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How can we capture the dynamics of deliberation in a debate? In an increasingly divided and misinformed world, understanding the relationship between who is arguing and what they are arguing about is becoming critical for fostering a…
This study introduces ValueScope, a framework leveraging language models to quantify social norms and values within online communities, grounded in social science perspectives on normative structures. We employ ValueScope to dissect and…
The World Wide Web is a complex interconnected digital ecosystem, where information and attention flow between platforms and communities throughout the globe. These interactions co-construct how we understand the world, reflecting and…
Picture a community torn over a proposed zoning law. Some are angry, others defensive, and misunderstandings abound. On social media, they broadcast insults at one another; every nuanced perspective is reduced to a viral soundbite. Yet,…
The broad adoption of the web as a communication medium has made it possible to study social behavior at a new scale. With social media networks such as Twitter, we can collect large data sets of online discourse. Social science researchers…
Recently, many content sites have started encouraging their users to engage in social activities such as adding buddies on Yahoo! Travel and sharing articles with their friends on New York Times. This has led to the emergence of {\em social…
In micro-blogging platforms, people connect and interact with others. However, due to cognitive biases, they tend to interact with like-minded people and read agreeable information only. Many efforts to make people connect with those who…
The emergence of decentralized social media platforms presents new opportunities and challenges for real-time analysis of public discourse. This study introduces CognitiveSky, an open-source and scalable framework designed for sentiment,…
Pluralism, the capacity to engage with diverse perspectives without collapsing them into a single viewpoint, is critical for developing large language models that faithfully reflect human heterogeneity. Yet this characteristic has not been…
In today's world, where moving forward hinges on innovation and working together, this article introduces a new global online platform that is all about sparking teamwork to come up with new ideas. This platform goes beyond borders and…
Social media (i.e., Reddit) users are overloaded with people's opinions when viewing discourses about divisive topics. Traditional user interfaces in such media present those opinions in a linear structure, which can limit users in viewing…
Digital democracy and new forms for direct digital participation in policy making gain unprecedented momentum. This is particularly the case for preferential voting methods and decision-support systems designed to promote fairer, more…
Divisiveness appears to be increasing in much of the world, leading to concern about political violence and a decreasing capacity to collaboratively address large-scale societal challenges. In this working paper we aim to articulate an…
Political discourse has grown increasingly fragmented across different social platforms, making it challenging to trace how narratives spread and evolve within such a fragmented information ecosystem. Reconstructing social graphs and…
Online discourse takes place in corporate-controlled spaces thought by users to be public realms. These platforms in name enable free speech but in practice implement varying degrees of censorship either by government edict or by uneven and…
In many instances of online collaboration, ideation and deliberation about what to write happen separately from the synthesis of the deliberation into a cohesive document. However, this may result in a final document that has little…
We present CommentWatcher, an open source tool aimed at analyzing discussions on web forums. Constructed as a web platform, CommentWatcher features automatic mass fetching of user posts from forum on multiple sites, extracting topics,…
Public discourse and opinions stem from multiple social groups. Each group has beliefs about a topic (such as vaccination, abortion, gay marriage, etc.), and opinions are exchanged and blended to produce consensus. A particular measure of…
In an increasingly polarized world, demagogues who reduce complexity down to simple arguments based on emotion are gaining in popularity. Are opinions and online discussions falling into demagoguery? In this work, we aim to provide…
Polarized topics often spark discussion and debate on social media. Recent studies have shown that polarized debates have a specific clustered structure in the endorsement net- work, which indicates that users direct their endorsements…