Related papers: Ideology and polarization set the agenda on social…
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…
In today's digital age, social media platforms play a crucial role in shaping public opinion. This study explores how discussions led by influencers on Twitter, now known as 'X', affect public sentiment and contribute to online…
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…
How do European publics debate a geopolitical crisis on social media, and do they inhabit a shared informational reality? We analyze over 38 million geolocated tweets from 20 European countries during the first eight months of the Russian…
Polarization is often a clich{\'e}, its conceptualization remains approximate and no consensus has been reached so far. Often simply seen as an inevitable result of the use of social networks, polarization nevertheless remains a complex…
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…
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…
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…
The rise of social media has fundamentally transformed how people engage in public discourse and form opinions. While these platforms offer unprecedented opportunities for democratic engagement, they have been implicated in increasing…
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…
Narratives are key interpretative devices by which humans make sense of political reality. In this work, we show how the analysis of conflicting narratives, i.e. conflicting interpretive lenses through which political reality is experienced…
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…
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…
In recent years, social media has increasingly become an important platform for political campaigns, especially elections. It remains elusive how exactly public discourse is driven by the intricate interplay between individual…
The existence of polarization and echo chambers has been noted in social media discussions of public concern such as the Covid-19 pandemic, foreign election interference, and regional conflicts. However, measuring polarization and assessing…
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…
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…
Individuals engaging on social media often tend to establish online communities where interactions predominantly occur among like-minded peers. While considerable efforts have been devoted to studying and delineating these communities,…
Social media platforms play a pivotal role in shaping public opinion and amplifying political discourse, particularly during elections. However, the same dynamics that foster democratic engagement can also exacerbate polarization. To better…
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…