Related papers: Characterizing Twitter Users Who Engage in Adversa…
This article presents a short case study in text analysis: the scoring of Twitter posts for positive, negative, or neutral sentiment directed towards particular US politicians. The study requires selection of a sub-sample of representative…
Until recently, social media were seen to promote democratic discourse on social and political issues. However, this powerful communication ecosystem has come under scrutiny for allowing hostile actors to exploit online discussions in an…
This article presents a preliminary approach towards characterizing political fake news on Twitter through the analysis of their meta-data. In particular, we focus on more than 1.5M tweets collected on the day of the election of Donald…
Election prediction has long been an evergreen in political science literature. Traditionally, such efforts included polling aggregates, economic indicators, partisan affiliation, and campaign effects to predict aggregate voting outcomes.…
The number of posts made by a single user account on a social media platform Twitter in any given time interval is usually quite low. However, there is a subset of users whose volume of posts is much higher than the median. In this paper,…
Technology-facilitated gender-based violence has become a global threat to women's political representation and democracy. Understanding how online hate affects its targets is thus paramount. We analyse 10 million tweets directed at female…
We present a machine learning framework that leverages a mixture of metadata, network, and temporal features to detect extremist users, and predict content adopters and interaction reciprocity in social media. We exploit a unique dataset…
We identified the Twitter accounts of 941 climate change policy actors across nine countries, and collected their activities from 2017--2022, totalling 48 million activities from 17,700 accounts at different organizational levels. There is…
The presidential elections in the United States on 3 November 2020 have caused extensive discussions on social media. A part of the content on US elections is organic, coming from users discussing their opinions of the candidates, political…
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…
Social media is considered a democratic space in which people connect and interact with each other regardless of their gender, race, or any other demographic aspect. Despite numerous efforts that explore demographic aspects in social media,…
Motivated by the two paradoxical facts that the marginal cost of following one extra candidate is close to zero and that the majority of Twitter users choose to follow only one or two candidates, we study the Twitter follow behaviors…
The rise of misinformation and fake news in online political discourse poses significant challenges to democratic processes and public engagement. While debunking efforts aim to counteract misinformation and foster fact-based dialogue,…
We develop a broadly applicable class of coevolving latent space network with attractors (CLSNA) models, where nodes represent individual social actors assumed to lie in an unknown latent space, edges represent the presence of a specified…
Twitter is one of the most popular online micro-blogging and social networking platforms. This platform allows individuals to freely express opinions and interact with others regardless of geographic barriers. However, with the good that…
Digital traces of conversations in micro-blogging platforms and OSNs provide information about user opinion with a high degree of resolution. These information sources can be exploited to under- stand and monitor collective behaviors. In…
Opinion dynamics models how the publicly expressed opinions of users in a social network coevolve according to their neighbors as well as their own intrinsic opinion. Motivated by the real-world manipulation of social networks during the…
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…
While existing works have emphasized how elites shape mass opinion, we ask whether the reverse also holds: do audience reactions on social media actively shape elite behavior? We examine this question through the lens of cross-partisan…
We investigate feedback mechanisms in political communication by testing whether politicians adapt the sentiment of their messages in response to public engagement. Using over 1.5 million tweets from Members of Parliament in the United…