Related papers: The Great Division
Twitter influences political debates. Phenomena like fake news and hate speech show that political discourse on micro-blogging can become strongly polarised by algorithmic enforcement of selective perception. Some political actors actively…
How popular a topic or an opinion appears to be in a network can be very different from its actual popularity. For example, in an online network of a social media platform, the number of people who mention a topic in their posts---i.e., its…
This study provides a large-scale mapping of the French media space using digital methods to estimate political polarization and to study information circuits. We collect data about the production and circulation of online news stories in…
Empirical studies of online disinformation emphasize matters of public concern such as the COVID-19 pandemic, foreign election interference, and the Russo-Ukraine war, largely in studies that treat the topics separately. Comparatively fewer…
Homophily -- our tendency to surround ourselves with others who share our perspectives and opinions about the world -- is both a part of human nature and an organizing principle underpinning many of our digital social networks. However,…
Echo chambers and opinion polarization recently quantified in several sociopolitical contexts and across different social media, raise concerns on their potential impact on the spread of misinformation and on openness of debates. Despite…
Recent years have seen a marked increase in the spread of misinformation, a phenomenon which has been accelerated and amplified by social media such as Facebook and Twitter. While some actors spread misinformation to push a specific agenda,…
Social media platforms allow users to create polls to gather public opinion on diverse topics. However, we know little about what such polls are used for and how reliable they are, especially in significant contexts like elections. Focusing…
Online manipulation is a pressing concern for democracies, but the actions and strategies of coordinated inauthentic accounts, which have been used to interfere in elections, are not well understood. We analyze a five million-tweet…
Online social platforms allow users to filter out content they do not like. According to selective exposure theory, people tend to view content they agree with more to get more self-assurance. This causes people to live in ideological…
We propose a framework to measure, evaluate, and rank campaign effectiveness in the ongoing 2016 U.S. presidential election. Using Twitter data collected from Sept. 2015 to Jan. 2016, we first uncover the tweeting tactics of the candidates…
Opinion polls have been the bridge between public opinion and politicians in elections. However, developing surveys to disclose people's feedback with respect to economic issues is limited, expensive, and time-consuming. In recent years,…
Societies are complex systems which tend to polarize into sub-groups of individuals with dramatically opposite perspectives. This phenomenon is reflected -- and often amplified -- in online social networks where, however, humans are no more…
The proliferation of public networks has enabled instantaneous and interactive communication that transcends temporal and spatial constraints. The vast amount of textual data on the Web has facilitated the study of quantitative analysis of…
One of the hallmarks of a free and fair society is the ability to conduct a peaceful and seamless transfer of power from one leader to another. Democratically, this is measured in a citizen population's trust in the electoral system of…
Content on Twitter's home timeline is selected and ordered by personalization algorithms. By consistently ranking certain content higher, these algorithms may amplify some messages while reducing the visibility of others. There's been…
Fake news can have a significant negative impact on society because of the growing use of mobile devices and the worldwide increase in Internet access. It is therefore essential to develop a simple mathematical model to understand the…
Twitter has been increasingly used for spreading messages about campaigns. Such campaigns try to gain followers through their Twitter accounts, influence the followers and spread messages through them. In this paper, we explore the…
Recent research brought awareness of the issue of bots on social media and the significant risks of mass manipulation of public opinion in the context of political discussion. In this work, we leverage Twitter to study the discourse during…
The novel coronavirus pandemic continues to ravage communities across the US. Opinion surveys identified importance of political ideology in shaping perceptions of the pandemic and compliance with preventive measures. Here, we use social…