Related papers: Analysing Calls to Order in German Parliamentary D…
This study investigates political discourse in the German parliament, the Bundestag, by analyzing approximately 28,000 parliamentary speeches from the last five years. Two machine learning models for topic and sentiment classification were…
Toxic and uncivil politics is widely seen as a growing threat to democratic values and governance, yet our understanding of the drivers and evolution of political incivility remains limited. Leveraging a novel dataset of nearly 18 million…
This paper focuses on language change based on shifting social norms, in particular with regard to the debate on language and gender. It is a recurring argument in this debate that language develops "naturally" and that "severe…
Discussion about the social network Twitter often concerns its role in political discourse, involving the question of when an expression of opinion becomes offensive, immoral, and/or illegal, and how to deal with it. Given the growing…
The rise of populism concerns many political scientists and practitioners, yet the detection of its underlying language remains fragmentary. This paper aims to provide a reliable, valid, and scalable approach to measure populist stances.…
Migration has been a core topic in German political debate, from the postwar displacement of millions of expellees to labor migration and recent refugee movements. Studying political speech across such wide-ranging phenomena in depth has…
In the digital age, hate speech poses a threat to the functioning of social media platforms as spaces for public discourse. Top-down approaches to moderate hate speech encounter difficulties due to conflicts with freedom of expression and…
Assessing political conversations in social media requires a deeper understanding of the underlying practices and styles that drive these conversations. In this paper, we present a computational approach for assessing online conversational…
Given the democratic nature of open source development, code review and issue discussions may be uncivil. Incivility, defined as features of discussion that convey an unnecessarily disrespectful tone, can have negative consequences to open…
Theories of democratic stability, populism, and party-system crisis often point to a form of polarization that comparative research rarely measures directly: hostile relations among political elites. Existing comparative measures capture…
In Twitter, there is a rising trend in abusive behavior which often leads to incivility. This trend is affecting users mentally and as a result they tend to leave Twitter and other such social networking sites thus depleting the active user…
Citizen-generated counter speech is a promising way to fight hate speech and promote peaceful, non-polarized discourse. However, there is a lack of large-scale longitudinal studies of its effectiveness for reducing hate speech. To this end,…
Social Network sites are fertile ground for several polluting phenomena affecting online and offline spaces. Among these phenomena are included echo chambers, closed systems in which the opinions expressed by the people inside are…
This study investigates the automated classification of Calls to Action (CTAs) within the 2021 German Instagram election campaign to advance the understanding of mobilization in social media contexts. We analyzed over 2,208 Instagram…
Numerous politicians use social media platforms, particularly X, to engage with their constituents. This interaction allows constituents to pose questions and offer feedback but also exposes politicians to a barrage of hostile responses,…
Statistical methods applied to social media posts shed light on the dynamics of online dialogue. For example, users' wording choices predict their persuasiveness and users adopt the language patterns of other dialogue participants. In this…
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…
Hateful rhetoric is plaguing online discourse, fostering extreme societal movements and possibly giving rise to real-world violence. A potential solution to this growing global problem is citizen-generated counter speech where citizens…
This paper introduces a method for detecting inappropriately targeting language in online conversations by integrating crowd and expert annotations with ChatGPT. We focus on English conversation threads from Reddit, examining comments that…
User-generated replies to hate speech are promising means to combat hatred, but questions about whether they can stop incivility in follow-up conversations linger. We argue that effective replies stop incivility from emerging in follow-up…