相关论文: Mitigating the Backfire Effect Using Pacing and Le…
In this work we study how pervasive is the presence of disinformation in the Italian debate around immigration on Twitter and the role of automated accounts in the diffusion of such content. By characterising the Twitter users with an…
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,…
Argumentative dialogues across political divides can reduce polarization, yet opportunities for citizens to engage with opposing views in accessible and structured ways remain limited. AI dialogue partners offer a scalable framework for…
Online toxic attacks, such as harassment, trolling, and hate speech have been linked to an increase in offline violence and negative psychological effects on victims. In this paper, we studied the impact of toxicity on users' online…
Collective opinions affect civic participation, governance, and societal norms. Due to the influence of opinion dynamics, many models of their formation and evolution have been developed. A commonly used approach for the study of opinion…
While existing works have emphasized how elites shape mass opinion, we ask whether the reverse also holds: do audience reactions on social media actively shape elite behavior? We examine this question through the lens of cross-partisan…
In recent years, social media has increasingly become an important platform for political campaigns, especially elections. It remains elusive how exactly public discourse is driven by the intricate interplay between individual…
The flow of information reaching us via the online media platforms is optimized not by the information content or relevance but by popularity and proximity to the target. This is typically performed in order to maximise platform usage. As a…
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 massive spread of digital misinformation has been identified as a major global risk and has been alleged to influence elections and threaten democracies. Communication, cognitive, social, and computer scientists are engaged in efforts…
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…
The micro-blogging platform Twitter allows its nearly 320 million monthly active users to build a network of follower connections to other Twitter users (i.e., followees) in order to subscribe to content posted by these users. With this…
Understanding the dynamics of language toxicity on social media is important for us to investigate the propagation of misinformation and the development of echo chambers for political scenarios such as U.S. presidential elections. Recent…
Polarized topics often spark discussion and debate on social media. Recent studies have shown that polarized debates have a specific clustered structure in the endorsement net- work, which indicates that users direct their endorsements…
Society is often polarized by controversial issues, that split the population into groups of opposing views. When such issues emerge on social media, we often observe the creation of 'echo chambers', i.e., situations where like-minded…
While exposure to diverse viewpoints may reduce polarization, it can also have a backfire effect and exacerbate polarization when the discussion is adversarial. Here, we examine the question whether intergroup interactions around important…
Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered recommender systems play a crucial role in determining the content that users are exposed to on social media platforms. However, the behavioural patterns of these systems are often opaque, complicating…
This study investigates how online counterspeech, defined as direct responses to harmful online content with the intention of dissuading the perpetrator from further engaging in such behavior, is influenced by the match between a target of…
In this paper, the influence of the social media on the opinion formation process is modeled during an election campaign. In the proposed model, peer- to-peer interactions and targeted online propaganda messages are assumed to be the…
The ever-increasing amount of information flowing through Social Media forces the members of these networks to compete for attention and influence by relying on other people to spread their message. A large study of information propagation…