2022-06-20
What does research really tell us about deplatforming?
Merriam-Webster has defined Deplatforming as an ‘attempt to boycott a group or individual through removing the platforms (such as speaking venues or websites) used to share information or ideas’...
2022-06-10
Fun with dummy variables
(Just some intuition about different encodings for dummy variables)...
2022-05-24
Effects of social recommendation
People recommender systems are widely used to suggest connections between users in social networks but are becoming pervasive across other areas (e.g., expert finding, education, dating, and employment). Analyses done on Twitter and Social Blue....
2022-03-28
Comments on "Causal Inference Struggles with Agency on Online Platforms"
I read this recent paper by the Twitter META team with the most interest. First, the Twitter META team (along with consultants, interns, and external academics) has been producing outstanding research. Second, a substantial part of what I do is observation...
2021-10-06
Do platform migrations compromise content moderation?
In 2018, around the time when America's leading conspiracy theorist was banned from YouTube, Apple, and Facebook, Merriam-Webster noted that a shiny new verb was emerging —to deplatform, the attempt to boycott a group or individual through removing the pla...
2021-05-19
So you wanna do research about YouTube...
The purpose of this blog post depends on the reaction you had while reading the question in the title. If you hesitated, I want to convince you that maybe you _should_ be doing research about YouTube. If you are already interested, and I hope you are (alwa...
2020-08-25
Comments on "Hidden Resilience and Adaptive Dynamics of the Global Online Hate Ecology"
I’m steering my Ph.D. towards studying how things like moderation policies impact our information ecosystem, that is, the way people consume and produce content online (more on that later, I hope)....
2020-06-06
Measuring the impact of misinformation amidst the pandemic (pt. 2)
This is the second post on some ideas about how one could possibly study the impact of misinformation on the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. To be quite fair, I think that the overarching theme of this post and the previous one is to talk about causality and ex...
Tradução em Português 🇧🇷
2020-05-28
Measuring the impact of misinformation amidst the pandemic (pt. 1)
Recently Atila Iamarino (@oatila),a major science communicator in Brazil who is playing a very important role in the COVID-19 pandemic, tagged me in a thread created by Sleeping Giants Brasil (@slpng_giants_pt), if you read portuguese you can check it [her...
Tradução em Português 🇧🇷
2020-01-05
Is YouTube a market? And does it matter?
My latest YouTube obsession follows the work of Kevin Munger & Joseph Phillips (about which I wrote another blogpost). Munger & Phillips proposed that part of the fringe content that exists on YouTube is a direct consequence of how the platform works. The...
2019-12-29
Comments on "Algorithmic Extremism: Examining YouTube’s Rabbit Hole of Radicalization"
Understanding the role that social media has in the radicalization of extremists has gained an increasing amount of attention from the research community. A new paper on this, titled Algorithmic Extremism: Examining YouTube’s Rabbit Hole of Radicalization,...
2019-11-20
Comments on "Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTube"
This post is intended to address some of the comments and criticism w.r.t. my latest paper: *Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTube*. The paper got an unreasonable amount of attention, which involved media coverage, angry e-mails and upset YouTubers. ...
2019-10-07
Comments on "A Supply and Demand Framework for YouTube Politics"
In this blog post, I will comment on a recent pre-print on YouTube Radicalization, which brought some new and exciting ideas about radicalization on YouTube. The paper is named 'A Supply and Demand Framework for YouTube Politics.' I believe that the author...
2019-07-12
On internet memes and what Dawkins meant by memes
This is probably the most “daring” blog post I wrote as it touches on subjects I’m not an expert on. However, the idea of studying memes (the meme of studying memes?) is widespread among CS and network science, often more than not by people that do not hav...
2019-05-21
Stuff I learned at #TheWebConf2019
During the last week, I attended the Web Conference 2019 (#TheWebConf2019). I had a blast, and the pleasure to meet and hang out with my perspective advisor in Switzerland, some future EPFL colleagues, some folks I befriended in social media and an old fri...
2019-04-16
My CS PhD application process
This post is a half-guide half-memoir of my PhD application process (not very timely, as the PhD application round has just ended). I think those who would benefit the most from my ~guide~ are international applicants, yet, I believe it contains generic en...
2019-03-20
On the unreasonable influence of fringe communities
So, one of my resolutions for 2019 was that I wantedto blog more. It may seem late for new year resolutions, but if you are from Brazil, then you do know that the year only begins after carnival ends....
2018-01-12
User-centered approaches to understand hate online
The advent of Online Social Networks has deeply transformed the way people communicate with each other in the contemporary world. Some of these platforms are very popular and aggregate millions of users that, on a daily basis, generate and publish a massiv...