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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…
Political polarization, a key driver of social fragmentation, has drawn increasing attention for its role in shaping online and offline discourse. Despite significant efforts, accurately measuring polarization within ideological…
We investigate feedback mechanisms in political communication by testing whether politicians adapt the sentiment of their messages in response to public engagement. Using over 1.5 million tweets from Members of Parliament in the United…
Echo chambers and opinion polarization recently quantified in several sociopolitical contexts and across different social media, raise concerns on their potential impact on the spread of misinformation and on openness of debates. Despite…
Narratives are key interpretative devices by which humans make sense of political reality. In this work, we show how the analysis of conflicting narratives, i.e. conflicting interpretive lenses through which political reality is experienced…
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…
The analysis of social networks enables the understanding of social interactions, polarisation of ideas, and the spread of information and therefore plays an important role in society. We use Twitter data - as it is a popular venue for the…
The COVID-19 pandemic that emerged in 2020 has highlighted the complex interplay between vaccine hesitancy and societal polarization. In this study, we analyse the dynamical polarization within a social network as well as the network…
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…
We identified the Twitter accounts of 941 climate change policy actors across nine countries, and collected their activities from 2017--2022, totalling 48 million activities from 17,700 accounts at different organizational levels. There is…
On June 24, 2018, Turkey conducted a highly-consequential election in which the Turkish people elected their president and parliament in the first election under a new presidential system. During the election period, the Turkish people…
Social media platforms have transformed the dynamics of collective opinion formation, enabling rapid, large-scale interactions while simultaneously exposing online discourse to polarization and manipulation. Traditional models of opinion…
There are some shreds of evidence that social opinion polarization leads to the breakup of the relationship, some in the scale of small communities, but others can divide large organizations or even a nation. The legacy methodology to…
Understanding the dynamics of language toxicity on social media is important for us to investigate the propagation of misinformation and the development of echo chambers for political scenarios such as U.S. presidential elections. Recent…
The rise of misinformation and fake news in online political discourse poses significant challenges to democratic processes and public engagement. While debunking efforts aim to counteract misinformation and foster fact-based dialogue,…
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…
Social media have great potential to support diverse information sharing, but there is widespread concern that platforms like Twitter do not result in communication between those who hold contradictory viewpoints. Because users can choose…
We explore a new mechanism to explain polarization phenomena in opinion dynamics in which agents evaluate alternative views on the basis of the social feedback obtained on expressing them. High support of the favored opinion in the social…
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, fears grew that making vaccination a political (instead of public health) issue may impact the efficacy of this life-saving intervention, spurring the spread of vaccine-hesitant content. In this…
While we typically focus on data visualization as a tool for facilitating cognitive tasks (e.g., learning facts, making decisions), we know relatively little about their second-order impacts on our opinions, attitudes, and values. For…