Related papers: Media Slant is Contagious
Hate speech on social media is a pressing concern. Understanding the factors associated with hate speech may help mitigate it. Here we explore the association between hate speech and exposure to fake news by studying the correlation between…
In elections, the vote shares or turnout rates show a strong spatial correlation. The logarithmic decay with distance suggests that a 2D noisy diffusive equation describes the system. Based on the study of U.S. presidential elections data,…
News sources undergo the process of selecting newsworthy information when covering a certain topic. The process inevitably exhibits selection biases, i.e. news sources' typical patterns of choosing what information to include in news…
We build a model of information cascades on feed-based networks, taking into account the finite attention span of users, message generation rates and message forwarding rates. Using this model, we study through simulations, the effect of…
The spread of propaganda, misinformation, and biased narratives from autocratic regimes, especially on social media, is a growing concern in many democracies. Can censorship be an effective tool to curb the spread of such slanted…
The media frequently describes the 2017 Charlottesville 'Unite the Right' rally as a turning point for the alt-right and white supremacist movements. Social movement theory suggests that the media attention and public discourse concerning…
Social media influence online activity by recommending to users content strongly correlated with what they have preferred in the past. In this way they constrain users within filter bubbles that strongly limit their exposure to new or…
The widespread adoption and dissemination of online news through social media systems have been revolutionizing many segments of our society and ultimately our daily lives. In these systems, users can play a central role as they share…
We investigate how representations of Syrian refugees (2011-2021) differ across US partisan news outlets. We analyze 47,388 articles from the online US media about Syrian refugees to detail differences in reporting between left- and…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are a transformational technology, fundamentally changing how people obtain information and interact with the world. As people become increasingly reliant on them for an enormous variety of tasks, a body of…
In this era of fake news and political polarization, it is desirable to have a system to enable users to access balanced news content. Current solutions focus on top down, server based approaches to decide whether a news article is fake or…
In recent years, malicious information had an explosive growth in social media, with serious social and political backlashes. Recent important studies, featuring large-scale analyses, have produced deeper knowledge about this phenomenon,…
An individual's opinions about media bias derive from their own independent assessment of media outputs combined with peer pressure from networked political allies and opponents. Here we generalize previous idealized, probabilistic models…
Understanding who blames or supports whom in news text is a critical research question in computational social science. Traditional methods and datasets for sentiment analysis are, however, not suitable for the domain of political text as…
The increasing growth of social media provides us with an instant opportunity to be informed of the opinions of a large number of politically active individuals in real-time. We can get an overall idea of the ideologies of these individuals…
One form of long-term behavior revealed by opinion dynamics simulations is intermittency, where an individual cycles between eras of stable, constant beliefs and turbulent, fluctuating beliefs, for example when inferring the political bias…
Waves propagating through a weakly scattering random medium show a pronounced branching of the flow accompanied by the formation of freak waves, i.e., extremely intense waves. Theory predicts that this strong fluctuation regime is…
Online social networks are used to diffuse opinions and ideas among users, enabling a faster communication and a wider audience. The way in which opinions are conditioned by social interactions is usually called social influence. Social…
We introduce time variation in the flip-rates of the Voter Model. This type of generalisation is relevant to models of ageing in language change, allowing the representation of changes in speakers' learning rates over their lifetime and may…
Public debates about "left-" or "right-wing" news overlook the fact that bias is usually conveyed by concrete linguistic manoeuvres that transcend any single political spectrum. We therefore shift the focus from where an outlet allegedly…