Related papers: Characterizing networks of propaganda on Twitter: …
An ability to infer the political leaning of social media users can help in gathering opinion polls thereby leading to a better understanding of public opinion. While there has been a body of research attempting to infer the political…
Members of different political groups not only disagree about issues but also dislike and distrust each other. While social media can amplify this emotional divide -- called affective polarization by political scientists -- there is a lack…
Large-scale social networks are thought to contribute to polarization by amplifying people's biases. However, the complexity of these technologies makes it difficult to identify the mechanisms responsible and to evaluate mitigation…
While social networks can provide an ideal platform for up-to-date information from individuals across the world, it has also proved to be a place where rumours fester and accidental or deliberate misinformation often emerges. In this…
This paper presents a quantitative study of Twitter, one of the most popular micro-blogging services, from the perspective of user influence. We crawl several datasets from the most active communities on Twitter and obtain 20.5 million user…
Many works related to Twitter aim at characterizing its users in some way: role on the service (spammers, bots, organizations, etc.), nature of the user (socio-professional category, age, etc.), topics of interest , and others. However, for…
In the age of information abundance, attention is a coveted resource. Social media platforms vigorously compete for users' engagement, influencing the evolution of their opinions on a variety of topics. With recommendation algorithms often…
Social networks play a fundamental role in the diffusion of information. However, there are two different ways of how information reaches a person in a network. Information reaches us through connections in our social networks, as well as…
The evolution of opinions in a population of individuals who constantly interact with a common source of user-generated content (i.e. the internet) and are also subject to propaganda is analyzed using computer simulations. The model is…
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 play a key role in shaping citizens' political opinion. According to the Eurobarometer, the percentage of EU citizens employing online social networks on a daily basis has increased from 18% in 2010 to 48% in 2019. The…
The emergence of politically driven divisions in online discussion networks has attracted a wealth of literature, but also one which has thus far been largely limited to single country studies. Hence whilst there is good evidence that these…
The widespread emergence of opinion polarization is often attributed to the rise of social media and the internet, which can promote selective exposure and the formation of echo chambers. However, experimental evidence shows that exposure…
We tackle the problem of classifying news articles pertaining to disinformation vs mainstream news by solely inspecting their diffusion mechanisms on Twitter. Our technique is inherently simple compared to existing text-based approaches, as…
This article presents a novel approach for learning low-dimensional distributed representations of users in online social networks. Existing methods rely on the network structure formed by the social relationships among users to extract…
Unlike traditional media, online news platforms allow users to consume content that suits their tastes and to facilitate interactions with other people. However, as more personalized consumption of information and interaction with…
Rumors have ignited revolutions, undermined the trust in political parties, or threatened the stability of human societies. Such destructive potential has been significantly enhanced by the development of on-line social networks. Several…
Understanding the dynamics of language toxicity on social media is important for us to investigate the propagation of misinformation and the development of echo chambers for political scenarios such as U.S. presidential elections. Recent…
Digital networks have profoundly transformed the ways in which individuals interact, exchange information, and establish connections, leading to the emergence of phenomena such as virality, misinformation cascades, and online polarization.…
How does political discourse spread in digital networks? Can we empirically test if certain conceptual frames of social movements have a correlate on their online discussion networks? Through an analysis of the Twitter data from the Occupy…