People tend to connect with others who are like them. Alumni from the same alma mater are more likely to collaborate over a research project together, or individuals with the same political beliefs are more likely to join the same political parties, attend rallies, and engage in online discussions. This sociology concept, called homophily, has been observed in many network science studies. But if like-minded individuals cluster in online and offline spaces to reinforce each other's ideas and form synergies, what does that mean for society' Researchers at MIT wanted to investigate homophily further to understand how groups of three or more interact in complex societal settings. Prior research on understanding homophily has studied relationships between pairs of people. For example, when two members of Congress co-sponsor a bill, they are likely to be from the same political party. However, less is known about whether group interactions between three or more people are likely to occur between similar individuals. If three members of Congress co-sponsor a bill together, are all three likely to be members of the same party, or would we expect more bipartisanship' When the researchers tried to extend traditional methods to measure homophily in these larger group interactions, they found the results can be misleading....

2023 was the year social networks realized that they were sitting on massive troves of data. And some companies, such as Twitter (now X) and Reddit, decided to change their terms to shut out third-party experiences on these platforms. In the process, they also put a price on their data ' something they believe is highly valuable today as it can be used to train AI models. After talking to several third-party developers who built apps and services on top of these larger social networks, we learned that there are mixed feelings among the developers about building experiences around social networks. While they are excited about the rise of decentralized networks, some of them haven't seen enough incentives to build out new apps. Twitter has historically been one of the most popular social networks when it comes to third-party apps. Some of those apps even pre-date the name 'tweet.' In January, however, the company started to shut out these clients without any notice. Within days, in typical Elon Musk style, the social network silently changed its developer terms to effectively shut down third-party apps....