Related papers: A User Modeling Pipeline for Studying Polarized Po…
Social media users express their political preferences via interaction with other users, by spontaneous declarations or by participation in communities within the network. This makes a social network such as Twitter a valuable data source…
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…
Research across different disciplines has documented the expanding polarization in social media. However, much of it focused on the US political system or its culturally controversial topics. In this work, we explore polarization on Twitter…
Social media provides many opportunities to monitor and evaluate political phenomena such as referendums and elections. In this study, we propose a set of approaches to analyze long-running political events on social media with a real-world…
Social media play a key role in shaping citizens' political opinion. According to the Eurobarometer, the percentage of EU citizens employing online social networks on a daily basis has increased from 18% in 2010 to 48% in 2019. The…
The recent availability of large, high-resolution data sets of online human activity allowed for the study and characterization of the mechanisms shaping human interactions at an unprecedented level of accuracy. To this end, many efforts…
Polarization is a troubling phenomenon that can lead to societal divisions and hurt the democratic process. It is therefore important to develop methods to reduce it. We propose an algorithmic solution to the problem of reducing…
Digital traces of conversations in micro-blogging platforms and OSNs provide information about user opinion with a high degree of resolution. These information sources can be exploited to under- stand and monitor collective behaviors. In…
On social media platforms and Twitter in particular, specific classes of users such as influencers have been given satisfactory operational definitions in terms of network and content metrics. Others, for instance online activists, are not…
An ability to infer the political leaning of social media users can help in gathering opinion polls thereby leading to a better understanding of public opinion. While there has been a body of research attempting to infer the political…
Multiple countries have recently experienced extreme political polarization, which in some cases led to escalation of hate crime, violence and political instability. Beside the much discussed presidential elections in the United States and…
Many cities around the world are aspiring to become. However, smart initiatives often give little weight to the opinions of average citizens. Social media are one of the most important sources of citizen opinions. This paper presents a…
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…
Polarized topics often spark discussion and debate on social media. Recent studies have shown that polarized debates have a specific clustered structure in the endorsement net- work, which indicates that users direct their endorsements…
Political polarization generates strong effects on society, driving controversial debates and influencing the institutions. Territorial disputes are one of the most important polarized scenarios and have been consistently related to the use…
Social media and data mining are increasingly being used to analyse political and societal issues. Here we undertake the classification of social media users as supporting or opposing ongoing independence movements in their territories.…
According to the Eurobarometer report about EU media use of May 2018, the number of European citizens who consult on-line social networks for accessing information is considerably increasing. In this work we analyze approximately $10^6$…
Users online tend to join polarized groups of like-minded peers around shared narratives, forming echo chambers. The echo chamber effect and opinion polarization may be driven by several factors including human biases in information…
We study how political polarization is reflected in the social media posts used by media outlets to promote their content online. In particular, we track the Twitter posts of several media outlets over the course of more than three years…
Understanding and quantifying polarization in social systems is important because of many reasons. It could for instance help to avoid segregation and conflicts in the society or to control polarized debates and predict their outcomes. In…