Related papers: Cross-Partisan Interactions on Twitter
Social media broadly refers to digital platforms and applications that simulate social interactions online. This study investigates the impact of social media platforms and their algorithms on political interest among users. As social media…
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…
The social connections people form online affect the quality of information they receive and their online experience. Although a host of socioeconomic and cognitive factors were implicated in the formation of offline social ties, few of…
Polarization, declining trust, and wavering support for democratic norms are pressing threats to U.S. democracy. Exposure to verified and quality news may lower individual susceptibility to these threats and make citizens more resilient to…
Polarization has increased substantially in political discourse, contributing to a widening partisan divide. In this paper, we analyzed large-scale, real-world language use in Reddit communities (294,476,146 comments) and in news outlets…
Does engagement with opposing views help break down ideological `echo chambers'; or does it backfire and reinforce them? This question remains critical as academics, policymakers and activists grapple with the question of how to regulate…
Priority users (e.g., verified profiles on Twitter) are social media users whose content is promoted by recommendation algorithms. However, the impact of this heterogeneous user influence on opinion dynamics, such as polarization phenomena,…
If popular online platforms systematically expose their users to partisan and unreliable news, they could potentially contribute to societal issues like rising political polarization. This concern is central to the echo chamber and filter…
The intensification of affective polarization worldwide has raised new questions about how social media platforms might be further fracturing an already-divided public sphere. As opposed to ideological polarization, affective polarization…
We study how political polarization is reflected in the social media posts used by media outlets to promote their content online. In particular, we track the Twitter posts of several media outlets over the course of more than three years…
Media outlets and political campaigners recognise social media as a means for widely disseminating news and opinions. In particular, Twitter is used by political groups all over the world to spread political messages, engage their…
Recent studies have shown that online users tend to select information adhering to their system of beliefs, ignore information that does not, and join groups - i.e., echo chambers - around a shared narrative. Although a quantitative…
Political news on social media rarely circulates in isolation: audiences actively engage, react, and clash. Whether these interactions reflect agreement or conflict may depend on the ideological discrepancy between publishers and the news…
In micro-blogging platforms, people can connect with others and have conversations on a wide variety of topics. However, because of homophily and selective exposure, users tend to connect with like-minded people and only read agreeable…
Social Media have been extensively used for commercial and political communication, besides their initial scope of providing an easy-to-use outlet to produce and consume user-generated content. Besides being a popular medium, Social Media…
The increasing sophistication of large language models (LLMs) has sparked growing concerns regarding their potential role in exacerbating ideological polarization through the automated generation of persuasive and biased content. This study…
Polls posted on social media have emerged in recent years as an important tool for estimating public opinion, e.g., to gauge public support for business decisions and political candidates in national elections. Here, we examine nearly two…
Affective polarization and political sorting drive public antagonism around issues at the science-policy nexus. Looking at the COVID-19 period, we study cross-domain spillover of incivility and contentiousness in public engagements with…
Recently a simple military exercise on the Internet was perceived as the beginning of a new civil war in the US. Social media aggregate people around common interests eliciting a collective framing of narratives and worldviews. However, the…
Polarization is an increasingly worrying phenomenon within social media. Recent work has made it possible to detect and even quantify polarization. Nevertheless, the few existing metrics, although defined in a continuous space, often lead…