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This paper investigates the communication styles and structures of Twitter (X) communities within the vaccination context. While mainstream research primarily focuses on the echo-chamber phenomenon, wherein certain ideas are reinforced and…
With the growth of online news over the past decade, empirical studies on political discourse and news consumption have focused on the phenomenon of filter bubbles and echo chambers. Yet recently, scholars have revealed limited evidence…
Interaction networks are generally much less homophilic than affiliation networks, accommodating for many more cross-cutting links. By statistically assigning a political valence to users from their network-level affiliation patterns, and…
The explosive growth of social media has not only revolutionized communication but also brought challenges such as political polarization, misinformation, hate speech, and echo chambers. This dissertation employs computational social…
Political news on social media rarely circulates in isolation: audiences actively engage, react, and clash. Whether these interactions reflect agreement or conflict may depend on the ideological discrepancy between publishers and the news…
Recommendation algorithms have been pointed out as one of the major culprits of misinformation spreading in the digital sphere. However, it is still unclear how these algorithms really propagate misinformation, e.g., it has not been shown…
Political discourse on social media has grown increasingly toxic, with electoral periods amplifying partisan hostility and cross-group attacks. Yet it remains unclear whether toxicity in online political speech reflects how partisans…
Despite echo chambers in social media have been under considerable scrutiny, general models for their detection and analysis are missing. In this work, we aim to fill this gap by proposing a probabilistic generative model that explains…
Political polarization in online social platforms is a rapidly growing phenomenon worldwide. Despite their relevance to modern-day politics, the structure and dynamics of polarized states in digital spaces are still poorly understood. We…
Measuring the number of "likes" in Twitter and the number of bills voted in favor by the members of the Chilean Chambers of Deputies. We empirically study how signals of agreement in Twitter translates into cross-cutting voting during a…
Recent studies have shown that online users tend to select information adhering to their system of beliefs, ignore information that does not, and join groups - i.e., echo chambers - around a shared narrative. Although a quantitative…
Polarization is a troubling phenomenon that can lead to societal divisions and hurt the democratic process. It is therefore important to develop methods to reduce it. We propose an algorithmic solution to the problem of reducing…
Given the prevalence of online misinformation and our scarce cognitive capacity, Internet users have been shown to frequently fall victim to such information. As some studies have investigated psychological factors that make people…
In recent years, scholars have raised concerns on the effects that unreliable news, or "fake news," has on our political sphere, and our democracy as a whole. For example, the propagation of fake news on social media is widely believed to…
User-generated content (e.g., tweets and profile descriptions) and shared content between users (e.g., news articles) reflect a user's online identity. This paper investigates whether correlations between user-generated and user-shared…
The rise in online misinformation in recent years threatens democracies by distorting authentic public discourse and causing confusion, fear, and even, in extreme cases, violence. There is a need to understand the spread of false content…
The prevalence of misinformation on online social media has tangible empirical connections to increasing political polarization and partisan antipathy in the United States. Ranking algorithms for social recommendation often encode broad…
This paper provides a simple theoretical framework to evaluate the effect of key parameters of ranking algorithms, namely popularity and personalization parameters, on measures of platform engagement, misinformation and polarization. The…
Social media has been a paramount arena for election campaigns for political actors. While many studies have been paying attention to the political campaigns related to partisanship, politicians also can conduct different campaigns…
Conversational AI has been proposed as a scalable way to correct public misconceptions and spread misinformation. Yet its effectiveness may depend on perceptions of its political neutrality. As LLMs enter partisan conflict, elites…