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Political polarization and popularity in online participatory media: an integrated approach

Published: 02 November 2012 Publication History

Abstract

We present our approach to online popularity and its applications to political science, aiming at the creation of agent-based models that reproduce patterns of popularity in participatory media. We illustrate our approach analyzing a dataset from Youtube, composed of the view statistics and comments for the videos of the U.S. presidential campaigns of 2008 and 2012. Using sentiment analysis, we quantify the collective emotions expressed by the viewers, finding that democrat campaigns elicited more positive collective emotions than republican campaigns. Techniques from computational social science allow us to measure virality of the videos of each campaign, to find that democrat videos are shared faster but republican ones are remembered longer inside the community. Last we present our work in progress in voting advice applications, and our results analyzing the data from choose4greece.com. We show how we assess the policy differences between parties and their voters, and how voting advice applications can be extended to test our agent-based models.

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        PLEAD '12: Proceedings of the first edition workshop on Politics, elections and data
        November 2012
        44 pages
        ISBN:9781450317139
        DOI:10.1145/2389661
        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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        Published: 02 November 2012

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        Author Tags

        1. agent-based modelling
        2. emotion
        3. internet
        4. politics
        5. popularity

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        PLEAD '12 Paper Acceptance Rate 6 of 8 submissions, 75%;
        Overall Acceptance Rate 9 of 18 submissions, 50%

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        • (2022)Polarization of Opinions on COVID-19 Measures: Integrating Twitter and Survey DataSocial Science Computer Review10.1177/0894439322108766241:5(1811-1835)Online publication date: 5-May-2022
        • (2022)Comparing Online and Offline Political SupportSwiss Political Science Review10.1111/spsr.1252428:4(604-623)Online publication date: 29-May-2022
        • (2021)Shadowing and shielding: Effective heuristics for continuous influence maximisation in the voting dynamicsPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.025251516:6(e0252515)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2021
        • (2021)Enhanced or distorted wisdom of crowds? An agent-based model of opinion formation under social influenceSwarm Intelligence10.1007/s11721-021-00189-3Online publication date: 7-May-2021
        • (2020)A Search for Optimal Feature in Political Sentiment Analysis2020 IEEE International Women in Engineering (WIE) Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering (WIECON-ECE)10.1109/WIECON-ECE52138.2020.9397966(340-343)Online publication date: 26-Dec-2020
        • (2020)A Comparison of Machine Learning Algorithms Applied to American Legislature Polarization2020 IEEE 21st International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration for Data Science (IRI)10.1109/IRI49571.2020.00075(451-456)Online publication date: Aug-2020
        • (2020)Political Polarization on the Digital Sphere: A Cross-platform, Over-time Analysis of Interactional, Positional, and Affective Polarization on Social MediaPolitical Communication10.1080/10584609.2020.1785067(1-42)Online publication date: 14-Jul-2020
        • (2018)Community Interaction and Conflict on the WebProceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference10.1145/3178876.3186141(933-943)Online publication date: 10-Apr-2018
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