2,664 research outputs found
Uncovering the Wider Structure of Extreme Right Communities Spanning Popular Online Networks
Recent years have seen increased interest in the online presence of extreme
right groups. Although originally composed of dedicated websites, the online
extreme right milieu now spans multiple networks, including popular social
media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Ideally therefore, any
contemporary analysis of online extreme right activity requires the
consideration of multiple data sources, rather than being restricted to a
single platform. We investigate the potential for Twitter to act as a gateway
to communities within the wider online network of the extreme right, given its
facility for the dissemination of content. A strategy for representing
heterogeneous network data with a single homogeneous network for the purpose of
community detection is presented, where these inherently dynamic communities
are tracked over time. We use this strategy to discover and analyze persistent
English and German language extreme right communities.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figures. Due to use of "sigchi" template, minor changes
were made to ensure 10 page limit was not exceeded. Minor clarifications in
Introduction, Data and Methodology section
Uncovering the wider structure of extreme right communities spanning popular online networks
AbstractRecent years have seen increased interest in the online presence of extreme right groups. Although originally composed of dedicated websites, the online extreme right milieu now spans multiple networks, including popular social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Ideally therefore, any contemporary analysis of online extreme right activity requires the consideration of multiple data sources, rather than being restricted to a single platform.We investigate the potential for Twitter to act as one possible gateway to communities within the wider online network of the extreme right, given its facility for the dissemination of content. A strategy for representing heterogeneous network data with a single homogeneous network for the purpose of community detection is presented, where these inherently dynamic communities are tracked over time. We use this strategy to discover and analyze persistent English and German language extreme right communities.Authored by Derek O’Callaghan, Derek Greene, Maura Conway, Joe Carthy and Padraig Cunningham
TIMME: Twitter Ideology-detection via Multi-task Multi-relational Embedding
We aim at solving the problem of predicting people's ideology, or political
tendency. We estimate it by using Twitter data, and formalize it as a
classification problem. Ideology-detection has long been a challenging yet
important problem. Certain groups, such as the policy makers, rely on it to
make wise decisions. Back in the old days when labor-intensive survey-studies
were needed to collect public opinions, analyzing ordinary citizens' political
tendencies was uneasy. The rise of social medias, such as Twitter, has enabled
us to gather ordinary citizen's data easily. However, the incompleteness of the
labels and the features in social network datasets is tricky, not to mention
the enormous data size and the heterogeneousity. The data differ dramatically
from many commonly-used datasets, thus brings unique challenges. In our work,
first we built our own datasets from Twitter. Next, we proposed TIMME, a
multi-task multi-relational embedding model, that works efficiently on
sparsely-labeled heterogeneous real-world dataset. It could also handle the
incompleteness of the input features. Experimental results showed that TIMME is
overall better than the state-of-the-art models for ideology detection on
Twitter. Our findings include: links can lead to good classification outcomes
without text; conservative voice is under-represented on Twitter; follow is the
most important relation to predict ideology; retweet and mention enhance a
higher chance of like, etc. Last but not least, TIMME could be extended to
other datasets and tasks in theory.Comment: In proceedings of KDD'20, Applied Data Science Track; 9 pages, 2
supplementary page
DoubleH: Twitter User Stance Detection via Bipartite Graph Neural Networks
Given the development and abundance of social media, studying the stance of
social media users is a challenging and pressing issue. Social media users
express their stance by posting tweets and retweeting. Therefore, the
homogeneous relationship between users and the heterogeneous relationship
between users and tweets are relevant for the stance detection task. Recently,
graph neural networks (GNNs) have developed rapidly and have been applied to
social media research. In this paper, we crawl a large-scale dataset of the
2020 US presidential election and automatically label all users by manually
tagged hashtags. Subsequently, we propose a bipartite graph neural network
model, DoubleH, which aims to better utilize homogeneous and heterogeneous
information in user stance detection tasks. Specifically, we first construct a
bipartite graph based on posting and retweeting relations for two kinds of
nodes, including users and tweets. We then iteratively update the node's
representation by extracting and separately processing heterogeneous and
homogeneous information in the node's neighbors. Finally, the representations
of user nodes are used for user stance classification. Experimental results
show that DoubleH outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on popular
benchmarks. Further analysis illustrates the model's utilization of information
and demonstrates stability and efficiency at different numbers of layers
From which world is your graph?
Discovering statistical structure from links is a fundamental problem in the
analysis of social networks. Choosing a misspecified model, or equivalently, an
incorrect inference algorithm will result in an invalid analysis or even
falsely uncover patterns that are in fact artifacts of the model. This work
focuses on unifying two of the most widely used link-formation models: the
stochastic blockmodel (SBM) and the small world (or latent space) model (SWM).
Integrating techniques from kernel learning, spectral graph theory, and
nonlinear dimensionality reduction, we develop the first statistically sound
polynomial-time algorithm to discover latent patterns in sparse graphs for both
models. When the network comes from an SBM, the algorithm outputs a block
structure. When it is from an SWM, the algorithm outputs estimates of each
node's latent position.Comment: To appear in NIPS 201
Detecting Political Framing Shifts and the Adversarial Phrases within\\ Rival Factions and Ranking Temporal Snapshot Contents in Social Media
abstract: Social Computing is an area of computer science concerned with dynamics of communities and cultures, created through computer-mediated social interaction. Various social media platforms, such as social network services and microblogging, enable users to come together and create social movements expressing their opinions on diverse sets of issues, events, complaints, grievances, and goals. Methods for monitoring and summarizing these types of sociopolitical trends, its leaders and followers, messages, and dynamics are needed. In this dissertation, a framework comprising of community and content-based computational methods is presented to provide insights for multilingual and noisy political social media content. First, a model is developed to predict the emergence of viral hashtag breakouts, using network features. Next, another model is developed to detect and compare individual and organizational accounts, by using a set of domain and language-independent features. The third model exposes contentious issues, driving reactionary dynamics between opposing camps. The fourth model develops community detection and visualization methods to reveal underlying dynamics and key messages that drive dynamics. The final model presents a use case methodology for detecting and monitoring foreign influence, wherein a state actor and news media under its control attempt to shift public opinion by framing information to support multiple adversarial narratives that facilitate their goals. In each case, a discussion of novel aspects and contributions of the models is presented, as well as quantitative and qualitative evaluations. An analysis of multiple conflict situations will be conducted, covering areas in the UK, Bangladesh, Libya and the Ukraine where adversarial framing lead to polarization, declines in social cohesion, social unrest, and even civil wars (e.g., Libya and the Ukraine).Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201
Stance Polarity in Political Debates: a Diachronic Perspective of Network Homophily and Conversations on Twitter
[EN] In the last decade, social media gained a very significant role in public debates, and despite the many intrinsic difficulties of analyzing data streaming from on-line platforms that are poisoned by bots, trolls, and low-quality information, it is undeniable that such data can still be used to test the public opinion and overall mood and to investigate how individuals communicate with each other. With the aim of analyzing the debate in Twitter on the 2016 referendum on the reform of the Italian Constitution, we created an Italian annotated corpus for stance detection for automatically estimating the stance of a relevant number of users. We take into account a diachronic perspective to shed lights on users' opinion dynamics. Furthermore, different types of social network communities, based on friendships, retweets, quotes, and replies were investigated, in order to analyze the communication among users with similar and divergent viewpoints. We observe particular aspects of users' behavior. First, our analysis suggests that users tend to be less explicit in expressing their stances after the outcome of the vote; simultaneously, users who exhibit a high number of cross-stance relations tend to become less polarized or to adopt a more neutral style in the following phase of the debate. Second, despite social media networks are generally aggregated in homogeneous communities, we highlight that the structure of the network can strongly change when different types of social relations are considered. In particular, networks defined by means of reply-to messages exhibit inverse homophily by stance, and users use more often replies for expressing diverging opinions, instead of other forms of communication. Interestingly, we also observe that the political polarization increases forthcoming the election and decreases after the election day.The work of Viviana Patti and Giancarlo Ruffo was partially funded by the Fondazione CRT under research project the Hate Speech and Social Media (2016.0688), and the "Progetto di Ateneo/CSP 2016" under research project "Immigrants, Hate and Prejudice in Social Media" (S1618_L2_BOSC_01). The work of Paolo Rosso was partially funded by the Spanish MICINN under the research project "MISMIS-FAKEnHATE on Misinformation and Miscommunication in social media: FAKE news and HATE speech" (PGC2018-096212-B-C31).Lai, M.; Tambuscio, M.; Patti, V.; Ruffo, G.; Rosso, P. (2019). Stance Polarity in Political Debates: a Diachronic Perspective of Network Homophily and Conversations on Twitter. Data & Knowledge Engineering. 124:1-20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.datak.2019.101738S12012
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