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Public discourse around climate change remains polarized despite scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change (ACC). This study examines how "believers" and "skeptics" of ACC differ in their YouTube comment discourse. We analyzed…
Social media is considered a democratic space in which people connect and interact with each other regardless of their gender, race, or any other demographic aspect. Despite numerous efforts that explore demographic aspects in social media,…
Social media studies often collect data retrospectively to analyze public opinion. Social media data may decay over time and such decay may prevent the collection of the complete dataset. As a result, the collected dataset may differ from…
Serious concerns have been raised about the role of 'socialbots' in manipulating public opinion and influencing the outcome of elections by retweeting partisan content to increase its reach. Here we analyze the role and influence of…
With the proliferation of social media over the last decade, determining people's attitude with respect to a specific topic, document, interaction or events has fueled research interest in natural language processing and introduced a new…
Polls posted on social media have emerged in recent years as an important tool for estimating public opinion, e.g., to gauge public support for business decisions and political candidates in national elections. Here, we examine nearly two…
A quarter of US adults regularly get their news from YouTube. Yet, despite the massive political content available on the platform, to date no classifier has been proposed to identify the political leaning of YouTube videos. To fill this…
Today, social media provide the means by which billions of people experience news and events happening around the world. However, the absence of traditional journalistic gatekeeping allows information to flow unencumbered through these…
In January 2019, YouTube announced it would exclude potentially harmful content from video recommendations but allow such videos to remain on the platform. While this step intends to reduce YouTube's role in propagating such content,…
We explore how the polarization around controversial topics evolves on Twitter - over a long period of time (2011 to 2016), and also as a response to major external events that lead to increased related activity. We find that increased…
Understanding the dynamics of social interactions is crucial to comprehend human behavior. The emergence of online social media has enabled access to data regarding people relationships at a large scale. Twitter, specifically, is an…
Recommendations algorithms of social media platforms are often criticized for placing users in "rabbit holes" of (increasingly) ideologically biased content. Despite these concerns, prior evidence on this algorithmic radicalization is…
This work advances investigations into the visual media shared by agents in disinformation campaigns by characterizing the images shared by accounts identified by Twitter as being part of such campaigns. Using images shared by US…
We investigate how the overall response to a piece of information (a story or an article) evolves and relaxes as a function of time in social networks like Reddit, Digg and Youtube. This response or popularity is measured in terms of the…
The intensification of affective polarization worldwide has raised new questions about how social media platforms might be further fracturing an already-divided public sphere. As opposed to ideological polarization, affective polarization…
News sharing on social networks reveals how information disseminates among users. This process, constrained by user preferences and social ties, plays a key role in the formation of public opinion. In this work we study news sharing of main…
Understanding how people argue across ideological divides online is important for studying political polarization, misinformation, and content moderation. Existing datasets capture only part of this problem: some preserve text but ignore…
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…
Optimism about the Internet's potential to bring the world together has been tempered by concerns about its role in inflaming the 'culture wars'. Via mass selection into like-minded groups, online society may be becoming more fragmented and…
This study examines the structural dynamics of Truth Social, a politically aligned social media platform, during two major political events: the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade and the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago. Using a…