The evolution of information-seeking processes, driven by search engines like Google, has reshaped how people access and interact with information. This paper examines how individuals' pre-existing attitudes on polarizing topics, such as the legality of abortion, influence their engagement with modern information-seeking processes. Recruiting participants from an undergraduate population of a university we use a mixed-methods study involving surveys and information-seeking tasks focused on the legality of abortion, this work offers five key insights. First, individuals with opposing abortion-related attitudes receive different search results. Second, the vocabulary used when formulated search queries differs significantly across opposing attitudes. Third, this difference in query vocabulary has a significant effect on the search results. Fourth, this effect remains consistent, though reduced, when personalization is removed from the process. Finally, Google Search returns search results that align with users' pre-existing attitudes, thereby reinforcing those attitudes. Taken together, these findings reveal a critical relationship between human biases, partisan audiences, and algorithmic processes. Specifically, our findings underscore how search platforms such as Google Search, which play a crucial role in the modern information-seeking process, contribute to information polarization.

The digital advertising ecosystem sustains the free web and drives global innovation, but often at the cost of user privacy through intrusive tracking and non-compliant ads, especially harmful to under-age users. This has led to widespread adoption of privacy tools like adblockers and anti-trackers, which, while disrupting ad revenues, expose users to alternate forms of tracking and fingerprinting. To address this, many adblockers now allow 'non-intrusive' ads by default. In this study, we evaluate Adblock Plus's Acceptable Ads feature and find a 13.6% increase in problematic ads compared to no adblocker use—challenging claims of improved user experience. We also find that ad exchanges on allowlists are more likely to serve problematic content, underscoring the hidden cost privacy-aware users pay when relying on such technologies. While prior work in the domain has been limited by their practical viability, we further propose a methodology to automate the detection of problematic ads using LLMs with zero-shot prompting, achieving substantial agreement with human annotators (IAA score: 0.79). This establishes the efficacy of LLMs in problematic content detection under well-defined environments. As In-browser LLMs emerge, adversaries may exploit problematic ad content to fingerprint privacy-conscious ABP users. At the same time, these advances present new opportunities for adblockers to develop robust defenses, detect malicious exchanges, and uphold both user privacy and the sustainability of the ad-supported web.

Social media platforms have had considerable impact on the real world especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Problematic narratives related to Covid-19 might have caused significant impact on the population specifically due to its association with dangerous beliefs such as anti-vaccination and Covid denial. In this work, we study a unique dataset of Facebook posts by users who shared and believed in such narratives before succumbing to Covid-19 often resulting in death. We aim to characterize the dominant themes and sources present in the victim's posts along with identifying the role of the platform in handling deadly narratives. Our analysis reveals the overwhelming politicization of Covid-19 through the prevalence of anti-government themes propagated by right-wing political and media ecosystem. Furthermore, we highlight the efforts of Facebook's implementation of soft moderation actions intended to warn users of misinformation. Results from this study bring insights into the responsibility of political elites in shaping public discourse and the platform's role in dampening the reach of harmful narratives.

The algorithms and the interactions facilitated by online platforms have been used by radical groups to recruit vulnerable individuals to their cause. This has resulted in the sharp growth of violent events and deteriorating online discourse. The Manosphere, a collection of radical anti-feminist communities, is one such group that has attracted attention due to its rapid growth and increasingly violent real-world outbursts. In this paper, we examine the social engagements between Reddit users who have participated in feminist discourse and the Manosphere communities on Reddit to understand the process of development of traits associated with the adoption of extremist ideologies. By using existing research on the psychology of radicalization we track how specific types of social engagement with the Manosphere influence the development of traits associated with radicalization. Our findings show that: (1) participation, even by the simple act of joining the Manosphere, has a significant influence on the language and outlook traits of a user, (2) Manosphere elites are extremely effective propagators of radical traits and cause their increase even outside the Manosphere, and (3) community perception can heavily influence a user's behavior. Finally, we examine how our findings can help draft community and platform moderation policies to help mitigate the problem of online radicalization.