Related papers: Quantifying polarization across political groups o…
Polarization among US political parties, media and elites is a widely studied topic. Prominent lines of prior research across multiple disciplines have observed and analyzed growing polarization in social media. In this paper, we present a…
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 platforms such as Twitter (now known as X) have revolutionized how the public engage with important societal and political topics. Recently, climate change discussions on social media became a catalyst for political…
Social media, once hailed as a vehicle for democratization and the promotion of positive social change across the globe, are under attack for becoming a tool of political manipulation and spread of disinformation. A case in point is the…
Global partisan hostility and polarization has increased, and this polarization is heightened around presidential elections. Models capable of generating accurate summaries of diverse perspectives can help reduce such polarization by…
The flourishing of fake news is favored by recommendation algorithms of online social networks which, based on previous users activity, provide content adapted to their preferences and so create filter bubbles. We introduce an analytically…
Ideological leanings of an individual can often be gauged by the sentiment one expresses about different issues. We propose a simple framework that represents a political ideology as a distribution of sentiment polarities towards a set of…
Understanding and quantifying polarization in social systems is important because of many reasons. It could for instance help to avoid segregation and conflicts in the society or to control polarized debates and predict their outcomes. In…
Social and political polarization is a significant source of conflict and poor governance in many societies. Thus, understanding its causes has become a priority of scholars across many disciplines. Here we demonstrate that shifts in…
Which topics spark the most heated debates on social media? Identifying those topics is not only interesting from a societal point of view, but also allows the filtering and aggregation of social media content for disseminating news…
We study the effect of time-fluctuating social influences on the formation of polarization and consensus in a three-party community consisting of two types of voters ("leftists" and "rightists") holding extreme opinions, and moderate agents…
In almost every election cycle, the validity of the United States Electoral College is brought into question. The 2016 Presidential Election again brought up the issue of a candidate winning the popular vote but not winning the Electoral…
Digital technologies can augment civic participation by facilitating the expression of detailed political preferences. Yet, digital participation efforts often rely on methods optimized for elections involving a few candidates. Here we…
This article presents a short case study in text analysis: the scoring of Twitter posts for positive, negative, or neutral sentiment directed towards particular US politicians. The study requires selection of a sub-sample of representative…
Signed networks and balance theory provide a natural setting for real-world scenarios that show polarization dynamics, positive/negative relationships, and political partisanship. For example, they have been proven effective in studying the…
Engaging with dissenting views, fostering productive disagreements or strategic anticonformity can benefit organizations as it challenges the status quo. The question arises, however, whether such strategic anticonformity ultimately leads…
This paper examines a novel proxy for political polarization, initially proposed by Caliskan et al., which estimates intergroup distances using computer vision. Analyzing 1,400+ YouTube videos with advanced object detection, their study…
Social polarization is a growing concern worldwide, as it strains social relations, erodes trust in institutions, and thus threatens democratic societies. Academic efforts to understand this phenomenon have traditionally approached it from…
Twitter influences political debates. Phenomena like fake news and hate speech show that political discourse on micro-blogging can become strongly polarised by algorithmic enforcement of selective perception. Some political actors actively…
While the polls have been the most trusted source for election predictions for decades, in the recent presidential election they were called inaccurate and biased. How inaccurate were the polls in this election and can social media beat the…