Related papers: Growing polarisation around climate change on soci…
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,…
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…
Many social media studies argue that social media creates echo chambers where some users only interact with peers of the same political orientation. However, recent studies suggest that a substantial amount of Cross-Partisan Interactions…
2020 through 2023 were unusually tumultuous years for children in the United States, and children's welfare was prominent in political debate. Theories in moral psychology suggest that political parties would treat concerns for children…
Defying the median voter theorem, party polarization has spread globally, especially in the United States. As concerns grow over its risks to democracy, political science has probed its causes, revealing two paradoxes: while polarization…
The rise of right-wing populism in Europe has brought to the forefront the significance of analysing social media discourse to understand the dissemination of extremist ideologies and their impact on political outcomes. Twitter, as a…
Societies are complex systems which tend to polarize into sub-groups of individuals with dramatically opposite perspectives. This phenomenon is reflected -- and often amplified -- in online social networks where, however, humans are no more…
We are in the midst of a transformation of the digital news ecosystem. The expansion of online social networks, the influence of recommender systems, increased automation, and new generative artificial intelligence tools are rapidly…
We study how political polarization is reflected in the social media posts used by media outlets to promote their content online. In particular, we track the Twitter posts of several media outlets over the course of more than three years…
We present ClimateChat-300K, a large-scale dataset of 299,329 public Facebook posts about climate change collected between May 2020 and May 2024 through the CrowdTangle platform. The dataset contains 41 metadata features including post…
For decades, researchers have been trying to understand how people form their opinions. This quest has become even more pressing with the widespread usage of online social networks and social media, which seem to amplify the already…
Climate change is the defining issue of our time, and we are at a defining moment. Various interest groups, social movement organizations, and individuals engage in collective action on this issue on social media. In addition, issue…
Political polarization is perceived as a threat to democracies. Using the Galam model of opinion dynamics deployed in a five-dimensional parameter space, I show that polarization is the byproduct of an essential hallmark of a vibrant…
A growing body of research focuses on computationally detecting controversial topics and understanding the stances people hold on them. Yet gaps remain in our theoretical and practical understanding of how to define controversy, how it…
During the summer of 2019-20, while Australia suffered unprecedented bushfires across the country, false narratives regarding arson and limited backburning spread quickly on Twitter, particularly using the hashtag #ArsonEmergency.…
During the 2022 French presidential election, we collected daily Twitter messages on key topics posted by political candidates and their close networks. Using a data-driven approach, we analyze interactions among political parties,…
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 the dynamics of opinion formation on social networking platforms, focusing on how individual opinions, influenced by both social connections and platform algorithms, evolve. We model this process using a differential…
Political conflict is an essential element of democratic systems, but can also threaten their existence if it becomes too intense. This happens particularly when most political issues become aligned along the same major fault line,…
Using language models, we analyze a sample of 67 million tweets and 30 million Reddit comments referencing a set of 215 political entities from 2010-2023 from partisan users, journalists, and politicians. Our analysis indicates outgroup…