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Manoel Horta Ribeiro

@manoel@hci.social

mastodon 4.7.3

CS PhD student @ EPFL

Keywords: Computational Social Science, Platforms, Communities, Moderation

241 Followers

227 Following

9 Posts

Joined November 14, 2022

website:

https://manoelhortaribeiro.github.io/

twitter:

https://twitter.com/manoelribeiro

Manoel Horta Ribeiro @manoel@hci.social

· 23mo ago

This ACM CSCW paper shows that online groups requiring active participation commitments (i.e., that you post regularly) see double the contributions and retain users 4 times more (compared to groups with passive reminders). Prob very useful to OSS and Wiki folks.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3687027

dl.acm.org

Manoel Horta Ribeiro @manoel@hci.social

· 45mo ago

Our paper on the effects of automated content moderation on Facebook (w @justincheng@twitter.com & @cervisiarius@twitter.com) was accepted at The Web Conference 2023! Will make a detailed thread soon, but you can already read the pre-print!

See you in Texas yeehaw (?)
📰: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.10454

arXiv.org

Automated Content Moderation Increases Adherence to Community Guidelines

Online social media platforms use automated moderation systems to remove or reduce the visibility of rule-breaking content. While previous work has documented the importance of manual content moderation, the effects of automated content moderation remain largely unknown. Here, in a large study of Facebook comments (n=412M), we used a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to measure the impact of automated content moderation on subsequent rule-breaking behavior (number of comments hidden/deleted)

Manoel Horta Ribeiro @manoel@hci.social

· 45mo ago

This cool new preprint argues that third-party bot detection tools generalize poorly due to the lack of robust high-quality data.

📰: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.07015

arXiv.org

Simplistic Collection and Labeling Practices Limit the Utility of Benchmark Datasets for Twitter Bot Detection

Accurate bot detection is necessary for the safety and integrity of online platforms. It is also crucial for research on the influence of bots in elections, the spread of misinformation, and financial market manipulation. Platforms deploy infrastructure to flag or remove automated accounts, but their tools and data are not publicly available. Thus, the public must rely on third-party bot detection. These tools employ machine learning and often achieve near perfect performance for classification

Manoel Horta Ribeiro @manoel@hci.social

· 26mo ago

In a new blog post, I argue that discourse on social media's (potentially harmful) impact is entirely ~vibes based~.

https://doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/discourse-on-social-media-is-vibes

doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz

Discourse on social media is vibes-based

In the fall of 2021, The Wall Street Journal dropped a bombshell on Facebook (now Meta): “Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls.” The report drew from “The Facebook Files,” documents leaked by former employee Frances Haugen, which, among other things, discussed internal research on mental health and well-being.

Manoel Horta Ribeiro @manoel@hci.social

· 30mo ago

In this new blog post, I argue that to improve online platforms, we need to study content curation practices. That is pretty hard to do, but we should do it anyway :)

https://doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/content-curation-in-online-platforms

doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz

Content Curation in Online Platforms

(This is a big rant on why research on content moderation, algorithms, and monetization strategies is hard and why we desperately need it.

Manoel Horta Ribeiro @manoel@hci.social

· 30mo ago

➡ Can large language models (LLMs) recognize convincing arguments? Kind of.

We propose evaluating LLMs' persuasiveness capabilities by measuring their ability to recognize whether an argument would convince a user with specific demographics.

📜 :arxiv.org/abs/2404.00750

Manoel Horta Ribeiro @manoel@hci.social

· 30mo ago

Audience capture is understudied IMO. I find it fascinating because the term comes from IDW folks close to audience-captured influencers (somehow, they reinvented Rebecca Lewis's report). Plus, it is well aligned with findings that the algorithm is not radicalizing people.

Manoel Horta Ribeiro @manoel@hci.social

· 31mo ago

🚨LLMs outdebate humans when given access to opponents' personal Information!🚨

In a pre-reg study (N=820), participants who debated ChatGPT had 81.7% (p<0.01) higher odds of agreeing with their opponents after the debate (compared to a human baseline)

📜: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.14380

arXiv.org

On the Conversational Persuasiveness of Large Language Models: A Randomized Controlled Trial

The development and popularization of large language models (LLMs) have raised concerns that they will be used to create tailor-made, convincing arguments to push false or misleading narratives online. Early work has found that language models can generate content perceived as at least on par and often more persuasive than human-written messages. However, there is still limited knowledge about LLMs' persuasive capabilities in direct conversations with human counterparts and how personalization c

Manoel Horta Ribeiro @manoel@hci.social

· 45mo ago

Twitter hivemind, what are two algorithmic changes that allegedly impacted platforms greatly? E.g., In 2016, Twitter changed its feed to show content using a ranking algorithm.