Related papers: Bluesky: Network Topology, Polarization, and Algor…
Unlike traditional media, online news platforms allow users to consume content that suits their tastes and to facilitate interactions with other people. However, as more personalized consumption of information and interaction with…
Online social networks (OSNs) have become increasingly relevant for studying social behavior and information diffusion. Nevertheless, they are limited by restricted access to real OSN data due to privacy, legal, and platform-related…
The suggestions generated by most existing recommender systems are known to suffer from a lack of diversity, and other issues like popularity bias. As a result, they have been observed to promote well-known "blockbuster" items, and to…
This paper aims to shed light on alternative news media ecosystems that are believed to have influenced opinions and beliefs by false and/or biased news reporting during the 2016 US Presidential Elections. We examine a large, professionally…
The rise of ideological divides in public discourse has received considerable attention in recent years. However, much of this research has been concentrated on Western democratic nations, leaving other regions largely unexplored. Here, we…
The flow of information reaching us via the online media platforms is optimized not by the information content or relevance but by popularity and proximity to the target. This is typically performed in order to maximise platform usage. As 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…
Social media users have repeatedly advocated for control over the currently opaque operations of feed algorithms. Large language models (LLMs) now offer the promise of custom-defined feeds--but users often fail to foresee the gaps and edge…
Predicting the political leaning of social media users is an increasingly popular task, given its usefulness for electoral forecasts, opinion dynamics models and for studying the political dimension of polarization and disinformation. Here,…
In online social media systems users are not only posting, consuming, and resharing content, but also creating new and destroying existing connections in the underlying social network. While each of these two types of dynamics has…
The analysis of social networks enables the understanding of social interactions, polarisation of ideas, and the spread of information and therefore plays an important role in society. We use Twitter data - as it is a popular venue for the…
This study provides a large-scale mapping of the French media space using digital methods to estimate political polarization and to study information circuits. We collect data about the production and circulation of online news stories in…
Social networks allow people to connect with each other and have conversations on a wide variety of topics. However, users tend to connect with like-minded people and read agreeable information, a behavior that leads to group polarization.…
In the political arena of social platforms, opposing factions of varying sizes show asymmetrical patterns, and elites and masses within these groups have divergent motivations and influence,challenging simplistic views of polarization. Yet,…
Polarization is implicated in the erosion of democracy and the progression to violence, which makes the polarization properties of large algorithmic content selection systems (recommender systems) a matter of concern for peace and security.…
In recent years, the ease with which social media can be accessed has led to the unexpected problem of a shrinkage in information sources. This phenomenon is caused by a system that facilitates the connection of people with similar ideas…
Following recent policy changes by X (Twitter) and other social media platforms, user interaction data has become increasingly difficult to access. These restrictions are impeding robust research pertaining to social and political phenomena…
We investigate disagreement and polarization in a social network with two polarizing sources of information. First, we define disagreement and polarization indices in two-party leader-follower models of opinion dynamics. We then give…
In politically sensitive scenarios like wars, social media serves as a platform for polarized discourse and expressions of strong ideological stances. While prior studies have explored ideological stance detection in general contexts,…
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…