社会与信息网络
Social media platforms are often blamed for exacerbating political polarization and worsening public dialogue. Many claim that hyperpartisan users post pernicious content, slanted to their political views, inciting contentious and toxic…
In this work, we examine the influence of unreliable information on political incivility and toxicity on the social media platform Reddit. We show that comments on articles from unreliable news websites are posted more often in…
We study how the stubbornness of social network users influences opinion polarization and disagreement. Our work is in the context of the popular Friedkin-Johnson opinion formation model, where users update their opinion as a function of…
Information Operations (IOs) pose a significant threat to the integrity of democratic processes, with the potential to influence election-related online discourse. In anticipation of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, we present a study…
Social connections are conduits through which individuals communicate, information propagates, and diseases spread. Identifying individuals who are more likely to adopt ideas and spread them is essential in order to develop effective…
Studying acquisitions offers invaluable insights into startup trends, aiding informed investment decisions for businesses. However, the scarcity of studies in this domain prompts our focus on shedding light in this area. Employing…
Many networked datasets with units interacting in groups of two or more, encoded with hypergraphs, are accompanied by extra information about nodes, such as the role of an individual in a workplace. Here we show how these node attributes…
Content analysis of news stories (whether manual or automatic) is a cornerstone of the communication studies field. However, much research is conducted at the level of individual news articles, despite the fact that news events (especially…
To find a shortest path between two nodes $s_0$ and $s_1$ in a given graph, a classical approach is to start a Breadth-First Search (BFS) from $s_0$ and run it until the search discovers $s_1$. Alternatively, one can start two Breadth-First…
Online communities of known extremist groups like the alt-right and QAnon have been well explored in past work. However, we find that an extremist group called Sovereign Citizens is relatively unexplored despite its existence since the…
This paper uses a multi-layer network model to study deliberation in online discussion platforms, focusing on the Reddit platform. The model comprises two layers: a discussion layer, which represents the comment-to-comment replies as a…
Social media platforms have evolved rapidly in modernity without strong regulation. One clear obstacle faced by current users is that of toxicity. Toxicity on social media manifests through a number of forms, including harassment,…
The use of social media platforms has been gradually increasing and fake news spreading is becoming an alarming issue nowadays. The spreading of fake news means disseminating false, confusing, and spurious information which hurts families,…
Despite growing efforts to halt distasteful content on social media, multilingualism has added a new dimension to this problem. The scarcity of resources makes the challenge even greater when it comes to low-resource languages. This work…
Evaluating the impact of policy interventions on respondents who are embedded in a social network is often challenging due to the presence of network interference within the treatment groups, as well as between treatment and non-treatment…
A well-crafted police patrol route design is vital in providing community safety and security in the society. Previous works have largely focused on predicting crime events with historical crime data. The usage of large-scale mobility data…
It is a widely accepted fact that state-sponsored Twitter accounts operated during the 2016 US presidential election, spreading millions of tweets with misinformation and inflammatory political content. Whether these social media campaigns…
This study explores the use of AI-driven sentiment analysis as a novel tool for forecasting election outcomes, focusing on Mauritius' 2024 elections. In the absence of reliable polling data, we analyze media sentiment toward two main…
Networks representation aims to encode vertices into a low-dimensional space, while preserving the original network structures and properties. Most existing methods focus on static network structure without considering temporal dynamics.…
Misinformation presents threats to societal mental well-being, public health initiatives, as well as satisfaction in democracy. Those who spread misinformation can leverage cognitive biases to make others more likely to believe and share…