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SUMMARY:IC Colloquium: Quantifying social organization and political polar
 ization in online platforms
DTSTART:20211209T161500
DTEND:20211209T171500
DTSTAMP:20260407T095659Z
UID:39e9d2e3e49b65815909b7fb581c802dcea8c7df040a87df06aae8aa
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:By: Ashton Anderson - University of Toronto\nVideo of his tal
 k\n\nAbstract\nVia mass selection into like-minded groups\, online society
  may be becoming more fragmented and polarized\, particularly with respect
  to partisan differences. However\, our ability to measure the social make
 up of online communities\, and in turn understand the social organization 
 of online platforms\, is limited by the pseudonymous\, unstructured\, and 
 large-scale nature of digital discussion. We develop a neural embedding m
 ethodology to quantify the positioning of online communities along social 
 dimensions by leveraging large-scale patterns of aggregate behaviour. App
 lying our methodology to 5.1B Reddit comments made in 10K communities over
  14 years\, we measure how the macroscale community structure is organized
  with respect to age\, gender\, and U.S. political partisanship. Examinin
 g political content\, we find Reddit underwent a significant polarization 
 event around the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Contrary to conventiona
 l wisdom\, however\, individual-level polarization is rare\; the system-le
 vel shift in 2016 was disproportionately driven by the arrival of new user
 s. Political polarization on Reddit is unrelated to previous activity on 
 the platform\, and is instead temporally aligned with external events. \n
 We also observe a stark ideological asymmetry\, with the sharp increase in
  2016 being entirely attributable to changes in right-wing activity. Our m
 ethodology is broadly applicable to the study of online interaction\, and 
 our findings have implications for the design of online platforms\, unders
 tanding the social contexts of online behaviour\, and quantifying the dyna
 mics and mechanisms of online polarization.\n\nBio\nAshton Anderson is an
  Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto\, wh
 ere he is also a Faculty Affiliate with the Vector Institute and the Schwa
 rtz-Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. He received his PhD from
  Stanford University in 2015 and completed a postdoctoral appointment at M
 icrosoft Research NYC in 2017. His research in computational social scienc
 e encompasses a diverse range of questions at the intersection of AI\, dat
 a\, and society. His work has appeared in venues including the Proceedings
  of the National Academy of Sciences\, the International Conference on Mac
 hine Learning\, and the Web Conference. \n\nMore information
LOCATION:https://epfl.zoom.us/j/64764463342?pwd=L0htWGlGa2dsWkhoWVlwY3Vxcn
 FYZz09
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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