Related papers: Embedding-based Qualitative Analysis of Polarizati…
This paper provides a novel summary measure of ideological polarization in the American public based on the joint distribution of survey responses. Intuitively, polarization is maximized when views are concentrated at opposing extremes with…
The emergence of opinion polarization within human communities -- the phenomenon that individuals within a society tend to develop conflicting attitudes related to the greatest diversity of topics -- has been a focus of interest for…
The advent of social media changed the way we consume content favoring a disintermediated access and production. This scenario has been matter of critical discussion about its impact on society. Magnified in the case of Arab Spring or…
The synthetic control method has emerged as a widely utilized empirical tool for estimating the causal effects of public policies, natural disasters, and other interventions on various economic, social, institutional, and political…
Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…
Explanations of polarization often rely on one of the three mechanisms: homophily, bounded confidence, and community-based interactions. Models based on these mechanisms consider the lack of interactions as the main cause of polarization.…
The rise of social media and online social networks has been a disruptive force in society. Opinions are increasingly shaped by interactions on online social media, and social phenomena including disagreement and polarization are now…
Social media have great potential to support diverse information sharing, but there is widespread concern that platforms like Twitter do not result in communication between those who hold contradictory viewpoints. Because users can choose…
Polarization and unexpected correlations between opinions on diverse topics (including in politics, culture and consumer choices) are an object of sustained attention. However, numerous theoretical models do not seem to convincingly explain…
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 investigate the dynamics of opinion formation on social networking platforms, focusing on how individual opinions, influenced by both social connections and platform algorithms, evolve. We model this process using a differential…
Social media has become an emerging alternative to opinion polls for public opinion collection, while it is still posing many challenges as a passive data source, such as structurelessness, quantifiability, and representativeness. Social…
Political polarization has become a growing concern in democratic societies, as it drives tribal alignments and erodes civic deliberation among citizens. Given its prevalence across different countries, previous research has sought to…
We investigate the polarization of the German Twittersphere by extracting the main issues discussed and the signaled opinions of users towards those issues based on (re)tweets concerning trending topics. The dataset covers daily trending…
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…
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…
Social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter play a key role in disseminating both reliable and unreliable information about climate change. This study analyses the topology of interactions in Twitter and their relation to cross-platform…
This paper addresses influence pathway discovery, a key emerging problem in today's online media. We propose a discovery algorithm that leverages recently published work on unsupervised interpretable ideological embedding, a mapping of…
We report the first direct comparisons of multiple alternative social media algorithms on multiple platforms on outcomes of societal interest. We used a browser extension to modify which posts were shown to desktop social media users,…
This paper introduces a definition of ideological polarization of an electorate around a particular central point. The definition is flexible about the location or boundaries of the center. Using US survey data, the paper shows how this…