Related papers: Illuminating an Ecosystem of Partisan Websites
We examine partisan differences in the behavior, communication patterns and social interactions of more than 18,000 politically-active Twitter users to produce evidence that points to changing levels of partisan engagement with the American…
The Web consists of numerous Web communities, news sources, and services, which are often exploited by various entities for the dissemination of false information. Yet, we lack tools and techniques to effectively track the propagation of…
News articles covering policy issues are an essential source of information in the social sciences and are also frequently used for other use cases, e.g., to train NLP language models. To derive meaningful insights from the analysis of…
One of the most pressing challenges in the digital media landscape is understanding the impact of biases on the news sources that people rely on for information. Biased news can have significant and far-reaching consequences, influencing…
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…
Search engines play an important role in the context of modern elections. By curating information in response to user queries, search engines influence how individuals are informed about election-related developments and perceive the media…
The suggestions generated by most existing recommender systems are known to suffer from a lack of diversity, and other issues like popularity bias. As a result, they have been observed to promote well-known "blockbuster" items, and to…
Nowadays, artificial intelligence algorithms are used for targeted and personalized content distribution in the large scale as part of the intense competition for attention in the digital media environment. Unfortunately, targeted…
Social media platforms shape users' experiences through the algorithmic systems they deploy. In this study, we examine to what extent Twitter's content recommender, in conjunction with a user's social network, impacts the topic, political…
A new era of Information Warfare has arrived. Various actors, including state-sponsored ones, are weaponizing information on Online Social Networks to run false information campaigns with targeted manipulation of public opinion on specific…
This work analyses surprising elections, and attempts to quantify the notion of surprise in elections. A voter is surprised if their estimate of the winner (assumed to be based on a combination of the preferences of their social connections…
Approximately 50% of tweets in X's user timelines are personalized recommendations from accounts they do not follow. This raises a critical question: What political content are users exposed to beyond their established networks, and what…
In the recent political climate, the topic of news quality has drawn attention both from the public and the academic communities. The growing distrust of traditional news media makes it harder to find a common base of accepted truth. In…
US voters shared large volumes of polarizing political news and information in the form of links to content from Russian, WikiLeaks and junk news sources. Was this low quality political information distributed evenly around the country, or…
Studying political activity on social media often requires defining and measuring political stances of users or content. Relevant examples include the study of opinion polarization, or the study of political diversity in online content…
The flourishing of fake news is favored by recommendation algorithms of online social networks which, based on previous users activity, provide content adapted to their preferences and so create filter bubbles. We introduce an analytically…
In this work we study, on a sample of 2.3 million individuals, how Facebook users consumed different information at the edge of political discussion and news during the last Italian electoral competition. Pages are categorized, according to…
In the past two decades, open access to news and information has increased rapidly, empowering educated political growth within democratic societies. News recommender systems (NRSs) have shown to be useful in this process, minimizing…
Social media are decentralized, interactive, and transformative, empowering users to produce and spread information to influence others. This has changed the dynamics of political communication that were previously dominated by traditional…
The growing political polarization of the American electorate over the last several decades has been widely studied and documented. During the administration of President Donald Trump, charges of "fake news" made social and news media not…