Related papers: Quantifying Polarization: A Comparative Study of M…
The emergence of politically driven divisions in online discussion networks has attracted a wealth of literature, but also one which has thus far been largely limited to single country studies. Hence whilst there is good evidence that these…
The explosive growth of social media has not only revolutionized communication but also brought challenges such as political polarization, misinformation, hate speech, and echo chambers. This dissertation employs computational social…
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…
We introduce a simple, geometric model of opinion polarization. It is a model of political persuasion, as well as marketing and advertising, utilizing social values. It focuses on the interplay between different topics and persuasion…
Affective polarization, or, inter-party hostility, is increasingly recognized as a pervasive issue in democracies worldwide, posing a threat to social cohesion. The digital media ecosystem, now widely accessible and ever-present, has often…
Explanations of polarization often rely on one of the three mechanisms: homophily, bounded confidence, and community-based interactions. Models based on these mechanisms consider the lack of interactions as the main cause of polarization.…
People are shifting from traditional news sources to online news at an incredibly fast rate. However, the technology behind online news consumption promotes content that confirms the users' existing point of view. This phenomenon has led to…
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…
On June 24, 2018, Turkey conducted a highly-consequential election in which the Turkish people elected their president and parliament in the first election under a new presidential system. During the election period, the Turkish people…
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…
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…
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 today's digital age, images have emerged as powerful tools for politicians to engage with their voters on social media platforms. Visual content possesses a unique emotional appeal that often leads to increased user engagement. However,…
Ensuring legislative accountability in multi-party systems requires quantitative tools that reveal actual voting behavior beyond formal party affiliations. We present a network-based framework for analyzing parliamentary dynamics at…
Prior research shows that public opinion on climate politics sorts along partisan lines. However, they leave open the question of whether climate politics and other politically salient issues exhibit tendencies for issue alignment, which…
Discussions of political disagreement emphasize two patterns: polarization, where beliefs diverge toward opposite extremes on each issue dimension; and issue alignment, where individuals' views across issues become more internally…
Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…
This paper investigates visual media shared by US national politicians on Twitter, how a politician's variety of image types shared reflects their political position, and identifies a hazard in using standard methods for image…
Background: Social media chatter in 2020 has been largely dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Existing research shows that COVID-19 discourse is highly politicized, with political preferences linked to beliefs and disbeliefs about the…
Social media have great potential to support diverse information sharing, but there is widespread concern that platforms like Twitter do not result in communication between those who hold contradictory viewpoints. Because users can choose…