Related papers: Quantifying Polarization on Twitter: the Kavanaugh…
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 controversies around the 2020 US presidential elections certainly casts serious concerns on the efficiency of the current voting system in representing the people's will. Is the naive Plurality voting suitable in an extremely polarized…
Polarization arises when the underlying network connecting the members of a community or society becomes characterized by highly connected groups with weak inter-group connectivity. The increasing polarization, the strengthening of echo…
Immigration is one of the most salient topics in public debate. Social media heavily influences opinions on immigration, often sparking polarized debates and offline tensions. Studying 220,870 immigration-related tweets in the UK, we…
Measuring and forecasting opinion trends from real-time social media is a long-standing goal of big-data analytics. Despite its importance, there has been no conclusive scientific evidence so far that social media activity can capture the…
Background: Social media chatter in 2020 has been largely dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Existing research shows that COVID-19 discourse is highly politicized, with political preferences linked to beliefs and disbeliefs about the…
Social media platforms are often blamed for exacerbating political polarization and worsening public dialogue. Many claim that hyperpartisan users post pernicious content, slanted to their political views, inciting contentious and toxic…
The concept of homophily is pervasive in online social media. While many empirical studies have relied on external sociodemographic traits to investigate it, significantly less is known about homophily at the cognitive level, that is, at…
Search systems in online social media sites are frequently used to find information about ongoing events and people. For topics with multiple competing perspectives, such as political events or political candidates, bias in the top ranked…
Social media platforms significantly influence ideological divisions by enabling users to select information that aligns with their beliefs and avoid opposing viewpoints. Analyzing approximately 47 million Facebook posts, this study…
We applied complex network analysis to ~27,000 tweets posted by the 2016 presidential election's principal participants in the USA. We identified the stages of the election campaigns and the recurring topics addressed by the candidates.…
Opinions about the 2016 U.S. Presidential Candidates have been expressed in millions of tweets that are challenging to analyze automatically. Crowdsourcing the analysis of political tweets effectively is also difficult, due to large…
Echo chambers and opinion polarization recently quantified in several sociopolitical contexts and across different social media, raise concerns on their potential impact on the spread of misinformation and on openness of debates. Despite…
While it is well-documented that climate change accepters and deniers have become increasingly polarized in the United States over time, there has been no large-scale examination of whether these individuals are prone to changing their…
With the recent advances of networking technology, connections among people are unprecedentedly enhanced. People with different ideologies and backgrounds interact with each other, and there may exist severe opinion polarization and…
Adversarial interactions against politicians on social media such as Twitter have significant impact on society. In particular they disrupt substantive political discussions online, and may discourage people from seeking public office. In…
Political polarisation on structured discussion platforms such as Reddit differs fundamentally from that on broadcast platforms such as Twitter/X, yet most prior work targets the latter. We present an end-to-end framework for measuring and…
We measure polarization in the United States Congress using the network science concept of modularity. Modularity provides a conceptually-clear measure of polarization that reveals both the number of relevant groups and the strength of…
The 2016 U.S. presidential election has witnessed the major role of Twitter in the year's most important political event. Candidates used this social media platform extensively for online campaigns. Meanwhile, social media has been filled…
Polarization of opinions has been empirically noted in many online social network platforms. Traditional models of opinion dynamics, based on statistical physics principles, do not account for the emergence of polarization and echo chambers…