Using Artificial Intelligence to Monitor the Evolution of Opinion Leaders\u27 Sentiments: Case Study on Global Warming

© 2020 University of Split, FESB. Emotional and sentiment analysis of social media content is essential for smart city analytics. In the past few years, researchers have relied on online content\u27s sentiment analysis to capture public opinion about current events. Despite their merits, the existing solutions take a retrospective coarse-grained approach that analyses millions of social media posts to study public opinion about past events (e.g., presidential elections). Such models give late insights, which makes it difficult to intervene or adjust strategies based on the evolution of public opinion over time. Moreover, such approaches lack efficiency and scalability since they require the analysis of millions of posts to obtain accurate results. In this work, we address those limitations by proposing a framework for the real-time monitoring of the evolution of public opinion over time. To ensure efficiency and scalability, we focus on the analysis of high impact social media content generated by opinion leaders and their followers. To build our framework, we leveraged our opinion leaders\u27 identification algorithm, along with text mining and text classification techniques, to capture and analyze the evolution of the sentiments and emotions of 34 opinion leaders concerning the topic of global warming. The results obtained are very promising and open the door to advanced social media analytics to monitor public opinion in real-time

Rethinking Populism in the Digital Age: Social Networks, Political Affects and Post-Truth Democracies

Although populism is not a new phenomena, its rise in the aftermath of the financial crisis presents some novelties that are worth exploring. Mostly, they refer to the transformation of the public sphere in the digital era, which has changed how political actors and citizens relate to each other and hence the discursive and non-discursive practices chosen by the former. This includes a more direct communication between populist leaders and their base, the creation of channels that sideline those of the mainstream media, as well as the emergence of "post-truth" as a framework that gives new value to narratives as conveyors of political values that disrupt established social conventions. In order to understand these features -which, their novelty notwithstanding, do not change populism's "thin" ideological core- attention is due to the emotional dimension of populist practices. Strictly speaking, they are not new: new are the lens through which we observe them after the affective turn experienced by social sciences in the last decade. Yet social networks are in themselves rather affective technologies, fostering an emotionally charged communication and facilitating the means by which individuals can feel engaged with their "moral tribe" -isolating themselves from other discourses or narratives. This paper will reflect upon these transformations from the vantage point of political theory, emphasizing how the digitization of the public sphere has influenced the way in which populist actors across liberal democracies create their publics and address them, as well as the increasing relevance of affects in explanations about political life.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

On the Concept of Snowball Sampling

This brief comment reflects on the historical and current uses of the term "snowball sampling."Comment: 5 pages, 0 figures. To appear in Sociological Methodolog

Does Campaigning on Social Media Make a Difference? Evidence from candidate use of Twitter during the 2015 and 2017 UK Elections

Social media are now a routine part of political campaigns all over the world. However, studies of the impact of campaigning on social platform have thus far been limited to cross-sectional datasets from one election period which are vulnerable to unobserved variable bias. Hence empirical evidence on the effectiveness of political social media activity is thin. We address this deficit by analysing a novel panel dataset of political Twitter activity in the 2015 and 2017 elections in the United Kingdom. We find that Twitter based campaigning does seem to help win votes, a finding which is consistent across a variety of different model specifications including a first difference regression. The impact of Twitter use is small in absolute terms, though comparable with that of campaign spending. Our data also support the idea that effects are mediated through other communication channels, hence challenging the relevance of engaging in an interactive fashion

Searching for superspreaders of information in real-world social media

A number of predictors have been suggested to detect the most influential spreaders of information in online social media across various domains such as Twitter or Facebook. In particular, degree, PageRank, k-core and other centralities have been adopted to rank the spreading capability of users in information dissemination media. So far, validation of the proposed predictors has been done by simulating the spreading dynamics rather than following real information flow in social networks. Consequently, only model-dependent contradictory results have been achieved so far for the best predictor. Here, we address this issue directly. We search for influential spreaders by following the real spreading dynamics in a wide range of networks. We find that the widely-used degree and PageRank fail in ranking users' influence. We find that the best spreaders are consistently located in the k-core across dissimilar social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal and scientific publishing in the American Physical Society. Furthermore, when the complete global network structure is unavailable, we find that the sum of the nearest neighbors' degree is a reliable local proxy for user's influence. Our analysis provides practical instructions for optimal design of strategies for "viral" information dissemination in relevant applications.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure