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Due to its status as the most popular video sharing platform, YouTube plays an important role in the online strategy of extreme right groups, where it is often used to host associated content such as music and other propaganda. In this…
Short-form video platforms like TikTok reshape how politicians communicate and have become important tools for electoral campaigning. Yet it remains unclear what kinds of political messages gain traction in these fast-paced, algorithmically…
Climate change poses a global threat to public health, food security, and economic stability. Addressing it requires evidence-based policies and a nuanced understanding of how the threat is perceived by the public, particularly within…
Empirical studies of online disinformation emphasize matters of public concern such as the COVID-19 pandemic, foreign election interference, and the Russo-Ukraine war, largely in studies that treat the topics separately. Comparatively fewer…
This technical report discusses three metrics of user engagement with online media. They are Commenting frequency, Voting frequency, and Voting balance. These relative figures can be derived from established, basic statistics available for…
Despite Facebook's central role in American civic life, a clear, evidence-based understanding of users' long-term information environments has remained elusive, hindering assessments of the platform's societal impact. This study addresses…
There is a prevailing perception that content on a social media platform generally have the same political leaning. These platforms are often viewed as ideologically congruent entities, reflecting the majority opinion of their users; a…
How do news sources tackle controversial issues? In this work, we take a data-driven approach to understand how controversy interplays with emotional expression and biased language in the news. We begin by introducing a new dataset of…
Prior work on ideology prediction has largely focused on single modalities, i.e., text or images. In this work, we introduce the task of multimodal ideology prediction, where a model predicts binary or five-point scale ideological leanings,…
Computational methods to model political bias in social media involve several challenges due to heterogeneity, high-dimensional, multiple modalities, and the scale of the data. Political bias in social media has been studied in multiple…
The proliferation of online social networks has significantly reshaped the way individuals access and engage with information. While these platforms offer unprecedented connectivity, they may foster environments where users are increasingly…
Political debate nowadays takes place mainly on online social media, with election periods amplifying ideological engagement. Reddit is generally considered more resistant to polarization and echo chamber effects than platforms like Twitter…
Polarization of opinion is an important feature of public debate on political, social and cultural topics. The availability of large internet databases of users' ratings has permitted quantitative analysis of polarization trends-for…
Twitter may be considered as a decentralized social information processing platform whose users constantly receive their followees' information feeds, which they may in turn dispatch to their followers. This decentralization is not devoid…
Content-creator collaborations are a widespread strategy for enhancing digital viewership and revenue. While existing research has explored the efficacy of collaborations, few have looked at inequities in collaborations, particularly from…
The global public sphere has changed dramatically over the past decades: a significant part of public discourse now takes place on algorithmically driven platforms owned by a handful of private companies. Despite its growing importance,…
Social media platforms offer users multiple ways to engage with content--likes, retweets, and comments--creating a complex signaling system within the attention economy. While previous research has examined factors driving overall…
When discussing difficult topics online, is it common to meaningfully engage with people from diverse perspectives? Why or why not? Could features of the online environment be redesigned to encourage civil conversation across difference? In…
Social media personalization algorithms increasingly influence the flow of civic information through society, resulting in concerns about "filter bubbles", "echo chambers", and other ways they might exacerbate ideological segregation and…
In recent years, the opaque design and the limited public understanding of social networks' recommendation algorithms have raised concerns about potential manipulation of information exposure. Reducing content visibility, aka shadow…