Controversy on Social Media: Collective Attention, Echo Chambers, and Price of Bipartisanship

How do we discuss controversial topics on social media?
Answering this question is not only interesting from a societal point of view, but also has concrete implications for policy makers, news agencies, and internet companies.
 
In this talk, we first take a look at how collective attention, which is typically related to external events that increase the visibility of the topic, changes the debate. Our analysis shows that, in long-lived controversial debates on Twitter, increased collective attention is associated with increased network polarization.
 
Then, we show how content and network interact in the formation of echo chambers. As expected, Twitter users are mostly exposed to political opinions that agree with their own. In addition, users who try to bridge the echo chambers by sharing content with diverse leaning have to pay a “price of bipartisanship” in terms of their network centrality and content appreciation.

Gianmarco De Francisci Morales is a Research Leader at ISI Foundation in Turin. Previously he worked as a Scientist at Qatar Computing Research Institute in Doha, as a Visiting Scientist at Aalto University in Helsinki, as a Research Scientist at Yahoo Labs in Barcelona, and as a Research Associate at ISTI-CNR in Pisa. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the IMT Institute for Advanced Studies of Lucca in 2012. His research focuses on scalable data mining, with an emphasis on Web mining and data-intensive scalable computing systems. He is one of the lead developers of Apache SAMOA, an open-source platform for mining big data streams. He co-organizes the workshop series on Social News on the Web (SNOW), co-located with the WWW conference. He has won best paper awards at WSDM and WebSci.