Related papers: Reducing Polarization on Abortion, Guns and Immigr…
As civil discourse increasingly takes place online, misinformation and the polarization of news shared in online communities have become ever more relevant concerns with real world harms across our society. Studying online news sharing at…
Social media has played an important role in shaping political discourse over the last decade. At the same time, it is often perceived to have increased political polarization, thanks to the scale of discussions and their public nature. In…
It has been suggested that online search and retrieval contributes to the intellectual isolation of users within their preexisting ideologies, where people's prior views are strengthened and alternative viewpoints are infrequently…
In spite of a growing body of scientific evidence on the effectiveness of individual face mask usage for reducing transmission rates, individual face mask usage has become a highly polarized topic within the United States. A series of…
In micro-blogging platforms, people connect and interact with others. However, due to cognitive biases, they tend to interact with like-minded people and read agreeable information only. Many efforts to make people connect with those who…
We evaluate homophily and heterophily among ideological and demographic groups in a typical opinion formation context: online discussions of current news. We analyze user interactions across five years in the r/news community on Reddit, one…
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…
As artificial intelligence increasingly mediates public discourse, it becomes important to understand how human-AI collectives shape opinion formation, deliberation, and democratic outcomes. We present a novel experimental method for…
Worldviews may differ significantly according to political orientation. Even a single word can have a completely different meaning depending on political orientation. However, no direct evidence has been obtained on differences in the…
Understanding political polarization on social platforms is important as public opinions may become increasingly extreme when they are circulated in homogeneous communities, thus potentially causing damage in the real world. Automatically…
In this paper we suggest a minimally-supervised approach for identifying nuanced frames in news article coverage of politically divisive topics. We suggest to break the broad policy frames suggested by Boydstun et al., 2014 into…
The widespread emergence of opinion polarization is often attributed to the rise of social media and the internet, which can promote selective exposure and the formation of echo chambers. However, experimental evidence shows that exposure…
Public opinion polling is usually done by random sampling from the entire population, treating individual opinions as independent. In the real world, individuals' opinions are often correlated, e.g., among friends in a social network. In…
We study models of a society composed of a mixture of conformist and reasonable contrarian agents that at any instant hold one of two opinions. Conformists tend to agree with the average opinion of their neighbors and reasonable contrarians…
We study the opinion dynamics in a generalized voter model in which voters are additionally influenced by two antagonistic news sources, whose effect is to promote political polarization. We show that, as the influence of the news sources…
Opinion summarisation is a task that aims to condense the information presented in the source documents while retaining the core message and opinions. A summary that only represents the majority opinions will leave the minority opinions…
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…
As the consequences of opinion polarization effect our everyday life in more and more aspect, the understanding of its origins and driving forces becomes increasingly important. Here we develop an agent-based network model with realistic…
We performed a massive study of the dynamics of group deliberation among several websites containing millions of opinions on topics ranging from books to media. Contrary to the common phenomenon of group polarization observed offline, we…
Explanations of polarization often rely on one of the three mechanisms: homophily, bounded confidence, and community-based interactions. Models based on these mechanisms consider the lack of interactions as the main cause of polarization.…