Related papers: Exposing Hate -- Understanding Anti-Immigration Se…
In the online public sphere, discussions about immigration often become increasingly fractious, marked by toxic language and polarization. Drawing on 4 million X posts over six months, we combine a user- and topic-centric approach to study…
Social media are decentralized, interactive, and transformative, empowering users to produce and spread information to influence others. This has changed the dynamics of political communication that were previously dominated by traditional…
Social media platforms often foster environments where users primarily engage with content that aligns with their existing beliefs, thereby reinforcing their views and limiting exposure to opposing viewpoints. In this paper, we analyze X…
Using language models, we analyze a sample of 67 million tweets and 30 million Reddit comments referencing a set of 215 political entities from 2010-2023 from partisan users, journalists, and politicians. Our analysis indicates outgroup…
Twitter is a common site of offensive language. Prior literature has shown that the emotional content of tweets can heavily impact their diffusion when discussing political topics. We extend prior work to look at offensive tweets that link…
The intensification of affective polarization worldwide has raised new questions about how social media platforms might be further fracturing an already-divided public sphere. As opposed to ideological polarization, affective polarization…
Vaccine hesitancy has been recognized as a major global health threat. Having access to any type of information in social media has been suggested as a potential powerful influence factor to hesitancy. Recent studies in other fields than…
Characterising the spreading of ideas within echo chambers is essential for understanding polarisation. In this paper, we explore the characteristics of popular and viral content in climate change discussions on Twitter around the 2019…
Language change is influenced by many factors, but often starts from synchronic variation, where multiple linguistic patterns or forms coexist, or where different speech communities use language in increasingly different ways. Besides…
In recent years, social media has been criticized for yielding polarization. Identifying emerging disagreements and growing polarization is important for journalists to create alerts and provide more balanced coverage. While recent studies…
Social media is now the predominant source of information due to the availability of immediate public response. As a result, social media data has become a valuable resource for comprehending public sentiments. Studies have shown that it…
Metaphor, discussing one concept in terms of another, is abundant in politics and can shape how people understand important issues. We develop a computational approach to measure metaphorical language, focusing on immigration discourse on…
Research across different disciplines has documented the expanding polarization in social media. However, much of it focused on the US political system or its culturally controversial topics. In this work, we explore polarization on Twitter…
We investigate the impact of free speech and the relaxation of moderation on online social media platforms using Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter as a case study. By curating a dataset of over 10 million tweets, our study employs a novel…
Societies are complex systems which tend to polarize into sub-groups of individuals with dramatically opposite perspectives. This phenomenon is reflected -- and often amplified -- in online social networks where, however, humans are no more…
Large-scale manipulations on social media have two important characteristics: (i) use of propaganda to influence others, and (ii) adoption of coordinated behavior to spread it and to amplify its impact. Despite the connection between them,…
Twitter, a microblogging service, is todays most popular platform for communication in the form of short text messages, called Tweets. Users use Twitter to publish their content either for expressing concerns on information news or views on…
An important challenge in the process of tracking and detecting the dissemination of misinformation is to understand the political gap between people that engage with the so called "fake news". A possible factor responsible for this gap is…
Far-right actors are often purveyors of Islamophobic hate speech online, using social media to spread divisive and prejudiced messages which can stir up intergroup tensions and conflict. Hateful content can inflict harm on targeted victims,…
Social Media are nowadays the privileged channel for information spreading and news checking. Unexpectedly for most of the users, automated accounts, also known as social bots, contribute more and more to this process of news spreading.…