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Drivers of Polarized Discussions on Twitter during Venezuela Political Crisis

Published: 22 June 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Social media activity is driven by real-world events (natural disasters, political unrest, etc.) and by processes within the platform itself (viral content, posts by influentials, etc). Understanding how these different factors affect social media conversations in polarized communities has practical implications, from identifying polarizing users to designing content promotion algorithms that alleviate polarization. Based on two datasets that record real-world events (ACLED and GDELT), we investigate how internal and external factors drive related Twitter activity in the highly polarizing context of the Venezuela’s political crisis from early 2019. Our findings show that antagonistic communities react differently to different exogenous sources depending on the language they tweet. The engagement of influential users within particular topics seem to match the different levels of polarization observed in the networks.

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Drivers of Polarized Discussions on Twitter during Venezuela Political Crisis

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Digital authoritarianism: a systematic literature reviewInformation Technology for Development10.1080/02681102.2024.2425352(1-25)Online publication date: 24-Nov-2024
  • (2023)Modeling information diffusion in social media: data-driven observationsFrontiers in Big Data10.3389/fdata.2023.11351916Online publication date: 17-May-2023
  • (2023)TwiSP: a framework for exploring polarized issues in TwitterProceedings of the 16th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance10.1145/3614321.3614324(16-23)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2023
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Conferences
WebSci '21: Proceedings of the 13th ACM Web Science Conference 2021
June 2021
328 pages
ISBN:9781450383301
DOI:10.1145/3447535
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 22 June 2021

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Author Tags

  1. Polarization
  2. Twitter
  3. Venezuela

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WebSci '21
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WebSci '21: WebSci '21 13th ACM Web Science Conference 2021
June 21 - 25, 2021
Virtual Event, United Kingdom

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Digital authoritarianism: a systematic literature reviewInformation Technology for Development10.1080/02681102.2024.2425352(1-25)Online publication date: 24-Nov-2024
  • (2023)Modeling information diffusion in social media: data-driven observationsFrontiers in Big Data10.3389/fdata.2023.11351916Online publication date: 17-May-2023
  • (2023)TwiSP: a framework for exploring polarized issues in TwitterProceedings of the 16th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance10.1145/3614321.3614324(16-23)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2023
  • (2023)Discovery and characterisation of socially polarised communities on social mediaScientific Reports10.1038/s41598-023-42592-213:1Online publication date: 18-Sep-2023
  • (2022)Social media activity forecasting with exogenous and endogenous signalsSocial Network Analysis and Mining10.1007/s13278-022-00927-312:1Online publication date: 8-Aug-2022

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