The 2016 United States presidential election has been characterized as a period of extreme divisiveness that was exacerbated on social media by the influence of fake news, trolls, and social bots. However, the extent to which the public became more polarized in response to these influences over the course of the election is not well understood. In this paper we propose IdeoTrace, a framework for (i) jointly estimating the ideology of social media users and news websites and (ii) tracing changes in user ideology over time. We apply this framework to the last two months of the election period for a group of 47508 Twitter users and demonstrate that both liberal and conservative users became more polarized over time.
@cite_40: In recent years, we have observed a significant trend towards filling the gap between social network analysis and control. This trend was enabled by the introduction of new mathematical models describing dynamics of social groups, the advancement in complex networks theory and multi-agent systems, and the development of modern computational tools for big data analysis. The aim of this tutorial is to highlight a novel chapter of control theory, dealing with applications to social systems, to the attention of the broad research community. This paper is the first part of the tutorial, and it is focused on the most classical models of social dynamics and on their relations to the recent achievements in multi-agent systems.
There is also a large body of work around opinion dynamics, which aims to trace the evolution of users' opinions over time. Note that while this paper is primarily concerned with the estimation of users' political ideology, the term is a generalization of the concept of political ideology, and is defined as an individual's cognitive orientation towards an object", such as an event, topic, or another individual, and can be represented using a real-valued scalar or vector @cite_40 .