Related papers: Can electoral popularity be predicted using social…

We present a contribution to the debate on the predictability of social events using big data analytics. We focus on the elimination of contestants in the American Idol TV shows as an example of a well defined electoral phenomenon that each…

Online political microtargeting involves monitoring people's online behaviour, and using the collected data, sometimes enriched with other data, to show people-targeted political advertisements. Online political microtargeting is widely…

Transmitting messages in the most efficient way as possible has always been one of politicians main concerns during electoral processes. Due to the rapidly growing number of users, online social networks have become ideal platforms for…

Social scientists have long sought to understand why certain people, items, or options become more popular than others. One seemingly intuitive theory is that inherent value drives popularity. An alternative theory claims that popularity is…

Online social networks are used to diffuse opinions and ideas among users, enabling a faster communication and a wider audience. The way in which opinions are conditioned by social interactions is usually called social influence. Social…

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…

Predicting X from Twitter is a popular fad within the Twitter research subculture. It seems both appealing and relatively easy. Among such kind of studies, electoral prediction is maybe the most attractive, and at this moment there is a…

Sentiment analysis is the task of automatic analysis of opinions and emotions of users towards an entity or some aspect of that entity. Political Sentiment Analysis of social media helps the political strategists to scrutinize the…

In the process of enacting or introducing a new policy, policymakers frequently consider the population's responses. These considerations are critical for effective governance. There are numerous methods to gauge the ground sentiment from a…

The proliferation of interactive AI like ChatGPT has fueled intense public discourse surrounding AI- generated content (AIGC). While some fear job displacement, others anticipate productivity gains. Social media provides a rich source of…

This work analyses surprising elections, and attempts to quantify the notion of surprise in elections. A voter is surprised if their estimate of the winner (assumed to be based on a combination of the preferences of their social connections…

Interpersonal influence estimation from empirical data is a central challenge in the study of social structures and dynamics. Opinion dynamics theory is a young interdisciplinary science that studies opinion formation in social networks and…

Elections involving a very large voter population often lead to outcomes that surprise many. This is particularly important for the elections in which results affect the economy of a sizable population. A better prediction of the true…

Consider n individuals who, by popular vote, choose among q >= 2 alternatives, one of which is "better" than the others. Assume that each individual votes independently at random, and that the probability of voting for the better…

Social networks play an important role in people's daily socialization, particularly through social media platforms, which have become key channels for communication and information dissemination. The digital ecosystem does not only evolve…

The enormous increase of popularity and use of the WWW has led in the recent years to important changes in the ways people communicate. An interesting example of this fact is provided by the now very popular social annotation systems,…

Accurate modeling of opinion dynamics has the potential to help us understand polarization and what makes effective political discourse possible or impossible. Here, we use physics-based methods to model the evolution of political opinions…

Solicited public opinion surveys reach a limited subpopulation of willing participants and are expensive to conduct, leading to poor time resolution and a restricted pool of expert-chosen survey topics. In this study, we demonstrate that…

In this age of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, there is rapidly growing interest in understanding network-enabled opinion dynamics in large groups of autonomous agents. The phenomena of opinion polarization, the spread of propaganda and…

Users online tend to join polarized groups of like-minded peers around shared narratives, forming echo chambers. The echo chamber effect and opinion polarization may be driven by several factors including human biases in information…