Related papers: The Great Division
Democrats and Republicans have seemed to grow apart in the past three decades. Since the United States as we know it today is undeniably bipartisan, this phenomenon would not appear as a surprise to most. However, there are triggers which…
The growing prominence of social media in public discourse has led to a greater scrutiny of the quality of online information and the role it plays in amplifying political polarization. However, studies of polarization on social media…
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…
Individuals engaging on social media often tend to establish online communities where interactions predominantly occur among like-minded peers. While considerable efforts have been devoted to studying and delineating these communities,…
Polarization in American politics has been extensively documented and analyzed for decades, and the phenomenon became all the more apparent during the 2016 presidential election, where Trump and Clinton depicted two radically different…
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 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…
As civil discourse increasingly takes place online, misinformation and the polarization of news shared in online communities have become ever more relevant concerns with real world harms across our society. Studying online news sharing at…
Unlike traditional media, online news platforms allow users to consume content that suits their tastes and to facilitate interactions with other people. However, as more personalized consumption of information and interaction with…
Even though the Internet and social media have increased the amount of news and information people can consume, most users are only exposed to content that reinforces their positions and isolates them from other ideological communities.…
The spread of ideas in online social networks is a crucial phenomenon to understand nowadays the proliferation of fake news and their impact in democracies. This makes necessary to use models that mimic the circulation of rumors. The law of…
This article presents a preliminary approach towards characterizing political fake news on Twitter through the analysis of their meta-data. In particular, we focus on more than 1.5M tweets collected on the day of the election of Donald…
The past decade has witnessed a marked increase in the use of social media by politicians, most notably exemplified by the 45th President of the United States (POTUS), Donald Trump. On Twitter, POTUS messages consistently attract high…
In this paper, we study the implications of the commonplace assumption that most social media studies make with respect to the nature of message shares (such as retweets) as a predominantly positive interaction. By analyzing two large…
This thesis addresses two paradoxes: (1) why empirical studies find that fake news represent only a small share of the information consulted and shared on social media despite the absence of editorial control or journalistic norms, and (2)…
The analysis of social networks enables the understanding of social interactions, polarisation of ideas, and the spread of information and therefore plays an important role in society. We use Twitter data - as it is a popular venue for the…
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…
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…
Echo chambers in online social networks, whereby users' beliefs are reinforced by interactions with like-minded peers and insulation from others' points of view, have been decried as a cause of political polarization. Here, we investigate…
The emergence of politically driven divisions in online discussion networks has attracted a wealth of literature, but also one which has thus far been largely limited to single country studies. Hence whilst there is good evidence that these…