Events

Social Network of Disagreement Among Humans and Among Bots

Speaker: Taha Yasseri

Senior Research Fellow in Computational Social Science, University of Oxford, Oxford Internet Institute

This event is part of the Nuffield Social Networks Seminar Series.

Despite their enormous importance, conflicts and wars in human societies are less studied within the framework of scientific methods. It is hard to have realistic controlled experiments and even observational data are very sparse. However, the emergence of online technologies and their integration into different aspects of our individual and societal lives, has brought about a change. In large-scale online collaborative projects such as Wikipedia where millions of people work together to produce a collection of the “whole of human knowledge,” conflicts and edit wars are inevitable. In this talk, we review some of the empirical analyses and theoretical modelling that we have done on Wikipedia edit wars between human and robot editors in different language editions.

The Nuffield Social Network Seminars are convened by Cohen R. Simpson & Laurin B. Weissinger.