Related papers: Breaking Political Filter Bubbles via Social Compa…
In the process of information gathering on the web, confirmation bias is known to exist, exemplified in phenomena such as echo chambers and filter bubbles. Our purpose is to reveal how people consume news and discuss these phenomena. In web…
Understanding and mitigating political bias in online social media platforms are crucial tasks to combat misinformation and echo chamber effects. However, characterizing political bias temporally using computational methods presents…
Ideologically homogeneous online environments - often described as "echo chambers" or "filter bubbles" - are widely seen as drivers of polarization, radicalization, and misinformation. A central debate asks whether such homophily stems…
The paper develops a stochastic model of drift in human beliefs that shows that today's sheer volume of accessible information, combined with consumers' confirmation bias and natural preference to more outlying content, necessarily lead to…
A large number of studies on social media compare the behaviour of users from different political parties. As a basic step, they employ a predictive model for inferring their political affiliation. The accuracy of this model can change the…
An ability to infer the political leaning of social media users can help in gathering opinion polls thereby leading to a better understanding of public opinion. While there has been a body of research attempting to infer the political…
In a stylized voting model, we establish that increasing the share of critical thinkers -- individuals who are aware of the ambivalent nature of a certain issue -- in the population increases the efficiency of surveys (elections) but might…
The problem of ideology detection is to study the latent (political) placement for people, which is traditionally studied on politicians according to their voting behaviors. Recently, more and more studies begin to address the ideology…
Selective exposure, individuals' inclination to seek out information that supports their beliefs while avoiding information that contradicts them, plays an important role in the emergence of polarization and echo chambers. In the political…
In this new era of social media, social networks are becoming increasingly important sources of user-generated content on the internet. These kinds of information resources, which include a lot of people's feelings, opinions, feedback, and…
Thanks to platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, people can know facts and events that otherwise would have been silenced. However, social media significantly contribute also to fast spreading biased and false news while targeting specific…
Modeling information cascades in a social network through the lenses of the ideological leaning of its users can help understanding phenomena such as misinformation propagation and confirmation bias, and devising techniques for mitigating…
Social media have a great potential to improve information dissemination in our society, yet, they have been held accountable for a number of undesirable effects, such as polarization and filter bubbles. It is thus important to understand…
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…
The proliferation of online social networks has significantly reshaped the way individuals access and engage with information. While these platforms offer unprecedented connectivity, they may foster environments where users are increasingly…
Political debate nowadays takes place mainly on online social media, with election periods amplifying ideological engagement. Reddit is generally considered more resistant to polarization and echo chamber effects than platforms like Twitter…
Despite their playful purpose social media changed the way users access information, debate, and form their opinions. Recent studies, indeed, showed that users online tend to promote their favored narratives and thus to form polarized…
The theory of echo chambers, which suggests that online political discussions take place in conditions of ideological homogeneity, has recently gained popularity as an explanation for patterns of political polarization and radicalization…
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…
In recent years, social media companies have grappled with defining and enforcing content moderation policies surrounding political content on their platforms, due in part to concerns about political bias, disinformation, and polarization.…