arXiv subjects

Taha Yasseri

Publications and source records attributed to Taha Yasseri.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A field experiment of social influence and behavioral contagion with bots on Reddit

Recent advances in AI have heightened scholars' and policy makers' concern with social influence and behavioral contagion in online communities. We conduct a field experiment on Reddit to investigate the extent to which online users are susceptible to positive behavioral stimuli from other users and artificial agents. We let apparent human and bot accounts give symbolic awards to users with one of four rationales: praising the recipient's logical argument, emotional sensitivity, or moral integrity, or explaining that the award resulted from a random draw in a lottery. We evaluate how the different rationales for the award affect the recipients' subsequent behavior on the platform in terms of volume, impact, and content, as well as the further behavioral contagion to other users. We find that awards do not increase user activity and downstream impact, and awards from bots with the lottery rationale can in fact reduce them. Nevertheless, awards encourage direct communication between users. These findings highlight the possible resilience of online users to simple behavioral manipulation from platform algorithms and artificial agents, but not necessarily to more sophisticated schemes that simulate human conversation. Transparently labeling automated agents remains essential for ethical and effective platform governance.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2026

Endogenous drivers of gender disparity in online dating

In its early days, online dating was heralded as a great equalizer, removing biases built into the structures of heterosexuality courtship. However, as repeatedly observed, that prophecy was never fulfilled, and some biases have even become exacerbated. In this paper, we identify a general endogenous mechanism that drives the widening of the gender gap in first-contact rates of heterosexual dating. This mechanism relies on assumptions about the participants' expectations of new contacts and their time constraints. We formulate this symmetry-breaking mechanism as a system of differential equations and analyze its fixed points and their stability.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2026

AI Feedback Enhances Community-Based Content Moderation through Engagement with Counterarguments

Today, social media platforms are significant sources of news and political communication, but their role in spreading misinformation has raised significant concerns. In response, these platforms have implemented various content moderation strategies. One such method, Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch) on X (formerly Twitter), relies on crowdsourced fact-checking and has gained traction. However, it faces challenges such as partisan bias and delays in verification. This study explores an AI-assisted hybrid moderation framework in which participants receive AI-generated feedback, supportive, neutral, or argumentative, on their notes and are asked to revise them accordingly. The results show that incorporating feedback improves note quality, with the most substantial gains coming from argumentative feedback. This underscores the value of diverse perspectives and direct engagement in human-AI collective intelligence. The research contributes to ongoing discussions about AI's role in political content moderation, highlighting the potential of generative AI and the importance of informed design.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

How Similar Are Grokipedia and Wikipedia? A Multi-Dimensional Textual and Structural Comparison

The launch of Grokipedia, an AI-generated encyclopedia developed by Elon Musk's xAI, was presented as a response to perceived ideological and structural biases in Wikipedia, aiming to produce "truthful" entries using the Grok large language model. Yet whether an AI-driven alternative can escape the biases and limitations of human-edited platforms remains unclear. This study conducts a large-scale computational comparison of 17,790 matched article pairs from the 20,000 most-edited English Wikipedia pages. Using metrics spanning lexical richness, readability, reference density, structural features, and semantic similarity, we assess how closely the two platforms align in form and substance. We find that Grokipedia articles are substantially longer and contain significantly fewer references per word. Moreover, Grokipedia's content divides into two distinct groups: one that remains semantically and stylistically aligned with Wikipedia, and another that diverges sharply. Among the dissimilar articles, we observe a systematic rightward shift in the political bias of frequently cited news media sources, concentrated primarily in entries related to history and religion, and literature and art. More broadly, the findings indicate that AI-generated encyclopedic content departs from established editorial norms, favoring narrative expansion over citation-based verification, raising questions about transparency, provenance, and the governance of knowledge in automated information systems.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

Gender Dynamics and Homophily in a Social Network of LLM Agents

Generative artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in interactive settings, yet we know little about how their identity performance develops when they interact within large-scale networks. We address this by examining Chirper.ai, a social media platform similar to X but composed entirely of autonomous AI chatbots. Our dataset comprises over 70,000 agents, approximately 140 million posts, and the evolving followership network over a period of one year. Based on agents' posted text, we assign weekly gender performance scores to each agent. Results suggest that each agent's gender performance is fluid rather than fixed. Despite this fluidity, the network displays strong gender-based homophily, as agents consistently follow others performing gender similarly. We investigate whether these homophilic connections arise from social selection, in which agents choose to follow similar accounts, or from social influence, in which agents become more similar to their followees over time. Consistent with human social networks, we find evidence that both mechanisms shape the structure and evolution of interactions among LLMs. Our findings suggest that, even in the absence of bodies, cultural entraining of gender performance leads to gender-based sorting. This has important implications for LLM applications in synthetic hybrid populations, social simulations, and decision support.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2026

Gender Bias in Perception of Human Managers Extends to AI Managers

As AI becomes more embedded in workplaces, it is shifting from a tool for efficiency to an active force in organizational decision-making. Whether due to anthropomorphism or intentional design choices, people often assign human-like qualities, including gender, to AI systems. However, how AI managers are perceived in comparison to human managers and how gender influences these perceptions remains uncertain. To investigate this, we conducted randomized controlled trials (RCTs) where teams of three participants worked together under a randomly assigned manager. The manager was either a human or an AI and was presented as male, female, or gender-unspecified. The manager's role was to select the best-performing team member for an additional award. Our findings reveal that while participants initially showed no strong preference based on manager type or gender, their perceptions changed notably after experiencing the award process. As expected, those who received awards rated their managers as more trustworthy, competent, and fair, and they were more willing to work with similar managers in the future. In contrast, those who were not selected viewed them less favorably. However, male managers, whether human or AI, were more positively received by awarded participants, whereas female managers, especially female AI managers, faced greater skepticism and negative judgments when they did not give awards. These results suggest that gender bias in leadership extends beyond human managers to include AI-driven decision-makers as well. As AI assumes more managerial responsibilities, understanding and addressing these biases will be crucial for designing fair and effective AI management systems.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

Visual Anthropomorphism Shifts Evaluations of Gendered AI Managers

This research examines whether competence cues can reduce gender bias in evaluations of AI managers and whether these effects depend on how the AI is represented. Across two preregistered experiments (N = 2,505), each employing a 2 x 2 x 3 design manipulating AI gender, competence, and decision outcome, we compared text-based descriptions of AI managers with visually generated AI faces created using a reverse-correlation paradigm. In the text condition, evaluations were driven by competence rather than gender. When participants received unfavourable decisions, high-competence AI managers were judged as fairer, more competent, and better leaders than low-competence managers, regardless of AI gender. In contrast, when the AI manager was visually represented, competence cues had attenuated influence once facial information was present. Instead, participants showed systematic gender-differentiated responses to AI faces, with feminine-appearing managers evaluated as more competent and more trustworthy than masculine-appearing managers, particularly when delivering favourable outcomes. These gender effects were largely absent when outcomes were unfavourable, suggesting that negative feedback attenuates the influence of both competence information and facial cues. Taken together, these findings show that competence information can mitigate negative reactions to AI managers in text-based interactions, whereas facial anthropomorphism elicits gendered perceptual biases not observed in text-only settings. The results highlight that representational modality plays a critical role in determining when gender stereotypes are activated in evaluations of AI systems and underscore that design choices are consequential for AI governance in evaluative contexts.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

The Benefit of Collective Intelligence in Community-Based Content Moderation is Limited by Overt Political Signalling

Social media platforms face increasing scrutiny over the rapid spread of misinformation. In response, many have adopted community-based content moderation systems, including Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch) on X (formerly Twitter), Community Notes on Meta, and Footnotes on TikTok. However, research shows that the current design of these systems can allow political biases to influence both the development of notes and the rating processes, reducing their overall effectiveness. We hypothesise that enabling users to collaborate on writing notes, rather than relying solely on individually authored notes, can enhance the overall quality of their notes. To test this idea, we conducted an online experiment in which participants jointly authored notes on politically misleading posts. We find that collaboration improves the helpfulness of notes, although the average effect depends on the interactional context. In particular, the benefits of collaboration decline when participants are made aware of one another's political affiliations. We also find that politically diverse teams improve note quality when evaluating Republican posts, while team composition does not meaningfully affect note quality for Democrat posts. These findings underscore the complexity of community-based content moderation and highlight the importance of understanding group dynamics and political diversity when designing more effective moderation systems.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2026

Bounded Normative Equivalence in Human-AI Cooperation: Group Behaviour, Not Partner Labels, Predicts Cooperation under Anonymous Aggregate Feedback

The introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) agents into human groups raises questions about how they influence cooperative social norms. Prior work has examined human-AI and human-robot teaming in small groups, but less is known about whether an AI label alters cooperation and norm-related outcomes in repeated group interactions. We report an online experiment using a repeated four-player Public Goods Game. Each group comprised three human participants and one bot, framed either as human or AI, following one of three predefined strategies: unconditional cooperation, conditional cooperation, or free-riding. Among 236 participants, cooperation was primarily associated with the group's contribution in the previous round and with participants' own previous contributions. These patterns were similar across human- and AI-labelled conditions, and cooperation levels did not differ significantly by agent label; a formal equivalence test (TOST) indicated that any label effect was smaller than +/-5 tokens (5% of the endowment). We also found no evidence of label-based differences in norm persistence in a follow-up Prisoner's Dilemma or in participants' normative perceptions. We describe this pattern as bounded normative equivalence: under anonymous aggregate group feedback, an AI label produced no detectable differences in observed cooperation or norm-related outcomes. We argue that this equivalence is bounded by the informational structure of the setting: aggregate feedback makes individual actions difficult to attribute, diluting the identity cues that might otherwise trigger differentiation. These findings suggest that, in collective settings where individual contributions are not identifiable, cooperative norms can extend to groups that include artificial agents.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Towards AI Transparency and Accountability: A Global Framework for Exchanging Information on AI Systems

We propose that future AI transparency and accountability regulations are based on an open global standard for exchanging information about AI systems, which allows co-existence of potentially conflicting local regulations. Then, we discuss key components of a lightweight and effective AI transparency and/or accountability regulation. To prevent overregulation, the proposed approach encourages collaboration between regulators and industry to create a scalable and cost-efficient mutually beneficial solution. This includes using automated assessments and benchmarks with results transparently communicated through AI cards in an open AI register to facilitate meaningful public comparisons of competing AI systems. Such AI cards should report standardized measures tailored to the specific high-risk applications of AI systems and could be used for conformity assessments under AI transparency and accountability policies such as the European Union's AI Act.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

Beyond Demographics: Behavioural Segmentation and Spatial Analytics to Enhance Visitor Experience at The British Museum

This study explores visitor behaviour at The British Museum using data science methods applied to novel sources, including audio guide usage logs and TripAdvisor reviews. Analysing 42,000 visitor journeys and over 50,000 reviews, we identify key drivers of satisfaction, segment visitors by behavioural patterns, examine tour engagement, model spatial navigation, and investigate room popularity. Behavioural clustering uncovered four distinct visitor types: Committed Trekkers, Leisurely Explorers, Targeted Visitors, and Speedy Samplers, each characterised by different levels of engagement and movement. Tour usage analysis revealed high drop-off rates and variation in completion rates across different language groups. Spatial flow modelling revealed that accessibility and proximity, particularly aversion to stairs, shaped visitor paths more than thematic organisation. Room popularity was more strongly predicted by physical accessibility than curatorial content. We propose practical strategies for improving engagement and flow, offering a scalable framework for visitor-centred, data-informed museum planning.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2025

From Birdwatch to Community Notes, from Twitter to X: four years of community-based content moderation

Community Notes (formerly known as Birdwatch) is the first large-scale crowdsourced content moderation initiative launched by X (formerly Twitter) in January 2021. As the Community Notes model gains momentum across other social media platforms, there is a growing need to assess its underlying dynamics and effectiveness. This paper provides a descriptive investigation of Community Notes during its first four years, examining its linguistic diversity, sourcing practices, Contributor activity, rating behaviour, and interaction networks. In addition, we release a curated dataset and accompanying source code to support future research, along with a review of prior research on Community Notes. We parsed Notes and ratings data from the first four years of the program and conducted language detection across all Notes. For English-language Notes, we extracted embedded URLs and identified discussion topics in each Note. Additionally, we constructed monthly interaction networks among the Contributors. Together, the descriptive analysis, dataset, code, and literature review provide a foundation for advancing research on Community Notes and community-based content moderation more broadly.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2025

A new sociology of humans and machines

From fake social media accounts and generative artificial intelligence chatbots to trading algorithms and self-driving vehicles, robots, bots and algorithms are proliferating and permeating our communication channels, social interactions, economic transactions and transportation arteries. Networks of multiple interdependent and interacting humans and intelligent machines constitute complex social systems for which the collective outcomes cannot be deduced from either human or machine behaviour alone. Under this paradigm, we review recent research and identify general dynamics and patterns in situations of competition, coordination, cooperation, contagion and collective decision-making, with context-rich examples from high-frequency trading markets, a social media platform, an open collaboration community and a discussion forum. To ensure more robust and resilient human-machine communities, we require a new sociology of humans and machines. Researchers should study these communities using complex system methods; engineers should explicitly design artificial intelligence for human-machine and machine-machine interactions; and regulators should govern the ecological diversity and social co-development of humans and machines.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2024

Computational Sociology of Humans and Machines; Conflict and Collaboration

This Chapter examines the dynamics of conflict and collaboration in human-machine systems, with a particular focus on large-scale, internet-based collaborative platforms. While these platforms represent successful examples of collective knowledge production, they are also sites of significant conflict, as diverse participants with differing intentions and perspectives interact. The analysis identifies recurring patterns of interaction, including serial attacks, reciprocal revenge, and third-party interventions. These microstructures reveal the role of experience, cultural differences, and topic sensitivity in shaping human-human, human-machine, and machine-machine interactions. The chapter further investigates the role of algorithmic agents and bots, highlighting their dual nature: they enhance collaboration by automating tasks but can also contribute to persistent conflicts with both humans and other machines. We conclude with policy recommendations that emphasize transparency, balance, cultural sensitivity, and governance to maximize the benefits of human-machine synergy while minimizing potential detriments.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

Toxic behavior silences online political conversations

Quantifying how individuals react to social influence is crucial for tackling collective political behavior online. While many studies of opinion in public forums focus on social feedback, they often overlook the potential for human interactions to result in self-censorship. Here, we investigate political deliberation in online spaces by exploring the hypothesis that individuals may refrain from expressing minority opinions publicly due to being exposed to toxic behavior. Analyzing conversations under YouTube videos from six prominent US news outlets around the 2020 US presidential elections, we observe patterns of self-censorship signaling the influence of peer toxicity on users' behavior. Using hidden Markov models, we identify a latent state consistent with toxicity-driven silence. Such state is characterized by reduced user activity and a higher likelihood of posting toxic content, indicating an environment where extreme and antisocial behaviors thrive. Our findings offer insights into the intricacies of online political deliberation and emphasize the importance of considering self-censorship dynamics to properly characterize ideological polarization in digital spheres.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2024

AI's assigned gender affects human-AI cooperation

Cooperation between humans and machines is increasingly vital as artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more integrated into daily life. Research indicates that people are often less willing to cooperate with AI agents than with humans, more readily exploiting AI for personal gain. While prior studies have shown that giving AI agents human-like features influences people's cooperation with them, the impact of AI's assigned gender remains underexplored. This study investigates how human cooperation varies based on gender labels assigned to AI agents with which they interact. In the Prisoner's Dilemma game, 402 participants interacted with partners labelled as AI (bot) or humans. The partners were also labelled male, female, non-binary, or gender-neutral. Results revealed that participants tended to exploit female-labelled and distrust male-labelled AI agents more than their human counterparts, reflecting gender biases similar to those in human-human interactions. These findings highlight the significance of gender biases in human-AI interactions that must be considered in future policy, design of interactive AI systems, and regulation of their use.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

AI-enhanced Collective Intelligence

Current societal challenges exceed the capacity of humans operating either alone or collectively. As AI evolves, its role within human collectives will vary from an assistive tool to a participatory member. Humans and AI possess complementary capabilities that, together, can surpass the collective intelligence of either humans or AI in isolation. However, the interactions in human-AI systems are inherently complex, involving intricate processes and interdependencies. This review incorporates perspectives from complex network science to conceptualize a multilayer representation of human-AI collective intelligence, comprising cognition, physical, and information layers. Within this multilayer network, humans and AI agents exhibit varying characteristics; humans differ in diversity from surface-level to deep-level attributes, while AI agents range in degrees of functionality and anthropomorphism. We explore how agents' diversity and interactions influence the system's collective intelligence and analyze real-world instances of AI-enhanced collective intelligence. We conclude by considering potential challenges and future developments in this field.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

Individual differences in knowledge network navigation

With the rapid accumulation of online information, efficient web navigation has grown vital yet challenging. To create an easily navigable cyberspace catering to diverse demographics, understanding how people navigate differently is paramount. While previous research has unveiled individual differences in spatial navigation, such differences in knowledge space navigation remain sparse. To bridge this gap, we conducted an online experiment where participants played a navigation game on Wikipedia and completed personal information questionnaires. Our analysis shows that age negatively affects knowledge space navigation performance, while multilingualism enhances it. Under time pressure, participants' performance improves across trials and males outperform females, an effect not observed in games without time pressure. In our experiment, successful route-finding is usually not related to abilities of innovative exploration of routes. Our results underline the importance of age, multilingualism and time constraint in the knowledge space navigation.

physics.soc-ph↗