Unpacking polarization: Antagonism and Alignment in Signed Networks of Online Interaction
Emma Fraxanet, Max Pellert, Simon Schweighofer, Vicen\c{c} G\'omez,, David Garcia

TL;DR
This paper introduces FAULTANA, a computational pipeline to identify and analyze major fault lines and polarization in signed online interactions, revealing how issues and conflicts align with societal divides.
Contribution
The paper presents a novel method, FAULTANA, for uncovering and quantifying fault lines and polarization in online debate data, with applications to real-world social media communities.
Findings
Both communities are divided along political and topical fault lines.
Certain issues reinforce societal divides and drive polarization.
The method reveals how conflict dynamics evolve over time during elections.
Abstract
Political conflict is an essential element of democratic systems, but can also threaten their existence if it becomes too intense. This happens particularly when most political issues become aligned along the same major fault line, splitting society into two antagonistic camps. In the 20th century, major fault lines were formed by structural conflicts, like owners vs workers, center vs periphery, etc. But these classical cleavages have since lost their explanatory power. Instead of theorizing new cleavages, we present the FAULTANA (FAULT-line Alignment Network Analysis) pipeline, a computational method to uncover major fault lines in data of signed online interactions. Our method makes it possible to quantify the degree of antagonism prevalent in different online debates, as well as how aligned each debate is to the major fault line. This makes it possible to identify the wedge issues…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsSocial Media and Politics · Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence · Complex Network Analysis Techniques
