3,658 research outputs found
Measuring Social Well Being in The Big Data Era: Asking or Listening?
The literature on well being measurement seems to suggest that "asking" for a
self-evaluation is the only way to estimate a complete and reliable measure of
well being. At the same time "not asking" is the only way to avoid biased
evaluations due to self-reporting. Here we propose a method for estimating the
welfare perception of a community simply "listening" to the conversations on
Social Network Sites. The Social Well Being Index (SWBI) and its components are
proposed through to an innovative technique of supervised sentiment analysis
called iSA which scales to any language and big data. As main methodological
advantages, this approach can estimate several aspects of social well being
directly from self-declared perceptions, instead of approximating it through
objective (but partial) quantitative variables like GDP; moreover
self-perceptions of welfare are spontaneous and not obtained as answers to
explicit questions that are proved to bias the result. As an application we
evaluate the SWBI in Italy through the period 2012-2015 through the analysis of
more than 143 millions of tweets.Comment: 40 pages, 2 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:1512.0156
Hate Speech and Polarization in Participatory Society
This timely volume offers a comprehensive and rigorous overview of the role of communication in the construction of hate speech and polarization in the online and offline arena. Delving into the meanings, implications, contexts and effects of extreme speech and gated communities in the media landscape, the chapters analyse misleading metaphors and rhetoric via focused case studies to understand how we can overcome the risks and threats stemming from the past decade’s defining communicative phenomena. The book brings together an international team of experts, enabling a broad, multidisciplinary approach that examines hate speech, dislike, polarization and enclave deliberation as cross axes that influence offline and digital conversations. The diverse case studies herein offer insights into international news media, television drama and social media in a range of contexts, suggesting an academic frame of reference for examining this emerging phenomenon within the field of communication studies. Offering thoughtful and much-needed analysis, this collection will be of great interest to scholars and students working in communication studies, media studies, journalism, sociology, political science, political communication and cultural industries
Quantifying polarization across political groups on key policy issues using sentiment analysis
There is growing concern that over the past decade, industrialized democratic
nations are becoming increasingly politically polarized. Indeed, elections in
the US, UK, France, and Germany have all seen tightly won races, with notable
examples including the 2016 Trump vs. Clinton presidential election and the
UK's Brexit referendum. However, while there has been much qualitative
discussion of polarization on key issues, there are few examples of formal
quantitative assessments examining this topic. Therefore, in this paper, we
undertake a statistical evaluation of political polarization for
representatives elected to the US congress on key policy issues between
2021-2022. The method is based on applying sentiment analysis to Twitter data
and developing quantitative analysis for six political groupings defined based
on voting records. Two sets of policy groups are explored, including
geopolitical policies (e.g., Ukraine-Russia, China, Taiwan, etc.) and domestic
policies (e.g., abortion, climate change, LGBTQ, immigration, etc.). We find
that out of the twelve policies explored here, gun control was the most
politically polarizing, with significant polarization results found for all
groups (four of which were P < 0.001). The next most polarizing issues include
immigration and border control, fossil fuels, and Ukraine-Russia.
Interestingly, the least polarized policy topics were Taiwan, LGBTQ, and the
Chinese Communist Party, potentially demonstrating the highest degree of
bipartisanship on these issues. The results can be used to guide future policy
making, by helping to identify areas of common ground across political groups.Comment: 31 pages, 7 figure
Examining the influence of Moral Foundations on Polarization in Social Media Discourse: A context of vigilantism
In August 2022, Kyle Rittenhouse\u27s vigilantism in Kenosha, Wisconsin, resulted in two fatalities and one injury, sparking heightened public security concerns and eliciting intense moral reactions. These moral impulses tend to contribute to extreme judgments of right or wrong, thereby fostering polarization on social media. The phenomenon of polarization, recognized as a component of social cybersecurity, has recently gained attention. This study explores the impact of five Moral Foundations on polarization following vigilantism, utilizing moral foundation theory and vector autoregression (VAR) in the analysis of social media discourse. Our findings reveal that these Moral Foundations significantly influence polarization dynamics. This insight holds implications for both research and the development of practical strategies for managing the societal consequences of polarization on social media
Trolling Twitter
Political polarization is a defining feature of the contemporary American political landscape. While there is little doubt that elite polarization levels have risen dramatically in recent decades, there is some debate over the existence of a corresponding rise in mass polarization. Recent scholarship on mass polarization has cited evidence related to citizens’ positions on public policy issues, party sorting, and geographic polarization; however, questions remain as to the nature and extent of mass polarization in online spaces. Specifically, more needs to be known regarding how expressions of elite polarization influence the formation of polarized communities within social media.
This dissertation examines the question: Does elite polarization contribute to mass polarization in social media? This question is approached in three stages. First, this dissertation tests whether or not a causal link between elite and mass polarization strengthens with temporal proximity to highly politicized and potentially polarizing events over the span of the 2016 Republican presidential primary. Second, this dissertation examines the instant effects of elite polarization by examining a minute-by-minute live stream of reactions on Twitter during the first 2016 presidential debate. Third, this dissertation tests a contemporary theory which claims a presidential candidate’s patterns of speech sows the seeds of mass polarization in the form of resentment, fear, or incivility.
This dissertation also employs the use of network analysis tools to measure the extent to which polarized communities form on social media in response to elite cues. The nature of such causal relationships provides insight into the influence polarizing messages by elites may have on mass polarization while taking into consideration the unique characteristics of the social media communications environment. In doing so, this dissertation offers a blueprint for future researchers who seek to better understand how networked technologies shape human interactions
Literature Review: Courageous Dialogues - Moving Beyond Polarization
Rural ResilienceCourageous Dialogue
Hate Speech and Polarization in Participatory Society
This timely volume offers a comprehensive and rigorous overview of the role of communication in the construction of hate speech and polarization in the online and offline arena. Delving into the meanings, implications, contexts and effects of extreme speech and gated communities in the media landscape, the chapters analyse misleading metaphors and rhetoric via focused case studies to understand how we can overcome the risks and threats stemming from the past decade’s defining communicative phenomena. The book brings together an international team of experts, enabling a broad, multidisciplinary approach that examines hate speech, dislike, polarization and enclave deliberation as cross axes that influence offline and digital conversations. The diverse case studies herein offer insights into international news media, television drama and social media in a range of contexts, suggesting an academic frame of reference for examining this emerging phenomenon within the field of communication studies. Offering thoughtful and much-needed analysis, this collection will be of great interest to scholars and students working in communication studies, media studies, journalism, sociology, political science, political communication and cultural industries
Islam as the Folk Devil : Hashtag Publics and the Fabrication of Civilizationism in a Post-Terror Populist Moment
With a focus on Twitter, this article investigates the populist moment triggered by a violent attack in the Northern European city of Turku, Finland, in August 2017. The article uses a mixed-method approach that applies a computational method for data collection and qualitative discursive mapping for data analysis. Moreover, the article applies Laclau's non-essentialist framework for theorizing on populism in connection to religion and critically discusses the types of religious implications identified in the "us" constructed in negation to Islam and the discursively constructed " bad" Muslim Other. The article suggests "civilizationism" and the related "Christianism" as potential schemas for advancing scholarly theorizing on the digital intersections between populism and religion, particularly in the present Northern European political context.Peer reviewe
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