CSSSA - December Webinar

will present Collective Emotions and Polarization on Social Media

Abstract: Social media has linked people on a global scale, transforming how we communicate and interact by sharing not only ideas, but also emotions and feelings. The massive interconnectedness created new vulnerabilities in the form of societal conflict, mistrust and deteriorating mental health. I describe the tools my group developed to recognize emotions in online discussions at scale and show how they help study collective social phenomena. One such phenomenon is affective polarization, which means that political factions not only disagree on policy issues but also dislike and distrust each other. I show that affective polarization exists in online interactions, with same-ideology users, e.g., liberals or conservatives, expressing warmer feelings toward each other than to opposite-ideology users. I also show that emotions structure social networks: interactions between users who are close to each other within the network elicit positive emotions, while more distant interactions have more anger and disgust. These findings are consistent across diverse datasets and languages, spanning discussions on topics such as the Covid-19 pandemic, abortion, and the 2017 French Election. Our research provides new insights into the complex social dynamics of collective emotions with implications for political discourse.

Brief Bio: Kristina Lerman is a Principal Scientist at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute and holds a joint appointment as a Research Professor in the USC Computer Science Department. Trained as a physicist, she now applies network analysis and machine learning to problems in computational social science, including crowdsourcing, social network and social media analysis. Her work on modeling and understanding cognitive biases in social networks has been covered by the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and MIT Tech Review. She is a fellow of the AAAI.

Zoom Link: 

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81338954098?pwd=VGs3RURkTVQvenhUM21saFJlQ3RqUT09