Related papers: Topo Goes Political: TDA-Based Controversy Detecti…
Bridging content that brings together individuals with opposing viewpoints on social media remains elusive, overshadowed by echo chambers and toxic exchanges. We propose that algorithmic curation could surface such content by considering…
Which topics spark the most heated debates on social media? Identifying those topics is not only interesting from a societal point of view, but also allows the filtering and aggregation of social media content for disseminating news…
Understanding how people argue across ideological divides online is important for studying political polarization, misinformation, and content moderation. Existing datasets capture only part of this problem: some preserve text but ignore…
As civil discourse increasingly takes place online, misinformation and the polarization of news shared in online communities have become ever more relevant concerns with real world harms across our society. Studying online news sharing at…
Dealing with imbalanced data is a prevalent problem while performing classification on the datasets. Many times, this problem contributes to bias while making decisions or implementing policies. Thus, it is vital to understand the factors…
Detecting controversy in general web pages is a daunting task, but increasingly essential to efficiently moderate discussions and effectively filter problematic content. Unfortunately, controversies occur across many topics and domains,…
Online discussions are often characterized by strong behavioral asymmetries: a relatively small fraction of users actively produces content, while the majority primarily consumes and redistributes it. Here we propose a community-detection…
The rise of social media has been argued to intensify uncivil and hostile online political discourse. Yet, to date, there is a lack of clarity on what incivility means in the political sphere. In this work, we utilize a multidimensional…
The prevalent perspective in quantitative research on opinion dynamics flattens the landscape of the online political discourse into a traditional left--right dichotomy. While this approach helps simplify the analysis and modeling effort,…
In recent years, social media companies have grappled with defining and enforcing content moderation policies surrounding political content on their platforms, due in part to concerns about political bias, disinformation, and polarization.…
In the context of investigative journalism, we address the problem of automatically identifying which claims in a given document are most worthy and should be prioritized for fact-checking. Despite its importance, this is a relatively…
Topological Data Analysis (TDA) is an emergent field that aims to discover topological information hidden in a dataset. TDA tools have been commonly used to create filters and topological descriptors to improve Machine Learning (ML)…
Online users discuss and converse about all sorts of topics on social networks. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit are among many other networks where users can have this freedom of information sharing. The abundance of information shared over these…
Controversy is a reflection of our zeitgeist, and an important aspect to any discourse. The rise of large language models (LLMs) as conversational systems has increased public reliance on these systems for answers to their various…
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 present the first large-scale comparative analysis of Truth Social and the most popular conservative Reddit communities, r/Conservative, r/conservatives, and r/Republican. Using topic modeling with FASTopic and LLM-assisted refinement,…
Topological Data Analysis (TDA) is an emergent field that aims to discover topological information hidden in a dataset. TDA tools have been commonly used to create filters and topological descriptors to improve Machine Learning (ML)…
Political discourse has grown increasingly fragmented across different social platforms, making it challenging to trace how narratives spread and evolve within such a fragmented information ecosystem. Reconstructing social graphs and…
Climate change, vaccination, abortion, Trump: Many topics are surrounded by fierce controversies. The nature of such heated debates and their elements have been studied extensively in the social science literature. More recently, various…
The Web has evolved to a dominant platform where everyone has the opportunity to express their opinions, to interact with other users, and to debate on emerging events happening around the world. On the one hand, this has enabled the…