Related papers: Decoding Political Polarization in Social Media In…

The flourishing of fake news is favored by recommendation algorithms of online social networks which, based on previous users activity, provide content adapted to their preferences and so create filter bubbles. We introduce an analytically…

Metaphors are widely used in political rhetoric as an effective framing device. While the efficacy of specific metaphors such as the war metaphor in political discourse has been documented before, those studies often rely on small number of…

Society is showing signs of strong ideological polarization. When pushed to seek perspectives different from their own, people often reject diverse ideas or find them unfathomable. Work has shown that framing controversial issues using the…

We introduce a socially motivated extension of the voter model in which individual voters are also influenced by two opposing, fixed-opinion news sources. These sources forestall consensus and instead drive the population to a politically…

Despite extensive research, the mechanisms through which online platforms shape extremism and polarization remain poorly understood. We identify and test a mechanism, grounded in empirical evidence, that explains how ranking algorithms can…

We measure trends in the diffusion of misinformation on Facebook and Twitter between January 2015 and July 2018. We focus on stories from 570 sites that have been identified as producers of false stories. Interactions with these sites on…

Social media presents an opportunity for people to share content that they find to be significant, funny, or notable. No single piece of content will appeal to all users, but are there systematic variations between users that can help us…

We analyze the relationship between partisanship, echo chambers, and vulnerability to online misinformation by studying news sharing behavior on Twitter. While our results confirm prior findings that online misinformation sharing is…

Images are an indispensable part of the news content we consume. Highly emotional images from sources of misinformation can greatly influence our judgements. We present two studies on the effects of emotional facial images on users'…

In this study, we propose a novel graph-based approach to model, analyze and comprehend user interactions within a social media platform based on post-comment relationship. We construct a user interaction graph from social media data and…

While existing works have emphasized how elites shape mass opinion, we ask whether the reverse also holds: do audience reactions on social media actively shape elite behavior? We examine this question through the lens of cross-partisan…

With the recent advances of networking technology, connections among people are unprecedentedly enhanced. People with different ideologies and backgrounds interact with each other, and there may exist severe opinion polarization and…

The widespread emergence of opinion polarization is often attributed to the rise of social media and the internet, which can promote selective exposure and the formation of echo chambers. However, experimental evidence shows that exposure…

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…

Polarization, defined as the emergence of sharply divided groups with opposing and often extreme views, is an increasingly prominent feature of modern societies. While many studies analyze this phenomenon in the context of single issues,…

User response to contributed content in online social media depends on many factors. These include how the site lays out new content, how frequently the user visits the site, how many friends the user follows, how active these friends are,…

This study investigates affective polarization among Swedish politicians on Twitter from 2021 to 2023, including the September 2022 parliamentary election. Analyzing over 25,000 tweets and employing large language models (LLMs) for…

Individuals increasingly rely on social networking platforms to form opinions. However, these platforms typically aim to maximize engagement, which may not align with social good. In this paper, we introduce an opinion dynamics model where…

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…

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…