Related papers: Quantifying Influencer Impact on Affective Polariz…
The abundance of information on social media has reshaped public discussions, shifting attention to the mechanisms that drive online discourse. This study analyzes large-scale Twitter (now X) data from three global debates--Climate Change,…
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…
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 have transformed the dynamics of collective opinion formation, enabling rapid, large-scale interactions while simultaneously exposing online discourse to polarization and manipulation. Traditional models of opinion…
We investigate the dynamics of opinion formation on social networking platforms, focusing on how individual opinions, influenced by both social connections and platform algorithms, evolve. We model this process using a differential…
The advent of social media platforms has revolutionized information consumption patterns, with individuals frequently engaging in these platforms for social interactions. This trend has fostered an environment where people gravitate towards…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Opinion dynamics is an important and very active area of research that delves into the complex processes through which individuals form and modify their opinions within a social context. The ability to comprehend and unravel the mechanisms…
Echo chambers and opinion polarization recently quantified in several sociopolitical contexts and across different social media, raise concerns on their potential impact on the spread of misinformation and on openness of debates. Despite…
Online social networks provide a medium for citizens to form opinions on different societal issues, and a forum for public discussion. They also expose users to viral content, such as breaking news articles. In this paper, we study the…
Members of different political groups not only disagree about issues but also dislike and distrust each other. While social media can amplify this emotional divide -- called affective polarization by political scientists -- there is a lack…
This paper analyses changes in public opinion by tracking political discussions in which people voluntarily engage online. Unlike polls or surveys, our approach does not elicit opinions but approximates what the public thinks by analysing…
Influencers are key to the nature and networks of information propagation on social media. Influencers are particularly important in political discourse through their engagement with issues, and may derive their legitimacy either solely or…
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…
Understanding affective polarization in online discourse is crucial for evaluating the societal impact of social media interactions. This study presents a novel framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) and domain-informed…
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…
Users online tend to join polarized groups of like-minded peers around shared narratives, forming echo chambers. The echo chamber effect and opinion polarization may be driven by several factors including human biases in information…