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Algorithms are widely applied to detect hate speech and abusive language in social media. We investigated whether the human-annotated data used to train these algorithms are biased. We utilized a publicly available annotated Twitter dataset…

Abortion has been one of the most divisive issues in the United States. Yet, missing is comprehensive longitudinal evidence on how political divides on abortion are reflected in public discourse over time, on a national scale, and in…

The United States have some of the highest rates of gun violence among developed countries. Yet, there is a disagreement about the extent to which firearms should be regulated. In this study, we employ social media signals to examine the…

The influence of gender on online political communication remains contested, with existing scholarship providing mixed evidence as to whether gender shapes political messaging in digital environments. However, this debate has largely…

Social media platforms may provide potential space for discourses that contain hate speech, and even worse, can act as a propagation mechanism for hate crimes. The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program collects hate crime data and…

Public digital conversation around major sporting events takes place within a hybrid system in which journalists and the media compete with new intermediaries, including influencers, to gain greater visibility and engage with audiences.…

The Internet and online forums such as Reddit have become an increasingly popular medium for citizens to engage in political conversations. However, the online disinhibition effect resulting from the ability to use pseudonymous identities…

The rapid growth of social media platforms has led to concerns about radicalization, filter bubbles, and content bias. Existing approaches to classifying ideology are limited in that they require extensive human effort, the labeling of…

This paper explores the growth of online mobilizations using data from the 'indignados' (the 'outraged') movement in Spain, which emerged under the influence of the revolution in Egypt and as a precursor to the global Occupy mobilizations.…

All societies have been much more bipolar over the past few years, particularly after the emergence of online social networks and media. In fact, the gap between the two ends of social spectrum is going to be even deeper after the spread of…

Language is a fundamental aspect of human societies, continuously evolving in response to various stimuli, including societal changes and intercultural interactions. Technological advancements have profoundly transformed communication, with…

When discussing difficult topics online, is it common to meaningfully engage with people from diverse perspectives? Why or why not? Could features of the online environment be redesigned to encourage civil conversation across difference? In…

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…

We study the response to the Charlie Hebdo shootings of January 7, 2015 on Twitter across the globe. We ask whether the stances on the issue of freedom of speech can be modeled using established sociological theories, including Huntington's…

Online social networks create echo-chambers where people are infrequently exposed to opposing opinions. Even if such exposure occurs, the persuasive effect may be minimal or nonexistent. Recent studies have shown that exposure to opposing…

Recent grassroots movements have suggested that online social networks might play a key role in their organization, as adherents have a fast, many-to-many, communication channel to help coordinate their mobilization. The structure and…

Increasing levels of far-right extremist violence have generated public concern about the spread of radicalization in the United States. Previous research suggests that radicalized individuals are destabilized by various environmental (or…

We use structural topic modeling to examine racial bias in data collected to train models to detect hate speech and abusive language in social media posts. We augment the abusive language dataset by adding an additional feature indicating…

With the recent surge and exponential growth of social media usage, scrutinizing social media content for the presence of any hateful content is of utmost importance. Researchers have been diligently working since the past decade on…

Due to the worldwide accessibility to the Internet along with the continuous advances in mobile technologies, physical and digital worlds have become completely blended, and the proliferation of social media platforms has taken a leading…