Related papers: Quantifying Polarization on Twitter: the Kavanaugh…
The abundance of information on social media has reshaped public discussions, shifting attention to the mechanisms that drive online discourse. This study analyzes large-scale Twitter (now X) data from three global debates--Climate Change,…
Polarization is a major concern for a well-functioning society. Often, mass polarization of a society is driven by polarizing political representation, even when the latter is easily preventable. The existing computational social choice…
Social media platforms allow users to create polls to gather public opinion on diverse topics. However, we know little about what such polls are used for and how reliable they are, especially in significant contexts like elections. Focusing…
Estimating the political leanings of social media users is a challenging and ever more pressing problem given the increase in social media consumption. We introduce Retweet-BERT, a simple and scalable model to estimate the political…
News sharing on digital platforms shapes the digital spaces millions of users navigate. Trace data from these platforms also enables researchers to study online news circulation. In this context, research on the types of news shared by…
In recent times, social media sites such as Twitter have been extensively used for debating politics and public policies. These debates span millions of tweets and numerous topics of public importance. Thus, it is imperative that this vast…
Polarization, declining trust, and wavering support for democratic norms are pressing threats to U.S. democracy. Exposure to verified and quality news may lower individual susceptibility to these threats and make citizens more resilient to…
Social network and publishing platforms, such as Twitter, support the concept of verification. Verified accounts are deemed worthy of platform-wide public interest and are separately authenticated by the platform itself. There have been…
On June 24, 2018, Turkey conducted a highly-consequential election in which the Turkish people elected their president and parliament in the first election under a new presidential system. During the election period, the Turkish people…
While the polls have been the most trusted source for election predictions for decades, in the recent presidential election they were called inaccurate and biased. How inaccurate were the polls in this election and can social media beat the…
Online social media are key platforms for the public to discuss political issues. As a result, researchers have used data from these platforms to analyze public opinions and forecast election results. Recent studies reveal the existence of…
When information flow fails, when Democrats and Republicans do not talk to each other, when Israelis and Palestinians do not talk to each other, and when North Koreans and South Koreans do not talk to each other, mis-perceptions, biases and…
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…
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…
Ideological divisions in the United States have become increasingly prominent in daily communication. Accordingly, there has been much research on political polarization, including many recent efforts that take a computational perspective.…
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…
Vaccine hesitancy has been recognized as a major global health threat. Having access to any type of information in social media has been suggested as a potential powerful influence factor to hesitancy. Recent studies in other fields than…
News sharing on social networks reveals how information disseminates among users. This process, constrained by user preferences and social ties, plays a key role in the formation of public opinion. In this work we study news sharing of main…
The flourishing of fake news is favored by recommendation algorithms of online social networks which, based on previous users activity, provide content adapted to their preferences and so create filter bubbles. We introduce an analytically…
The study analyses polarisation on Finnish social media with data from the platform X, which was known as Twitter during the time of data collection (during the Sipil\"a and Marin governments, 2015-2023). The users were clustered into three…