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The aftermath of the 2020 US Presidential Election witnessed an unprecedented attack on the democratic values of the country through the violent insurrection at Capitol Hill on January 6th, 2021. The attack was fueled by the proliferation…
Microblogging services such as Twitter are an increasingly important way to communicate, both for individuals and for groups through the use of hashtags that denote topics of conversation. However, groups can be easily blocked from…
We study the evolution of long-lived controversial debates as manifested on Twitter from 2011 to 2016. Specifically, we explore how the structure of interactions and content of discussion varies with the level of collective attention, as…
Social movements use social computing systems to complement offline mobilizations, but prior literature has focused almost exclusively on movement actors' use of social media. In this paper, we analyze participation and attention to topics…
The United States have some of the highest rates of gun violence among developed countries. Yet, there is a disagreement about the extent to which firearms should be regulated. In this study, we employ social media signals to examine the…
We study the dynamics of interactions between a traditional medium, the New York Times journal, and its followers in Twitter, using a massive dataset. It consists of the metadata of the articles published by the journal during the first…
Social media enables activists to directly communicate with the public and provides a space for movement leaders, participants, bystanders, and opponents to collectively construct and contest narratives. Focusing on Twitter messages from…
The study of coordinated manipulation of conversations on social media has become more prevalent as social media's role in amplifying misinformation, hate, and polarization has come under scrutiny. We discuss the implications of successful…
This study proposes a novel method to understand the factors affecting individuals' perception of transport accessibility, socioeconomic disparity, and public infrastructure. As opposed to the time consuming and expensive survey-based…
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?…
The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a significant rise in the spread of misinformation on online platforms such as Twitter. Oftentimes this growth is blamed on the idea of the "echo chamber." However, the behavior said to…
In recent years, bullying and aggression against users on social media have grown significantly, causing serious consequences to victims of all demographics. In particular, cyberbullying affects more than half of young social media users…
Understanding the framing of political issues is of paramount importance as it significantly shapes how individuals perceive, interpret, and engage with these matters. While prior research has independently explored framing within news…
Gun related violence is a complex issue and accounts for a large proportion of violent incidents. In the research reported in this paper, we set out to investigate the pro-gun and anti-gun sentiments expressed on a social media platform,…
We study how participation in collective action is articulated in podcast discussions, using the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement as a case study. While research on collective action discourse has primarily focused on text-based content,…
While social media has become an empowering agent to individual voices and freedom of expression, it also facilitates anti-social behaviors including online harassment, cyberbullying, and hate speech. In this paper, we present the first…
We study the Twitter conversation following the August 2017 `Unite the Right' rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, using tools from network analysis and data science. We use media followership on Twitter and principal component analysis…
In 2020 the tragic murder of George Floyd at the hands of law enforcement ignited and intensified nationwide protests, demanding changes in police funding and allocation. This happened during a budgeting feedback exercise where residents of…
Social media has become an indispensable part of the everyday lives of millions of people around the world. It provides a platform for expressing opinions and beliefs, communicated to a massive audience. However, this ease with which people…
We collect and analyse messages exchanged in Twitter using two of the platform's publicly available APIs (the search and stream specifications). We assess the differences between the two samples, and compare the networks of communication…