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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 2: Focus Session: Machine Learning for Complex Socio-economic Systems

SOE 2.1: Hauptvortrag

Montag, 18. März 2024, 09:30–10:00, MA 001

Collective emotions and polarization on social media — •Kristina Lerman — USC Information Sciences Institute

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.

Keywords: computational social science; collective emotion; affective polarization; opinion dynamics