Related papers: The Great Division
In recent times, social media sites such as Twitter have been extensively used for debating politics and public policies. These debates span millions of tweets and numerous topics of public importance. Thus, it is imperative that this vast…
Peer influence and social contagion are key denominators in the adoption and participation of information spreading, such as news propagation, word-of-mouth or viral marketing. In this study, we argue that it is biased to only focus on the…
Polarization and echo chambers are often studied in the context of explicitly political events such as elections, and little scholarship has examined the mixing of political groups in non-political contexts. A major obstacle to studying…
There is growing concern that over the past decade, industrialized democratic nations are becoming increasingly politically polarized. Indeed, elections in the US, UK, France, and Germany have all seen tightly won races, with notable…
Recent studies, targeting Facebook, showed the tendency of users to interact with information adhering to their preferred narrative and to ignore dissenting information. Primarily driven by confirmation bias, users tend to join polarized…
Polarization among US political parties, media and elites is a widely studied topic. Prominent lines of prior research across multiple disciplines have observed and analyzed growing polarization in social media. In this paper, we present a…
The study analyses polarisation on Finnish social media with data from the platform X, which was known as Twitter during the time of data collection (during the Sipil\"a and Marin governments, 2015-2023). The users were clustered into three…
On July 13, 2024, at the Trump rally in Pennsylvania, someone attempted to assassinate Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump. This attempt sparked a large-scale discussion on social media. We collected posts from X (formerly known…
Social media platforms have been exploited to conduct election interference in recent years. In particular, the Russian-backed Internet Research Agency (IRA) has been identified as a key source of misinformation spread on Twitter prior to…
In recent years, malicious information had an explosive growth in social media, with serious social and political backlashes. Recent important studies, featuring large-scale analyses, have produced deeper knowledge about this phenomenon,…
Most studies on social influence have focused on direct influence, while another interesting question can be raised as whether indirect influence exists between two users who're not directly connected in the network and what affects such…
Social networks offer a ready channel for fake and misleading news to spread and exert influence. This paper examines the performance of different reputation algorithms when applied to a large and statistically significant portion of the…
We analyze the relationship between partisanship, echo chambers, and vulnerability to online misinformation by studying news sharing behavior on Twitter. While our results confirm prior findings that online misinformation sharing is…
In the analysis of Twitter debate, the recent literature focused on discursive communities, i.e. clusters of accounts interacting among themselves via retweets. In the present work, we studied discursive communities in 8 different thematic…
Online social media has become an important platform to organize around different socio-cultural and political topics. An extensive scholarship has discussed how people are divided into echo-chamber-like groups. However, there is a lack of…
The popularity of an opinion in one's direct circles is not necessarily a good indicator of its popularity in one's entire community. Network structures make local information about global properties of the group potentially inaccurate, and…
Social media can be viewed as a social system where the currency is attention. People post content and interact with others to attract attention and gain new followers. In this paper, we examine the distribution of attention across a large…
In this study, we examine the role of Twitter as a first line of defense against misinformation by tracking the public engagement with, and the platforms response to, 500 tweets concerning the RussoUkrainian conflict which were identified…
With the growth of online news over the past decade, empirical studies on political discourse and news consumption have focused on the phenomenon of filter bubbles and echo chambers. Yet recently, scholars have revealed limited evidence…
How do European publics debate a geopolitical crisis on social media, and do they inhabit a shared informational reality? We analyze over 38 million geolocated tweets from 20 European countries during the first eight months of the Russian…