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The rise in popularity of Twitter has led to a debate on its impact on public opinions. The optimists foresee an increase in online participation and democratization due to social media's personal and interactive nature. Cyber-pessimists,…
Social media have great potential to support diverse information sharing, but there is widespread concern that platforms like Twitter do not result in communication between those who hold contradictory viewpoints. Because users can choose…
Social Media have been extensively used for commercial and political communication, besides their initial scope of providing an easy-to-use outlet to produce and consume user-generated content. Besides being a popular medium, Social Media…
Social media play an increasingly important role in political communication. Various studies investigated how individuals adopt social media for political discussion, to share their views about politics and policy, or to mobilize and…
The widespread adoption and dissemination of online news through social media systems have been revolutionizing many segments of our society and ultimately our daily lives. In these systems, users can play a central role as they share…
In this new era of social media, social networks are becoming increasingly important sources of user-generated content on the internet. These kinds of information resources, which include a lot of people's feelings, opinions, feedback, and…
We investigate the polarization of the German Twittersphere by extracting the main issues discussed and the signaled opinions of users towards those issues based on (re)tweets concerning trending topics. The dataset covers daily trending…
News sharing on digital platforms shapes the digital spaces millions of users navigate. Trace data from these platforms also enables researchers to study online news circulation. In this context, research on the types of news shared by…
The COVID-19 pandemic brought upon a massive wave of disinformation, exacerbating polarization in the increasingly divided landscape of online discourse. In this context, popular social media users play a major role, as they have the…
Social media platforms play a pivotal role in shaping public opinion and amplifying political discourse, particularly during elections. However, the same dynamics that foster democratic engagement can also exacerbate polarization. To better…
Social media has played an important role in shaping political discourse over the last decade. At the same time, it is often perceived to have increased political polarization, thanks to the scale of discussions and their public nature. In…
Social media has become extremely influential when it comes to policy making in modern societies, especially in the western world, where platforms such as Twitter allow users to follow politicians, thus making citizens more involved in…
Large-scale data from social media have a significant potential to describe complex phenomena in real world and to anticipate collective behaviors such as information spreading and social trends. One specific case of study is represented by…
News sharing on social networks reveals how information disseminates among users. This process, constrained by user preferences and social ties, plays a key role in the formation of public opinion. In this work we study news sharing of main…
The importance of collective social action in current events is manifest in the Arab Spring and Occupy movements. Electronic social media have become a pervasive channel for social interactions, and a basis of collective social response to…
The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis that has been testing every society and exposing the critical role of local politics in crisis response. In the United States, there has been a strong partisan divide between the Democratic and…
The blogosphere can be construed as a knowledge network made of bloggers who are interacting through a social network to share, exchange or produce information. We claim that the social and semantic dimensions are essentially co-determined…
Are users who comment on a variety of matters more likely to achieve high influence than those who delve into one focused field? Do general Twitter hashtags, such as #lol, tend to be more popular than novel ones, such as #instantlyinlove?…
Social media platforms shape users' experiences through the algorithmic systems they deploy. In this study, we examine to what extent Twitter's content recommender, in conjunction with a user's social network, impacts the topic, political…
We study how political polarization is reflected in the social media posts used by media outlets to promote their content online. In particular, we track the Twitter posts of several media outlets over the course of more than three years…