Related papers: The Spatial Dimension of Online Echo Chambers
With the advance of the Internet, ordinary users have created multiple personal accounts on online social networks, and interactions among these social network users have recently been tagged with location information. In this work, we…
People who share similar opinions towards controversial topics could form an echo chamber and may share similar political views toward other topics as well. The existence of such connections, which we call connected behavior, gives…
We study the cohesion within and the coalitions between political groups in the Eighth European Parliament (2014--2019) by analyzing two entirely different aspects of the behavior of the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in the…
When learning from others, people tend to focus their attention on those with similar views. This is often attributed to flawed reasoning, and thought to slow learning and polarize beliefs. However, we show that echo chambers are a rational…
Social media platforms have become essential spaces for public discourse. While political polarisation and limited communication across different groups are widely acknowledged, the connection between social network fragmentation and the…
Competitive information diffusion on large-scale social networks reveals fundamental characteristics of rumor contagions and has profound influence on public opinion formation. There has been growing interest in exploring dynamical…
Brexit, a global pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and record inflation - few legislative bodies have faced such a cascade of shocks as the European Parliament did during its 9th term (2019-2024). Using the Bipartite Configuration…
This thesis investigates geographic dialect alignment in place-informed social media communities, focussing on New Zealand-related Reddit communities. By integrating qualitative analyses of user perceptions with computational methods, the…
Echoing the history of search engines and social media content rankings, the advent of large language models (LLMs) has led to a push for increased personalization of model outputs to individual users. In the past, personalized…
Online discourse covers a wide range of topics and many actors tailor their content to impact online discussions through carefully crafted messages and targeted campaigns. Yet the scale and diversity of online media content make it…
The rise of misinformation and fake news in online political discourse poses significant challenges to democratic processes and public engagement. While debunking efforts aim to counteract misinformation and foster fact-based dialogue,…
Political polarization in online social platforms is a rapidly growing phenomenon worldwide. Despite their relevance to modern-day politics, the structure and dynamics of polarized states in digital spaces are still poorly understood. We…
Twitter is often used in quantitative studies that identify geographically-preferred topics, writing styles, and entities. These studies rely on either GPS coordinates attached to individual messages, or on the user-supplied location field…
The COVID-19 pandemic, with millions of Americans compelled to stay home and work remotely, presented an opportunity to explore the dynamics of social relationships in a predominantly remote world. Using the 1972-2022 General Social…
Online Social Networks represent a novel opportunity for political campaigns, revolutionising the paradigm of political communication. Nevertheless, many studies uncovered the presence of d/misinformation campaigns or of malicious…
Computer-mediated communication is driving fundamental changes in the nature of written language. We investigate these changes by statistical analysis of a dataset comprising 107 million Twitter messages (authored by 2.7 million unique user…
Theories of democratic stability, populism, and party-system crisis often point to a form of polarization that comparative research rarely measures directly: hostile relations among political elites. Existing comparative measures capture…
In social networks, users often engage with like-minded peers. This selective exposure to opinions might result in echo chambers, i.e., political fragmentation and social polarization of user interactions. When echo chambers form, opinions…
How does political discourse spread in digital networks? Can we empirically test if certain conceptual frames of social movements have a correlate on their online discussion networks? Through an analysis of the Twitter data from the Occupy…
Understanding the dynamics of language toxicity on social media is important for us to investigate the propagation of misinformation and the development of echo chambers for political scenarios such as U.S. presidential elections. Recent…