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 socio-cognitive biases, dueling campaign efforts, and social media platforms. We examine this complex socio-political process by integrating observed retweet networks from the 2016 political networks with an agent-based model of political opinion formation and network structure. Here we show that the range of political viewpoints individuals are willing to consider is a key determinant in the formation of polarized networks and the emergence of echo chambers. We also find that winning majority support in public discourse is determined by both the effort exerted by campaigns and the relative ideological positioning of opposing campaigns. Our results demonstrate how public discourse and political polarization can be modeled as an interactive process of shifting individual opinions, evolving social networks, and political campaigns.
Purpose: In the tradition of Spencer Brown's (1969) Laws of Form, observation was defined in Luhmann's (1984) social systems theory as the designation of a distinction. In the sociological design, however, the designation specifies only a category for the observation. The distinction between observation and expectation enables the sociologist to appreciate the processing of meaning in social systems. Design: The specification of "the observer" in the tradition of systems theory is analyzed in historical detail. Inconsistencies and differences in perspectives are explicated, and the specificity…
The intellectual organization of the sciences cannot be appreciated sufficiently unless the cognitive dimension is considered as an independent source of variance. Cognitive structures interact and co-construct the organization of scholars and discourses into research programs, specialties, and disciplines. In the sociology of scientific knowledge and the sociology of translation, these heterogeneous sources of variance have been homogenized a priori in the concepts of practices and actor-networks. Practices and actor-networks, however, can be explained in terms of the self-organization of the…
Actors are embedded in networks of communication: the relations of the actors can be represented as the rows of a matrix, while the column vectors represent their communications. The two systems are structurally coupled in the co-variation: each action can be considered as a communication with reference to the network. Co-variation among systems if repeated over time, may lead to co-evolution. Conditions for stabilization of higher-order systems are specifiable: segmentation, stratification, reflection, differentiation, and self-organization can be distinguished in terms of developmental stage…
Echo chambers in online social networks, in which users prefer to interact only with ideologically-aligned peers, are believed to facilitate misinformation spreading and contribute to radicalize political discourse. In this paper, we gauge the effects of echo chambers in information spreading phenomena over political communication networks. Mining 12 million Twitter messages, we reconstruct a network in which users interchange opinions related to the impeachment of the former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. We define a continuous {political position} parameter, independent of the network's…
Echo chambers and opinion polarization recently quantified in several sociopolitical contexts and across different social media, raise concerns on their potential impact on the spread of misinformation and on openness of debates. Despite increasing efforts, the dynamics leading to the emergence of these phenomena stay unclear. We propose a model that introduces the dynamics of radicalization, as a reinforcing mechanism driving the evolution to extreme opinions from moderate initial conditions. Inspired by empirical findings on social interaction dynamics, we consider agents characterized by he…
Echo chambers in online social networks, whereby users' beliefs are reinforced by interactions with like-minded peers and insulation from others' points of view, have been decried as a cause of political polarization. Here, we investigate their role in the debate around the 2016 US elections on Reddit, a fundamental platform for the success of Donald Trump. We identify Trump vs Clinton supporters and reconstruct their political interaction network. We observe a preference for cross-cutting political interactions between the two communities rather than within-group interactions, thus contradict…
Scientific education and divulgation not only amplify people's vocabulary and repertory of scientific concepts but, at the same time, promote the diffusion of certain conceptual and cognitive metaphors. Here we make some hypothesis about this process, proposing a classification in terms of visible, invisible, basic and derived metaphors. We focus our attention in contemporary and classical physics metaphors applied to psychological and socio-economical phenomena, and we study two exemplar cases through an exhaustive exam of the online content of large Brazilian journalistic portals. Finally, w…
In social networks, users often engage with like-minded peers. This selective exposure to opinions might result in echo chambers, i.e., political fragmentation and social polarization of user interactions. When echo chambers form, opinions have a bimodal distribution with two peaks on opposite sides. In certain issues, where either extreme positions contain a degree of misinformation, neutral consensus is preferable for promoting discourse. In this paper, we use an opinion dynamics model that naturally forms echo chambers in order to find a feedback mechanism that bridges these communities and…
The rising attention to the spreading of fake news and unsubstantiated rumors on online social media and the pivotal role played by confirmation bias led researchers to investigate different aspects of the phenomenon. Experimental evidence showed that confirmatory information gets accepted even if containing deliberately false claims while dissenting information is mainly ignored or might even increase group polarization. It seems reasonable that, to address misinformation problem properly, we have to understand the main determinants behind content consumption and the emergence of narratives o…
Online social networks have emerged as a significant platform for political discourse. In this paper we investigate what affects the level of participation of users in the political discussion. Specifically, are users more likely to be active when they are surrounded by like-minded individuals, or, alternatively, when their environment is heterogeneous, and so their messages might be carried to people with differing views. To answer this question, we analyzed the activity of about 200K Twitter users who expressed explicit support for one of the candidates of the 2012 US presidential election. …
Guanxi, roughly translated as "social connection", is a term commonly used in the Chinese language. In this research, we employed a linguistic approach to explore popular discourses on Guanxi. Although sharing the same Confucian roots, Chinese communities inside and outside Mainland China have undergone different historical trajectories. Hence, we took a comparative approach to examine guanxi in Mainland China and in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau (TW-HK-M). Comparing guanxi discourses in two Chinese societies aims at revealing the divergence of guanxi culture. The data for this research were co…
Climate change and political polarisation are two of the 21st century's critical socio-political issues. Here, we investigate their intersection by studying the discussion around the UN Conference of The Parties on Climate Change (COP) using Twitter data from 2014 to 2021. First, we reveal a large increase in ideological polarisation during COP26, following low polarisation between COP20 and COP25. Second, we show that this increase is driven by growing right-wing activity, a 4-fold increase since COP21 relative to pro-climate groups. Finally, we identify a broad range of ''climate contrarian'…
In recent years researchers have gravitated to social media platforms, especially Twitter, as fertile ground for empirical analysis of social phenomena. Social media provides researchers access to trace data of interactions and discourse that once went unrecorded in the offline world. Researchers have sought to use these data to explain social phenomena both particular to social media and applicable to the broader social world. This paper offers a minireview of Twitter-based research on political crowd behavior. This literature offers insight into particular social phenomena on Twitter, but of…
