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There is an ongoing debate about whether the Internet is like a public sphere or an echo chamber. Among many forms of social media, Twitter is one of the most crucial online places for political debate. Most of the previous studies focus on…

Disengagement and disenchantment with the Parliamentary process is an important concern in today's Western democracies. Members of Parliament (MPs) in the UK are therefore seeking new ways to engage with citizens, including being on digital…

Considering the raising socio-economic burden of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), timely and evidence-driven public policy decision making and communication of the latest guidelines pertaining to the treatment and management of the disorder…

Serious concerns have been raised about the role of 'socialbots' in manipulating public opinion and influencing the outcome of elections by retweeting partisan content to increase its reach. Here we analyze the role and influence of…

There is growing concern that over the past decade, industrialized democratic nations are becoming increasingly politically polarized. Indeed, elections in the US, UK, France, and Germany have all seen tightly won races, with notable…

News sharing on digital platforms shapes the digital spaces millions of users navigate. Trace data from these platforms also enables researchers to study online news circulation. In this context, research on the types of news shared by…

While social media has become an empowering agent to individual voices and freedom of expression, it also facilitates anti-social behaviors including online harassment, cyberbullying, and hate speech. In this paper, we present the first…

Social media platforms attempting to curb abuse and misinformation have been accused of political bias. We deploy neutral social bots who start following different news sources on Twitter, and track them to probe distinct biases emerging…

Unlike the more observable phenomenon of group opinion reinforcement, self-censorship online has received comparatively less attention. Our goal in this work is to dissect the phenomena of self-censorship and to examine the implications of…

Polls posted on social media have emerged in recent years as an important tool for estimating public opinion, e.g., to gauge public support for business decisions and political candidates in national elections. Here, we examine nearly two…

Social media are now a routine part of political campaigns all over the world. However, studies of the impact of campaigning on social platform have thus far been limited to cross-sectional datasets from one election period which are…

Research shows that various social media platforms on Internet such as Twitter, Tumblr (micro-blogging websites), Facebook (a popular social networking website), YouTube (largest video sharing and hosting website), Blogs and discussion…

In this paper, we study the implications of the commonplace assumption that most social media studies make with respect to the nature of message shares (such as retweets) as a predominantly positive interaction. By analyzing two large…

Social media platforms increasingly employ proactive moderation techniques, such as detecting and curbing toxic and uncivil comments, to prevent the spread of harmful content. Despite these efforts, such approaches are often criticized for…

Computer-mediated communication is driving fundamental changes in the nature of written language. We investigate these changes by statistical analysis of a dataset comprising 107 million Twitter messages (authored by 2.7 million unique user…

In a pre-registered algorithmic audit, we found that, relative to a reverse-chronological baseline, Twitter's engagement-based ranking algorithm amplifies emotionally charged, out-group hostile content that users say makes them feel worse…

This paper addresses polarization quantification, particularly as it pertains to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court and his subsequent confirmation with the narrowest margin since 1881. Republican (GOP) and Democratic…

In the past few years, there has been a significant rise in toxic and hateful content on various social media platforms. Recently Black Lives Matter movement came into the picture, causing an avalanche of user generated responses on the…

We present results of empirical studies on positive speech on Twitter. By positive speech we understand speech that works for the betterment of a given situation, in this case relations between different communities in a conflict-prone…

The #MeToo movement on Twitter has drawn attention to the pervasive nature of sexual harassment and violence. While #MeToo has been praised for providing support for self-disclosures of harassment or violence and shifting societal response,…