Related papers: Retweets Amplify the Echo Chamber Effect
The micro-blogging platform Twitter allows its nearly 320 million monthly active users to build a network of follower connections to other Twitter users (i.e., followees) in order to subscribe to content posted by these users. With this…
Social media can be viewed as a social system where the currency is attention. People post content and interact with others to attract attention and gain new followers. In this paper, we examine the distribution of attention across a large…
Political polarization appears to be on the rise, as measured by voting behavior, general affect towards opposing partisans and their parties, and contents posted and consumed online. Research over the years has focused on the role of the…
The social media craze is on an ever increasing spree, and people are connected with each other like never before, but these vast connections are visually unexplored. We propose a methodology Twigraph to explore the connections between…
Online social media are key platforms for the public to discuss political issues. As a result, researchers have used data from these platforms to analyze public opinions and forecast election results. Recent studies reveal the existence of…
Polarization of opinions has been empirically noted in many online social network platforms. Traditional models of opinion dynamics, based on statistical physics principles, do not account for the emergence of polarization and echo chambers…
In recent years, the ease with which social media can be accessed has led to the unexpected problem of a shrinkage in information sources. This phenomenon is caused by a system that facilitates the connection of people with similar ideas…
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…
The entertainment-driven nature of social media encourages users to engage with like-minded individuals and consume content aligned with their beliefs, limiting exposure to diverse perspectives. Simultaneously, users migrate between…
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,…
While online social media offers a way for ignored or stifled voices to be heard, it also allows users a platform to spread hateful speech. Such speech usually originates in fringe communities, yet it can spill over into mainstream…
Social media platforms allow users to create polls to gather public opinion on diverse topics. However, we know little about what such polls are used for and how reliable they are, especially in significant contexts like elections. Focusing…
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…
Society is often polarized by controversial issues, that split the population into groups of opposing views. When such issues emerge on social media, we often observe the creation of 'echo chambers', i.e., situations where like-minded…
An ability to infer the political leaning of social media users can help in gathering opinion polls thereby leading to a better understanding of public opinion. While there has been a body of research attempting to infer the political…
In the political arena of social platforms, opposing factions of varying sizes show asymmetrical patterns, and elites and masses within these groups have divergent motivations and influence,challenging simplistic views of polarization. Yet,…
Until recently, social media were seen to promote democratic discourse on social and political issues. However, this powerful communication ecosystem has come under scrutiny for allowing hostile actors to exploit online discussions in an…
Political polarisation on structured discussion platforms such as Reddit differs fundamentally from that on broadcast platforms such as Twitter/X, yet most prior work targets the latter. We present an end-to-end framework for measuring and…
Social networks play a fundamental role in propagation of information and news. Characterizing the content of the messages becomes vital for different tasks, like breaking news detection, personalized message recommendation, fake users…
We present a study to analyze how word use can predict social engagement behaviors such as replies and retweets in Twitter. We compute psycholinguistic category scores from word usage, and investigate how people with different scores…