Related papers: Media Environment, Dual Process and Polarization: …
Online social networks provide a medium for citizens to form opinions on different societal issues, and a forum for public discussion. They also expose users to viral content, such as breaking news articles. In this paper, we study the…
As political polarization in the United States continues to rise, the question of whether polarized individuals can fruitfully cooperate becomes pressing. Although diversity of individual perspectives typically leads to superior team…
We present an automated method for measuring media bias. Inferring which newspaper published a given article, based only on the frequencies with which it uses different phrases, leads to a conditional probability distribution whose analysis…
Politics in different countries show diverse degrees of polarization, which tends to be stronger on social media, given how easy it became to connect and engage with like-minded individuals on the web. A way of reducing polarization would…
We propose a collective opinion formation model with a so-called confirmation bias. The confirmation bias is a psychological effect with which, in the context of opinion formation, an individual in favor of an opinion is prone to…
Political polarization is a significant issue in American politics, influencing public discourse, policy, and consumer behavior. While studies on polarization in news media have extensively focused on verbal content, non-verbal elements,…
We develop a model of social media in which users produce different types of content and choose whom to follow. Even when abstracting from algorithmic bias, linking costs shape networks and polarization. In the welfare-maximizing…
Language model alignment research often attempts to ensure that models are not only helpful and harmless, but also truthful and unbiased. However, optimizing these objectives simultaneously can obscure how improving one aspect might impact…
Worldviews may differ significantly according to political orientation. Even a single word can have a completely different meaning depending on political orientation. However, no direct evidence has been obtained on differences in the…
With social media, the flow of uncertified information is constantly increasing, with the risk that more people will trust low-credible information sources. To design effective strategies against this phenomenon, it is of paramount…
In recent years, social media has increasingly become an important platform for political campaigns, especially elections. It remains elusive how exactly public discourse is driven by the intricate interplay between individual…
Since this century, the speed, availability, and plethora of online informational content have made it increasingly difficult for humans to keep an overview of real-world situations, build a personal opinion, and sometimes even decide on…
Nowadays, we live in a society where people often form their opinion by accessing and discussing contents shared on social networking websites. While these platforms have fostered information access and diffusion, they represent optimal…
In an increasingly polarized world, demagogues who reduce complexity down to simple arguments based on emotion are gaining in popularity. Are opinions and online discussions falling into demagoguery? In this work, we aim to provide…
Causal and counterfactual reasoning are emerging directions in data science that allow us to reason about hypothetical scenarios. This is particularly useful in fields like environmental and ecological sciences, where interventional data…
The spread of disinformation (maliciously spread false information) in online social networks has become an important problem in today's society. Disinformation's spread is facilitated by the fact that individuals often accept false…
While lobbying has been demonstrated to have an important effect on public opinion and policy making, existing models of opinion formation do not specifically include its effect. In this work we introduce a new model of lobbying-driven…
Computational Politics is the study of computational methods to analyze and moderate users' behaviors related to political activities such as election campaign persuasion, political affiliation, and opinion mining. With the rapid…
Previous work suggests that people's preference for different kinds of information depends on more than just accuracy. This could happen because the messages contained within different pieces of information may either be well-liked or…
Despite the increasing diffusion of the Internet technology, TV remains the principal medium of communication. People's perceptions, knowledge, beliefs and opinions about matter of facts get (in)formed through the information reported on by…