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Prior research shows that public opinion on climate politics sorts along partisan lines. However, they leave open the question of whether climate politics and other politically salient issues exhibit tendencies for issue alignment, which…
Our perceptions are shaped by the social networks we are embedded in. Despite the acknowledged influence of close contacts on how we perceive the world, the role of the broader social environment remains opaque. Here, we leverage a unique…
Polarization is an increasingly worrying phenomenon within social media. Recent work has made it possible to detect and even quantify polarization. Nevertheless, the few existing metrics, although defined in a continuous space, often lead…
In today's digital age, social media platforms play a crucial role in shaping public opinion. This study explores how discussions led by influencers on Twitter, now known as 'X', affect public sentiment and contribute to online…
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…
Online social media has become an important platform to organize around different socio-cultural and political topics. An extensive scholarship has discussed how people are divided into echo-chamber-like groups. However, there is a lack of…
We propose an analytical framework able to investigate discussions about polarized topics in online social networks from many different angles. The framework supports the analysis of social networks along several dimensions: time, space and…
Social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter play a key role in disseminating both reliable and unreliable information about climate change. This study analyses the topology of interactions in Twitter and their relation to cross-platform…
Individuals engaging on social media often tend to establish online communities where interactions predominantly occur among like-minded peers. While considerable efforts have been devoted to studying and delineating these communities,…
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…
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…
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 play a pivotal role in shaping public opinion and amplifying political discourse, particularly during elections. However, the same dynamics that foster democratic engagement can also exacerbate polarization. To better…
Social media have become the main vehicle of information production and consumption online. Millions of users every day log on their Facebook or Twitter accounts to get updates and news, read about their topics of interest, and become…
Polarized topics often spark discussion and debate on social media. Recent studies have shown that polarized debates have a specific clustered structure in the endorsement net- work, which indicates that users direct their endorsements…
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 investigate the polarization of the German Twittersphere by extracting the main issues discussed and the signaled opinions of users towards those issues based on (re)tweets concerning trending topics. The dataset covers daily trending…
Superdiversity refers to large cultural diversity in a population due to immigration. In this paper, we introduce a superdiversity index based on the changes in the emotional content of words used by a multi-cultural community, compared to…
Recently, social media platforms are heavily moderated to prevent the spread of online hate speech, which is usually fertile in toxic words and is directed toward an individual or a community. Owing to such heavy moderation, newer and more…
Online government petitions represent a new data-rich mode of political participation. This work examines the thus far understudied dynamics of sharing petitions on social media in order to garner signatures and, ultimately, a government…