Latest News
Drivers of social influence in the Twitter migration to Mastodon
Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter on October 2022 triggered a mass exodus to Mastodon. This is a unique example of collective behavioral change that is documented through large-scale digital traces, and can teach us a lot about how people coordinate. New Scientific Reports paper.
Best Presentation Award at Complex Networks 2023
Arianna won the Best Presentation Award at Complex Networks 2023, with her paper "Finding Hidden Swingers in the 2022 Italian Elections Twitter Discourse". Congratulations Arianna!
The Strength of Knowledge Ties
The "strength" of a social tie is much more than the frequency of interaction between people. In a new paper in Scientific Reports we show how NLP can capture a nuanced notion of tie strength as Granovetter initially conceptualized it.
The Language of Persuasion in Social Media
What elements of language are most effective at changing a person's mind? By measuring the social intent of conversations, we show that knowledge, trust, and similarity are key, as Philosopher Jürgen Habermas predicted. New on Nature Scientific Reports.
Committed Minorities in Financial Collective Action
In January 2021, retail investors on Reddit targeted short-selling activity by hedge funds on GameStop shares. In a new study on Royal Society Open Science we dissect the dynamics of commitment and coordination that allowed the Reddit crowd to win that battle.
Mission
In the coming decades, a defining task for humanity will be to solve global challenges through mass coordination, such as averting the most catastrophic consequences of rapid climate change or curbing the diffusion of pandemics. These challenges can be understood as social dilemmas: the individual benefits are at odds with collective interests, and only concerted action can attain shared gains that outmatch individual costs. The focus of COCOONS is to unveil the prime elements of social interactions that enable spontaneous citizen coordination in the face of social dilemmas. Its ultimate goal is to provide a blueprint to create online participatory platforms that will facilitate their members to find agreement on how to solve problems that can be addressed only with mass action. COCOONS is a project funded by the Carlsbergfondet under the Semper Ardens program and supported by the IT University of Copenhagen.
