Related papers: Language bubbles in online social networks
Social media enables the rapid spread of many kinds of information, from memes to social movements. However, little is known about how information crosses linguistic boundaries. We apply causal inference techniques on the European Twitter…
In the age of information abundance, attention is a coveted resource. Social media platforms vigorously compete for users' engagement, influencing the evolution of their opinions on a variety of topics. With recommendation algorithms often…
Language is a fundamental aspect of human societies, continuously evolving in response to various stimuli, including societal changes and intercultural interactions. Technological advancements have profoundly transformed communication, with…
Our paper studies the predictability of online speech -- that is, how well language models learn to model the distribution of user generated content on X (previously Twitter). We define predictability as a measure of the model's…
Social media users drive the spread of misinformation online by sharing posts that include erroneous information or commenting on controversial topics with unsubstantiated arguments often in earnest. Work on echo chambers has suggested that…
The reappearance of measles in the US and Europe, a disease considered eliminated in early 2000s, has been accompanied by a growing debate on the merits of vaccination on social media. In this study we examine the extent to which the…
Estimating the political leanings of social media users is a challenging and ever more pressing problem given the increase in social media consumption. We introduce Retweet-BERT, a simple and scalable model to estimate the political…
Large scale analysis and statistics of socio-technical systems that just a few short years ago would have required the use of consistent economic and human resources can nowadays be conveniently performed by mining the enormous amount of…
Cultural diversity encoded within languages of the world is at risk, as many languages have become endangered in the last decades in a context of growing globalization. To preserve this diversity, it is first necessary to understand what…
Recent research has shown the deep impact of the dynamics of human interactions (or temporal social networks) on the spreading of information, opinion formation, etc. In general, the bursty nature of human interactions lowers the…
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…
This paper examines the link between conversational communities on Twitter and their members' expressions of social identity. It specifically tests the presence of community prototypes, or collections of attributes which define a group…
Picture a community torn over a proposed zoning law. Some are angry, others defensive, and misunderstandings abound. On social media, they broadcast insults at one another; every nuanced perspective is reduced to a viral soundbite. Yet,…
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…
Contemporary social media networks can be viewed as a break to the early two-step flow model in which influential individuals act as intermediaries between the media and the public for information diffusion. Today's social media platforms…
The architecture of public discourse has been profoundly reshaped by social media platforms, which mediate interactions at an unprecedented scale and complexity. This study analyzes user behavior across six platforms over 33 years,…
Online social media play a major role in shaping public discourse and opinion, especially during political events. We present the first public multi-platform dataset of Italian-language political conversations, focused on the 2022 Italian…
Group interactions take place within a particular socio-temporal context, which should be taken into account when modelling interactions in online communities. We propose a method for jointly modelling community structure and language over…
Using Twitter during academic conferences is a way of engaging and connecting an audience inherently multicultural by the nature of scientific collaboration. English is expected to be the lingua franca bridging the communication and…
We analyze the ego-alter Twitter networks of 300 Italian MPs and 18 European leaders, and of about 14,000 generic users. We find structural properties typical of social environments, meaning that Twitter activity is controlled by…