human writing, but also consistently alter the intended…

Amid the migration of academics from X, the social media platform Bluesky has emerged as a potential alternative. To assess its viability and relevance for science communication, this study presents the first large-scale analysis of…

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools are increasingly deployed across social media platforms, yet their implications for user behavior and experience remain understudied, particularly regarding two critical dimensions: (1) how AI…

Social media users post content on various topics. A defining feature of social media is that other users can provide feedback -- called community feedback -- to their content in the form of comments, replies, and retweets. We hypothesize…

Pollution of online social spaces caused by rampaging d/misinformation is a growing societal concern. However, recent decisions to reduce access to social media APIs are causing a shortage of publicly available, recent, social media data,…

Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered recommender systems play a crucial role in determining the content that users are exposed to on social media platforms. However, the behavioural patterns of these systems are often opaque, complicating…

Regularization occurs when the output a learner produces is less variable than the linguistic data they observed. In an artificial language learning experiment, we show that there exist at least two independent sources of regularization…