arXiv subjects

Balazs Vedres

Publications and source records attributed to Balazs Vedres.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Social bots weaken activist cohesion

Social bots now make up a substantial share of online political communication, where they are studied mainly as producers of misinformation and amplified content. Far less is known about whether their presence reshapes the human relationships that hold movements together. We ask whether exposure to bots during a protest peak is followed by the erosion of cohesion in human networks. Tracking retweet networks of core participants in the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests before, during, and after the peak, we measure change in cohesion at two scales: triadic closure in individual ego networks and edge density within detected communities. Greater bot exposure during the peak predicts steeper subsequent declines in human cohesion at both scales, and the loss concentrates among supporters of the movement. Bots may weaken activism less by changing what people believe than by dissolving the ties through which collective action is sustained.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2024

Quantifying Indirect Gender Discrimination on Collaborative Platforms

Digital collaborative platforms have become crucial venues of career advancement and individual success in many creative fields, from engineering to the arts. Indirect gender discrimination is a key component to gendered disadvantage on platforms. Such platforms carried the promise of opening avenues of advancement to previously discriminated groups, such as women, as platforms lack managerial gatekeepers with conventional prejudice. We analyzed the extent of indirect gender discriminatory on two diverse platforms, GitHub and Behance, focused on software development and fine arts and design. We found that the main cause of women's disadvantage in attention, success, and survival is largely due to indirect discrimination that varies between 60-90\% of total female disadvantage. Men and women are penalized if they follow highly female-like behavior, while categorical gender's impact varies by outcome and field. As platforms employ algorithmic tools and AI systems to manage users' activity, visibility and recommend new projects to collaborate, stereotypes rooted in behavior can have long-lasting consequences.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2024

Social bots sour activist sentiment without eroding engagement

Social media platforms have witnessed a substantial increase in social bot activity, significantly affecting online discourse. Our study explores the dynamic nature of bot engagement related to Extinction Rebellion climate change protests from 18 November 2019 to 10 December 2019. We find that bots exert a greater influence on human behavior than vice versa during heated online periods. To assess the causal impact of human-bot communication, we compared communication histories between human users who directly interacted with bots and matched human users who did not. Our findings demonstrate a consistent negative impact of bot interactions on subsequent human sentiment, with exposed users displaying significantly more negative sentiment than their counterparts. Furthermore, the nature of bot interaction influences human tweeting activity and the sentiment towards protests. Political astroturfing bots increase activity, whereas other bots decrease it. Sentiment changes towards protests depend on the user's original support level, indicating targeted manipulation. However, bot interactions do not change activists' engagement towards protests. Despite the seemingly minor impact of individual bot encounters, the cumulative effect is profound due to the large volume of bot communication. Our findings underscore the importance of unrestricted access to social media data for studying the prevalence and influence of social bots, as with new technological advancements distinguishing between bots and humans becomes nearly impossible.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2022

Inclusion unlocks the creative potential of gender diversity in teams

Diversity in teams can boost creativity, and gender diversity was shown to be a contributor to collective creativity. We show that gender diversity requires inclusion to lead to benefits in creativity by analyzing teams in 4011 video game projects. Recording data on the weighted network from past collaborations, we developed four measures of inclusion, depending on a lack of segregation, strong ties across genders, and the incorporation of women into the core of the team s network. We found that gender diversity without inclusion does not contribute to creativity, while with maximal inclusion one standard deviation change in diversity results in .04 to .09 standard deviation change in creativity, depending on the measure of inclusion. To reap creative benefits of diversity, developer firms need to include 23 percent or more female developers (as opposed to the 15 percent mean female proportion) and include them in the team along all dimensions. Inclusion at low diversity has a negative effect. By analyzing the sequences of diversity and inclusion across games within firms, we found that adding diversity first, and developing inclusion later can lead to higher diversity and inclusion, compared to adding female developers with already existing cross-gender ties to the team.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2021

Does Crowdfunding Really Foster Innovation? Evidence from the Board Game Industry

Crowdfunding offers inventors and entrepreneurs alternative access to resources with which they can develop and realize their ideas. Besides helping to secure capital, crowdfunding also connects creators with engaged early supporters who provide public feedback. But does this process foster truly innovative outcomes? Does the proliferation of crowdfunding in an industry make it more innovative overall? Prior studies investigating the link between crowdfunding and innovation do not compare traditional and crowdfunded products and so while claims that crowdfunding supports innovation are theoretically sound, they lack empirical backing. We address this gap using a unique dataset of board games, an industry with significant crowdfunding activity in recent years. Each game is described by how it combines fundamental mechanisms such as dice-rolling, negotiation, and resource-management, from which we develop quantitative measures of innovation in game design. Using these measures to compare games, we find that crowdfunded games tend to be more distinctive from previous games than their traditionally published counterparts. They are also significantly more likely to implement novel combinations of mechanisms. Crowdfunded games are not just transient experiments: subsequent games imitate their novel ideas. These results hold in regression models controlling for game and designer-level confounders. Our findings demonstrate that the innovative potential of crowdfunding goes beyond individual products to entire industries, as new ideas spill over to traditionally funded products.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2018

Gendered behavior as a disadvantage in open source software development

Women are severely marginalized in software development, especially in open source. In this article we argue that disadvantage is more due to gendered behavior than to categorical discrimination: women are at a disadvantage because of what they do, rather than because of who they are. Using data on entire careers of users from GitHub.com, we develop a measure to capture the gendered pattern of behavior: We use a random forest prediction of being female (as opposed to being male) by behavioral choices in the level of activity, specialization in programming languages, and choice of partners. We test differences in success and survival along both categorical gender and the gendered pattern of behavior. We find that 84.5% of women's disadvantage (compared to men) in success and 34.8% of their disadvantage in survival are due to the female pattern of their behavior. Men are also disadvantaged along their interquartile range of the female pattern of their behavior, and users who don't reveal their gender suffer an even more drastic disadvantage in survival probability. Moreover, we do not see evidence for any reduction of these inequalities in time. Our findings are robust to noise in gender recognition, and to taking into account particular programming languages, or decision tree classes of gendered behavior. Our results suggest that fighting categorical gender discrimination will have a limited impact on gender inequalities in open source software development, and that gender hiding is not a viable strategy for women.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2017

Dis-embedded Openness: Inequalities in European Economic Integration at the Sectoral Level

The process of European integration resulted in a marked increase in transnational economic flows, yet regional inequalities along many developmental indicators remain. We analyze the unevenness of European economies with respect to the embedding of export sectors in upstream domestic flows, and their dependency on dominant export partners. We use the WIOD data set of sectoral flows for the period of 1995-2011 for 24 European countries. We found that East European economies were significantly more likely to experience increasing unevenness and dependency with increasing openness, while core countries of Europe managed to decrease their unevenness while increasing their openness. Nevertheless, by analyzing the trajectories of changes for each country, we see that East European countries are also experiencing a turning point, either switching to a path similar to the core, or to a retrograde path with decreasing openness. We analyze our data using pooled time series models and case studies of country trajectories.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2017

Forbidden triads and Creative Success in Jazz: The Miles Davis Factor

This article argues for the importance of forbidden triads - open triads with high-weight edges - in predicting success in creative fields. Forbidden triads had been treated as a residual category beyond closed and open triads, yet I argue that these structures provide opportunities to combine socially evolved styles in new ways. Using data on the entire history of recorded jazz from 1896 to 2010, I show that observed collaborations have tolerated the openness of high weight triads more than expected, observed jazz sessions had more forbidden triads than expected, and the density of forbidden triads contributed to the success of recording sessions, measured by the number of record releases of session material. The article also shows that the sessions of Miles Davis had received an especially high boost from forbidden triads.

cs.SI↗