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Social media enables the rapid spread of many kinds of information, from memes to social movements. However, little is known about how information crosses linguistic boundaries. We apply causal inference techniques on the European Twitter…
The rise in popularity of Twitter has led to a debate on its impact on public opinions. The optimists foresee an increase in online participation and democratization due to social media's personal and interactive nature. Cyber-pessimists,…
Social media has become an indispensable channel for political communication. However, the political discourse is increasingly characterized by hate speech, which affects not only the reputation of individual politicians but also the…
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…
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…
The #MeToo movement has catalyzed widespread public discourse surrounding sexual harassment and assault, empowering survivors to share their stories and holding perpetrators accountable. While the movement has had a substantial and largely…
With the proliferation of social media over the last decade, determining people's attitude with respect to a specific topic, document, interaction or events has fueled research interest in natural language processing and introduced a new…
News sharing on social networks reveals how information disseminates among users. This process, constrained by user preferences and social ties, plays a key role in the formation of public opinion. In this work we study news sharing of main…
Political polarization in online social platforms is a rapidly growing phenomenon worldwide. Despite their relevance to modern-day politics, the structure and dynamics of polarized states in digital spaces are still poorly understood. We…
This paper presents a quantitative study of Twitter, one of the most popular micro-blogging services, from the perspective of user influence. We crawl several datasets from the most active communities on Twitter and obtain 20.5 million user…
Does polarization online reflect the state of polarization in society? We study ideological positions and attitudes on several issues in France, a country with documented issue nonalignment. We compare distributions on X/Twitter with a…
The online hate speech is proliferating with several organization and countries implementing laws to ban such harmful speech. While these restrictions might reduce the amount of such hateful content, it does so by restricting freedom of…
We investigate the presence (and the influence) of disinformation spreading on online social networks in Italy, in the5-month period preceding the 2019 European Parliament elections. To this aim we collected a large-scale dataset oftweets…
Monitoring advertising around controversial issues is an important step in ensuring accountability and transparency of political processes. To that end, we use the Facebook Ads Library to collect 2312 migration-related advertising campaigns…
During the summer of 2019-20, while Australia suffered unprecedented bushfires across the country, false narratives regarding arson and limited backburning spread quickly on Twitter, particularly using the hashtag #ArsonEmergency.…
The COVID-19 pandemic brought upon a massive wave of disinformation, exacerbating polarization in the increasingly divided landscape of online discourse. In this context, popular social media users play a major role, as they have the…
Optimism about the Internet's potential to bring the world together has been tempered by concerns about its role in inflaming the 'culture wars'. Via mass selection into like-minded groups, online society may be becoming more fragmented and…
The growing prominence of social media in public discourse has led to a greater scrutiny of the quality of online information and the role it plays in amplifying political polarization. However, studies of polarization on social media…
We address a challenging problem of identifying main sources of hate speech on Twitter. On one hand, we carefully annotate a large set of tweets for hate speech, and deploy advanced deep learning to produce high quality hate speech…
The study analyses polarisation on Finnish social media with data from the platform X, which was known as Twitter during the time of data collection (during the Sipil\"a and Marin governments, 2015-2023). The users were clustered into three…