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The daily exposure of social media users to propaganda and disinformation campaigns has reinvigorated the need to investigate the local and global patterns of diffusion of different (mis)information content on social media. Echo chambers…
Citizen-generated counter speech is a promising way to fight hate speech and promote peaceful, non-polarized discourse. However, there is a lack of large-scale longitudinal studies of its effectiveness for reducing hate speech. To this end,…
In this paper we illustrate the use of Data Science techniques to analyse complex human communication. In particular, we consider tweets from leaders of political parties as a dynamical proxy to political programmes and ideas. We also study…
Conspiracy theories related to climate change denial and anti-science have found fertile ground on Telegram, particularly among Brazilian communities that distrust scientific institutions and oppose global environmental policies. This study…
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…
We live in an age of information abundance but know little about how this influences our opinions or attitudes. A common expectation is that people consulting numerous pieces of information, well balancing the different sides of an issue,…
Many openly non-binary gender individuals participate in social networks. However, the relationship between gender and online interactions is not well understood, which may result in disparate treatment by large language models. We…
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…
Political polarization, a key driver of social fragmentation, has drawn increasing attention for its role in shaping online and offline discourse. Despite significant efforts, accurately measuring polarization within ideological…
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…
Rising animosity toward ideological opponents poses critical societal challenges. We introduce and test the Ideological Turing Test, a gamified framework requiring participants to adopt and defend opposing viewpoints, to reduce affective…
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…
Recent research brought awareness of the issue of bots on social media and the significant risks of mass manipulation of public opinion in the context of political discussion. In this work, we leverage Twitter to study the discourse during…
The emergence of new public forums in the shape of online social media has introduced unprecedented challenges to public discourse, including polarization, misinformation, and the emergence of echo chambers. While existing research has…
This research presents a framework for analyzing the dynamics of online communities in social media platforms, utilizing a temporal fusion of text and network data. By combining text classification and dynamic social network analysis, we…
Assessing political conversations in social media requires a deeper understanding of the underlying practices and styles that drive these conversations. In this paper, we present a computational approach for assessing online conversational…
In an increasingly polarized world, demagogues who reduce complexity down to simple arguments based on emotion are gaining in popularity. Are opinions and online discussions falling into demagoguery? In this work, we aim to provide…
Online toxic attacks, such as harassment, trolling, and hate speech have been linked to an increase in offline violence and negative psychological effects on victims. In this paper, we studied the impact of toxicity on users' online…
Social networks allow people to connect with each other and have conversations on a wide variety of topics. However, users tend to connect with like-minded people and read agreeable information, a behavior that leads to group polarization.…
The spread of online misinformation on social media is increasingly perceived as a problem for societal cohesion and democracy. The role of political leaders in this process has attracted less research attention, even though politicians who…