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The recent availability of large, high-resolution data sets of online human activity allowed for the study and characterization of the mechanisms shaping human interactions at an unprecedented level of accuracy. To this end, many efforts…
This study investigates gender-based differences in online communication patterns of academics, focusing on how male and female academics represent themselves and how users interact with them on the social media platform X (formerly…
Characterising the spreading of ideas within echo chambers is essential for understanding polarisation. In this paper, we explore the characteristics of popular and viral content in climate change discussions on Twitter around the 2019…
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…
Humanity for centuries has perfected skills of interpersonal interactions and evolved patterns that enable people to detect lies and deceiving behavior of others in face-to-face settings. Unprecedented growth of people's access to mobile…
We study the Twitter conversation following the August 2017 `Unite the Right' rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, using tools from network analysis and data science. We use media followership on Twitter and principal component analysis…
Although considerable research has concentrated on online campaigning, it is still unclear how politicians use different social media platforms in political communication. Focusing on the German federal election campaign 2013, this article…
2018 started with massive protests in Iran, bringing back the impressions of the so called "Arab Spring" and it's revolutionary impact for the Maghreb states, Syria and Egypt. Many reports and scientific examinations considered online…
Online users discuss and converse about all sorts of topics on social networks. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit are among many other networks where users can have this freedom of information sharing. The abundance of information shared over these…
Computational propaganda deploys social or political bots to try to shape, steer and manipulate online public discussions and influence decisions. Collective behaviour of populations of social bots has not been yet widely studied, though…
This paper studies the dynamics of opinion formation and polarization in social media. We investigate whether users' stance concerning contentious subjects is influenced by the online discussions they are exposed to and interactions with…
The recent past has highlighted the influential role of social networks and online media in shaping public debate on current affairs and political issues. This paper is focused on studying the role of politically-motivated actors and their…
During broadcast events such as the Superbowl, the U.S. Presidential and Primary debates, etc., Twitter has become the de facto platform for crowds to share perspectives and commentaries about them. Given an event and an associated…
Twitter as a new form of social media potentially contains useful information that opens new opportunities for content analysis on tweets. This paper examines the predictive power of Twitter regarding the US presidential election of 2012.…
Communities in social networks often reflect close social ties between their members and their evolution through time. We propose an approach that tracks two aspects of community evolution in retweet networks: flow of the members in, out…
Social media users post content on various topics. A defining feature of social media is that other users can provide feedback -- called community feedback -- to their content in the form of comments, replies, and retweets. We hypothesize…
In the digital age, hate speech poses a threat to the functioning of social media platforms as spaces for public discourse. Top-down approaches to moderate hate speech encounter difficulties due to conflicts with freedom of expression and…
With public information becoming widely accessible and shared on today's web, greater insights are possible into crowd actions by citizens and non-state actors such as large protests and cyber activism. We present efforts to predict the…
The importance of collective social action in current events is manifest in the Arab Spring and Occupy movements. Electronic social media have become a pervasive channel for social interactions, and a basis of collective social response to…
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…