Related papers: The Spatial Dimension of Online Echo Chambers
Measuring the number of "likes" in Twitter and the number of bills voted in favor by the members of the Chilean Chambers of Deputies. We empirically study how signals of agreement in Twitter translates into cross-cutting voting during a…
Social media has become an emerging alternative to opinion polls for public opinion collection, while it is still posing many challenges as a passive data source, such as structurelessness, quantifiability, and representativeness. Social…
Members of different political groups not only disagree about issues but also dislike and distrust each other. While social media can amplify this emotional divide -- called affective polarization by political scientists -- there is a lack…
The election forecasting 'industry' is a growing one, both in the volume of scholars producing forecasts and methodological diversity. In recent years a new approach has emerged that relies on social media and particularly Twitter data to…
Machine learning is used extensively in recommender systems deployed in products. The decisions made by these systems can influence user beliefs and preferences which in turn affect the feedback the learning system receives - thus creating…
We study the statistics of turnout rates and results of the French elections since 1992. We find that the distribution of turnout rates across towns is surprisingly stable over time. The spatial correlation of the turnout rates, or of the…
Society is often polarized by controversial issues, that split the population into groups of opposing views. When such issues emerge on social media, we often observe the creation of 'echo chambers', i.e., situations where like-minded…
The online diffusion of information related to Europe and migration has been little investigated from an external point of view. However, this is a very relevant topic, especially if users have had no direct contact with Europe and its…
Social Cyber Geography is the space in the digital cyber realm that is produced through social relations. Communication in the social media ecosystem happens not only because of human interactions, but is also fueled by algorithmically…
Politics in different countries show diverse degrees of polarization, which tends to be stronger on social media, given how easy it became to connect and engage with like-minded individuals on the web. A way of reducing polarization would…
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…
We propose an analytical framework able to investigate discussions about polarized topics in online social networks from many different angles. The framework supports the analysis of social networks along several dimensions: time, space and…
Previous studies have shown that Twitter users have biases to tweet from certain locations, locational bias, and during certain hours, temporal bias. We used three years of geolocated Twitter Data to quantify these biases and test our…
We study in details the turnout rate statistics for 77 elections in 11 different countries. We show that the empirical results established in a previous paper for French elections appear to hold much more generally. We find in particular…
While online social media offers a way for ignored or stifled voices to be heard, it also allows users a platform to spread hateful speech. Such speech usually originates in fringe communities, yet it can spill over into mainstream…
The prevalent perspective in quantitative research on opinion dynamics flattens the landscape of the online political discourse into a traditional left--right dichotomy. While this approach helps simplify the analysis and modeling effort,…
In the oscillation model that describes the user dynamics of online social networks, it is known that the fundamental equation can explicitly describe the causal relationship between the network structure and user dynamics. The fundamental…
Search engines are used and trusted by hundreds of millions of people every day. However, the algorithms used by search engines to index, filter, and rank web content are inherently biased, and will necessarily prefer some views and…
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 has brought a revolution on how people are consuming news. Beyond the undoubtedly large number of advantages brought by social-media platforms, a point of criticism has been the creation of echo chambers and filter bubbles,…