|Talks|

Ideological bias and information cascades on Twitter: evidence from French politicians

Visiting speaker
Hybrid
Past Talk
Margherita Comola
Affiliate Researcher, University of Paris
Mon, Mar 24, 2025
2:00 PM UTC
Mon, Mar 24, 2025
2:00 PM UTC
In-person
4 Thomas More St
London E1W 1YW, UK
The Roux Institute
Room
100 Fore Street
Portland, ME 04101
Network Science Institute
11th floor
177 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
Room
58 St Katharine's Way
London E1W 1LP, UK

Talk recording

This paper studies how ideological bias affects the transmission of information on social media. We exploit a novel database combining administrative and Twitter data from a population of French politicians over a two-year period, and study how messages flow (i.e. get re-posted and liked) within the sample. Our data show that the network is divided into five distinct  communities (`blocks') with internally homogeneous political ideology. We aim at quantifying two biases which may affect information cascades: the `identity' bias against messages originating from different political blocks, and the `topic' bias related to the message content. Our preliminary findings suggest that identity and topic bias are strong yet heterogeneous across political blocks, and that information cascades are based on political affinity and ideological distance.

About the speaker
Margherita Comola is a professor of economics at the University Paris-Saclay and an affiliate member at the Paris School of Economics. She holds a PhD in Economics from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. Her research fields are social networks, experimental economics and development, with a focus on the econometrics of network data.
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Mar 24, 2025