Related papers: Quantifying Polarization: A Comparative Study of M…
Although the topic of opinion polarization receives much attention from the media, public opinion researchers and political scientists, the phenomenon itself has not been adequately characterized in either the lay or academic literature. To…
Discovering the stances of media outlets and influential people on current, debatable topics is important for social statisticians and policy makers. Many supervised solutions exist for determining viewpoints, but manually annotating…
This paper presents TrollHunter2020, a real-time detection mechanism we used to hunt for trolling narratives on Twitter during the 2020 U.S. elections. Trolling narratives form on Twitter as alternative explanations of polarizing events…
Over the past decade, contrary to the early popular expectation that large-scale discourse in online communities would foster greater consensus, the large-scale structure of online discourse has been measured to be strongly polarized.…
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…
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…
Polarization is a problem in modern society. Understanding how opinions evolve through social interactions is crucial for addressing conditions that lead to polarization, consensus, or opinion diversity. Classical opinion dynamics models…
The impact of social media on critical issues such as echo chambers needs to be addressed, as these phenomena can have disruptive consequences for our society. Traditional research often oversimplifies emotional tendencies and opinion…
Polarization of opinions has been empirically noted in many online social network platforms. Traditional models of opinion dynamics, based on statistical physics principles, do not account for the emergence of polarization and echo chambers…
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…
This paper examines a novel proxy for political polarization, initially proposed by Caliskan et al., which estimates intergroup distances using computer vision. Analyzing 1,400+ YouTube videos with advanced object detection, their study…
This work focuses on the nature of visibility in societies where the behaviours of humans and algorithms influence each other - termed algorithmically infused societies. We propose a quantitative measure of visibility, with implications and…
Political polarisation on structured discussion platforms such as Reddit differs fundamentally from that on broadcast platforms such as Twitter/X, yet most prior work targets the latter. We present an end-to-end framework for measuring and…
Polarization is a ubiquitous phenomenon in social systems. Empirical studies document substantial evidence for opinion polarization across social media, showing a typical bipolarized pattern devising individuals into two groups with…
The form of political polarization where citizens develop strongly negative attitudes towards out-party policies and members has become increasingly prominent across many democracies. Economic hardship and social inequality, as well as…
The median voter theorem has long been the default model of voter behavior and candidate choice. While contemporary work on the distribution of political opinion has emphasized polarization and an increasing gap between the "left" and the…
The 2016 United States presidential election has been characterized as a period of extreme divisiveness that was exacerbated on social media by the influence of fake news, trolls, and social bots. However, the extent to which the public…
Public health measures were among the most polarizing topics debated online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Much of the discussion surrounded specific events, such as when and which particular interventions came into practise. In this work,…
Studying political activity on social media often requires defining and measuring political stances of users or content. Relevant examples include the study of opinion polarization, or the study of political diversity in online content…
Global partisan hostility and polarization has increased, and this polarization is heightened around presidential elections. Models capable of generating accurate summaries of diverse perspectives can help reduce such polarization by…