Related papers: The Great Division
This paper presents a quantitative study of Twitter, one of the most popular micro-blogging services, from the perspective of user influence. We crawl several datasets from the most active communities on Twitter and obtain 20.5 million user…
Social media have quickly become a prevalent channel to access information, spread ideas, and influence opinions. However, it has been suggested that social and algorithmic filtering may cause exposure to less diverse points of view, and…
In recent decades, the massification of online social connections has made information globally accessible in a matter of seconds. Unfortunately, this has been accompanied by a dramatic surge in extreme opinions, without a clear solution in…
Arguably one of the most important features of Twitter is the support for "retweets" or messages re-posted verbatim by a user that were originated by someone else. (This does not include modified tweets that sometimes are referred to as…
The rise of a trending topic on Twitter or Facebook leads to the temporal emergence of a set of users currently interested in that topic. Given the temporary nature of the links between these users, being able to dynamically identify…
The Internet Research Agency (IRA) influences online political conversations in the United States, exacerbating existing partisan divides and sowing discord. In this paper we investigate the IRA's communication strategies by analyzing…
Politically divided societies are also often divided emotionally: people like and trust those with similar political views (in-group favoritism) while disliking and distrusting those with different views (out-group animosity). This…
Social media is considered a democratic space in which people connect and interact with each other regardless of their gender, race, or any other demographic factor. Despite numerous efforts that explore demographic factors in social media,…
We predict the popularity of short messages called tweets created in the micro-blogging site known as Twitter. We measure the popularity of a tweet by the time-series path of its retweets, which is when people forward the tweet to others.…
A model algorithm is proposed to study subsequent partitions of complex networks describing social structures. The partitions are supposed to appear as actions of rivaling leaders corresponding to nodes with large degrees. The condition of…
Information cocoons are frequently cited in the literature on whether and how social media might lead to ideological segregation and political polarization. From the behavioural and communication perspectives, this paper first examines why…
False rumors are known to have detrimental effects on society. To prevent the spread of false rumors, social media platforms such as Twitter must detect them early. In this work, we develop a novel probabilistic mixture model that…
Users polarization and confirmation bias play a key role in misinformation spreading on online social media. Our aim is to use this information to determine in advance potential targets for hoaxes and fake news. In this paper, we introduce…
Political polarization plays a pivotal and potentially harmful role in a democracy. However, existing studies are often limited to a single country and one form of polarization, hindering a comprehensive understanding of the phenomena. Here…
Using language models, we analyze a sample of 67 million tweets and 30 million Reddit comments referencing a set of 215 political entities from 2010-2023 from partisan users, journalists, and politicians. Our analysis indicates outgroup…
Social media are pervaded by unsubstantiated or untruthful rumors, that contribute to the alarming phenomenon of misinformation. The widespread presence of a heterogeneous mass of information sources may affect the mechanisms behind the…
Social media is often blamed for the creation of echo chambers. However, these claims fail to consider the prevalence of offline echo chambers resulting from high levels of partisan segregation in the United States. Our article empirically…
The presidential elections in the United States on 3 November 2020 have caused extensive discussions on social media. A part of the content on US elections is organic, coming from users discussing their opinions of the candidates, political…
In modern democracies, the outcome of elections and referendums is often remarkably tight. The repetition of these divisive events are the hallmark of a split society; to the physicist, however, it is an astonishing feat for such large…
Twitter, a microblogging service, is todays most popular platform for communication in the form of short text messages, called Tweets. Users use Twitter to publish their content either for expressing concerns on information news or views on…