arXiv AI

Measuring climate backlash in Twitter and Reddit archives: Lexical definitions, recorded responses and participant turnover

The study analyzes four Twitter and Reddit archives to examine how lexical definitions, recorded responses, and participant turnover affect measurements of climate backlash. By applying transparent, non-exclusive lexical rules to all registered files, the authors link frame co-occurrence to source-specific temporal and response models, revealing that renewable‑energy terms co‑occur with cost‑related language on Reddit, while narrower backlash phrases reverse the Paris Agreement contrast. The research shows that returning‑author expression and participant turnover both contribute to increased protest‑language shares around the 2019 global climate strike, and that operational definitions and platform‑specific response fields shape what can be claimed about climate backlash. whyItMatters":"The findings highlight that how data are defined and processed can significantly alter conclusions about climate backlash, underscoring the need for careful methodological transparency in social media research."

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

Paid Voices vs. Public Feeds: Interpretable Cross-Platform Theme-Based Analysis of Climate Discourse

arXiv:2601. 13317v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Climate discourse online shapes public understanding of climate change and informs political and policy debate, yet it unfolds across structurally different environments: paid advertising platforms host targeted, institutionally produced messaging, while public social media reflects largely organic, user-driven discussion.

By Samantha Sudhoff, Pranav Perumal, Zhaoqing Wu, Tunazzina Islam
arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

High prevalence of antagonizing rhetoric in trending topics on Twitter/X

The study introduces a computational method to distinguish between antagonizing and criticizing rhetoric in political discourse on Twitter/X. Analyzing over 17 million tweets from German trending topics, it finds that roughly one‑third contain antagonizing rhetoric, which is more prevalent in trending discussions than in general Twitter traffic. Right‑leaning users use antagonizing language more than left‑leaning users, and both forms of rhetoric are amplified within political camps, with certain parties—AfD and the Greens—emerging as primary antagonists.

By Armin Pournaki, Eckehard Olbrich
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 7

Inductive Claims Extraction at Scale

arXiv:2610.05275v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A large part of political discourse on social media is built and expressed at a level of claims: i.e. declarative, typically single-clause statemen...

By Sandrine Chausson, Bj\"orn Ross
arXiv AI
Jul 21

Posts of Peril: Detecting Information About Hazards in Text

arXiv:2405. 17838v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Socio-linguistic indicators of affectively-relevant phenomena, such as emotion or sentiment, are often extracted from text to better understand features of human-computer interactions, including on social media.

By Keith Burghardt, Daniel M. T. Fessler, Chyna Tang, Anne Pisor, Kristina Lerman
arXiv AI
2d ago

Political Narratives in the 2024 Moldovan Presidential Election: Stance, Amplification, and Influence

The study examines how political narratives formed and spread on X, Facebook, and Reddit during the 2024 Moldovan presidential election. Using multilingual stance detection, network analysis, and causal inference, it finds distinct cross‑platform differences in positions on European integration, Russia, and the candidates, and shows that amplification and peer exposure significantly reinforce these narratives. This is the first comprehensive analysis of social media discourse for this election, highlighting the role of language, network dynamics, and causal effects in shaping political influence.

By Andrea Piras, Osman Rahmoun, Elena Zheleva
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 20

Global Crises and National Policies: A Large Scale Analysis of Political Content in German Language Online Media

The study analyzes millions of German-language online articles and tweets from 2019–2022 to uncover political biases using automated text analysis. It finds that international events such as the COVID‑19 pandemic and the Ukraine war create thematic convergence between German and Swiss media, while domestic policy differences drive divergence in locally focused topics. Newspapers maintain more stable political content, whereas Twitter shows rapid, event‑driven spikes, illustrating how media platforms differ in intensity and timing.

By Yara D\"oring, Felix Bie{\ss}mann
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

The Illinois Social Attitudes Aggregate Corpus (ISAAC): An Open Tool and Reproducible Pipeline for Analyzing Social Group Discourse at Scale

The Illinois Social Attitudes Aggregate Corpus (ISAAC) is an open, modular corpus comprising over 527 million English‑language Reddit posts from 2007 to 2023, curated for relevance to six social group distinctions—race, sexuality, age, ability, body weight, and skin tone. A multi‑step, human‑audited filtering pipeline keeps irrelevant content below 10% overall and per group, while each post receives algorithmic annotations of user home region and a suite of validated semantic labels such as moralization, sentiment, emotion, and linguistic generalization. ISAAC’s publicly available, reproducible pipeline enables cross‑category comparisons, high‑precision tracking of long‑term temporal shifts, and spatial mapping of public opinion and policy outcomes, and can be extended to new platforms, languages, and social categories via both point‑and‑click and programmatic interfaces.

By Babak Hemmatian, Sarah Hadjarab, Jessica Chen, Benedek Kurdi
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

Unifying Models of Intergroup Hostility in Online Discourse

The paper examines how six foundational theories of intergroup hostility—boundary construction, threat construction, scapegoating, negative evaluation, dehumanization, and action orientation—manifest in online discourse. Using 2.86 million posts from TikTok, Truth Social, and Twitter/X during the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the authors model these mechanisms within a common empirical framework and find that boundary and threat construction anchor the system, with a regular temporal ordering of rhetorical strategies. The study maps theoretical frameworks onto real-world discourse, offering a clearer empirical basis for computational social science to model intergroup hostility beyond single-label detection.

By Patrick Gerard, Julia Mendelsohn, Kristina Lerman