Political Astroturfing on Twitter: How to Coordinate a Disinformation Campaign

The assault on normal birth: the OB disinformation campaign.

We seem to have spent the last few years reeling from assault after assault on the concept of normal birth. Have you wondered, as I have, what is going on? Why is our side of the story nowhere to be heard? Why, for example, isn't the rising cesarean rate—which translates into about half a million unnecessary major operations per year at a cost of over $1 billion to our health care system—consid...

Political Polarization on Twitter

In this study we investigate how social media shape the networked public sphere and facilitate communication between communities with different political orientations. We examine two networks of political communication on Twitter, comprised of more than 250,000 tweets from the six weeks leading up to the 2010 U.S. congressional midterm elections. Using a combination of network clustering algori...

What Makes Campaign Messages Popular On Twitter ?

The rapid adoption of social media by billions of people from all over the world has unleashed unprecedented opportunities for marketers and cognitive scientists to better understand why some message become popular while other die quickly. We designed a novel technique for automatically learning to differentiate popular tweets from unpopular ones and to predict how popular a given tweet will be...

How Political Science Can Contribute to Public Health: A Response to Gagnon and Colleagues

Geovisual Analytics Approach to Exploring Public Political Discourse on Twitter

We introduce spatial patterns of Tweets visualization (SPoTvis), a web-based geovisual analytics tool for exploring messages on Twitter (or “tweets”) collected about political discourse, and illustrate the potential of the approach with a case study focused on a set of linked political events in the United States. In October 2013, the U.S. Congressional debate over the allocation of funds to th...