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Abortion has been one of the most divisive issues in the United States. Yet, missing is comprehensive longitudinal evidence on how political divides on abortion are reflected in public discourse over time, on a national scale, and in…
On July 13, 2024, at the Trump rally in Pennsylvania, someone attempted to assassinate Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump. This attempt sparked a large-scale discussion on social media. We collected posts from X (formerly known…
The alt-right is a far-right movement that has uniquely developed on social media, before becoming prominent in the 2016 United States presidential elections. However, very little research exists about their discourse and organization…
Social media platforms such as Twitter have a fundamental role in facilitating the spread and discussion of ideas online through the concept of retweeting and replying. However, these features also contribute to the spread of…
We mapped the tweets of 520 US Congress members, focusing on analyzing their engagement with two broad topics: first, the COVID-19 pandemic, and second, the recent wave of anti-racist protest. We find that, in discussing COVID-19, Democrats…
A common diversionary tactic used to deflect attention from contested issues is whataboutery which, when used by majoritarian groups to justify their behaviour against marginalised communities, can quickly devolve into extremism. We explore…
Language is a dynamic aspect of our culture that changes when expressed in different technologies/communities. Online social networks have enabled the diffusion and evolution of different dialects, including African American English (AAE).…
This article analyses public debate on Twitter via network representations of retweets and replies. We argue that tweets observable on Twitter have both a direct and mediated effect on the perception of public opinion. Through the interplay…
An important challenge in the process of tracking and detecting the dissemination of misinformation is to understand the political gap between people that engage with the so called "fake news". A possible factor responsible for this gap is…
We draw insights from the social psychology literature to identify two facets of Twitter deliberations about migrants, i.e., perceptions about migrants and behaviors towards mi-grants. Our theoretical anchoring helped us in identifying two…
Social media platforms are revolutionizing the way users communicate by increasing the exposure to highly stigmatized issues in the society. Sexual abuse is one such issue that recently took over social media via attaching the hashtag…
This study uses TikTok (N = 8,173) to examine how short-form video platforms challenge the protest paradigm in the recent Black Lives Matter movement. A computer-mediated visual analysis, computer vision, is employed to identify the…
In recent times, social media sites such as Twitter have been extensively used for debating politics and public policies. These debates span millions of tweets and numerous topics of public importance. Thus, it is imperative that this vast…
The ideological asymmetries have been recently observed in contested online spaces, where conservative voices seem to be relatively more pronounced even though liberals are known to have the population advantage on digital platforms. Most…
We create a computational framework for understanding social action and demonstrate how this framework can be used to build an open-source event detection tool with scalable statistical machine learning algorithms and a subsampled database…
Social media platforms have facilitated the rapid spread of dis- and mis-information. Parler, a US-based fringe social media platform that positions itself as a champion of free-speech, has had substantial information integrity issues. In…
Recent policy initiatives have acknowledged the importance of disaggregating data pertaining to diverse Asian ethnic communities to gain a more comprehensive understanding of their current status and to improve their overall well-being.…
Online social networks create echo-chambers where people are infrequently exposed to opposing opinions. Even if such exposure occurs, the persuasive effect may be minimal or nonexistent. Recent studies have shown that exposure to opposing…
The mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school on December 14, 2012 catalyzed a year of active debate and legislation on gun control in the United States. Social media hosted an active public discussion where people expressed their…
Language change is influenced by many factors, but often starts from synchronic variation, where multiple linguistic patterns or forms coexist, or where different speech communities use language in increasingly different ways. Besides…