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Social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter play a key role in disseminating both reliable and unreliable information about climate change. This study analyses the topology of interactions in Twitter and their relation to cross-platform…
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…
Individuals are increasingly exposed to news and opinion from beyond national borders in a world that is becoming more and more globalised. This news and opinion is often concentrated in clusters of ideological homophily such as political…
The Internet and, in particular, Online Social Networks have changed the way that terrorist and extremist groups can influence and radicalise individuals. Recent reports show that the mode of operation of these groups starts by exposing a…
Bias assessment of news sources is paramount for professionals, organizations, and researchers who rely on truthful evidence for information gathering and reporting. While certain bias indicators are discernible from content analysis,…
We evaluate homophily and heterophily among ideological and demographic groups in a typical opinion formation context: online discussions of current news. We analyze user interactions across five years in the r/news community on Reddit, one…
Many people rely on online social networks as sources of news and information, and the spread of media content with ideologies across the political spectrum influences online discussions and impacts actions offline. To examine the impact of…
Instagram has been increasingly used as a source of information especially among the youth. As a result, political figures now leverage the platform to spread opinions and political agenda. We here analyze online discussions on Instagram,…
Online information is increasingly linked to real-world instability, especially as automated accounts and LLM-based agents help spread and amplify news. In this work, we study how information spreads on networks of Large Language Models…
Large-scale data resulting from users online interactions provide the ultimate source of information to study emergent social phenomena on the Web. From individual actions of users to observable collective behaviors, different mechanisms…
The news ecosystem has become increasingly complex, encompassing a wide range of sources with varying levels of trustworthiness, and with public commentary giving different spins to the same stories. In this paper, we present a…
How do news sources tackle controversial issues? In this work, we take a data-driven approach to understand how controversy interplays with emotional expression and biased language in the news. We begin by introducing a new dataset of…
Diffusion of information and viral content, social contagion and influence are still topics of broad evaluation. We have studied the information epidemic in a social networking platform in order compare different campaign setups. The goal…
News media has long been an ecosystem of creation, reproduction, and critique, where news outlets report on current events and add commentary to ongoing stories. Understanding the dynamics of news information creation and dispersion is…
We present a machine learning framework that leverages a mixture of metadata, network, and temporal features to detect extremist users, and predict content adopters and interaction reciprocity in social media. We exploit a unique dataset…
This study investigates the dynamics of extreme opinions on social media during the 2023 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, utilising a comprehensive dataset of over 450,000 posts from four Reddit subreddits (r/Palestine, r/Judaism,…
Online communities play a critical role in shaping societal discourse and influencing collective behavior in the real world. The tendency for people to connect with others who share similar characteristics and views, known as homophily,…
Human interactions create social networks forming the backbone of societies. Individuals adjust their opinions by exchanging information through social interactions. Two recurrent questions are whether social structures promote opinion…
Qualitative research provides methodological guidelines for observing and studying communities and cultures on online social media platforms. However, such methods demand considerable manual effort from researchers and can be overly focused…
We study the joint evolution of worldviews by proposing a model of opinion dynamics, which is inspired in notions from evolutionary ecology. Agents update their opinion on a specific issue based on their propensity to change -- asserted by…