{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/negative-ties-highlight-hidden-extremes-in","title":"Negative Ties Highlight Hidden Extremes in Social Media Polarization","arxiv_id":"2501.05590","date":"2025-01-09","proceeding":null,"authors":["Elena Candellone","Shazia'Ayn Babul","Özgür Togay","Alexandre Bovet","Javier Garcia-Bernardo"],"abstract":"Human interactions in the online world comprise a combination of positive and negative exchanges. These diverse interactions can be captured using signed network representations, where edges take positive or negative weights to indicate the sentiment of the interaction between individuals. Signed networks offer valuable insights into online political polarization by capturing antagonistic interactions and ideological divides on social media platforms. This study analyzes polarization on Meneame, a Spanish social media platform that facilitates engagement with news stories through comments and voting. Using a dual-method approach, Signed Hamiltonian Eigenvector Embedding for Proximity (SHEEP) for signed networks and Correspondence Analysis (CA) for unsigned networks, we investigate how including negative ties enhances the understanding of structural polarization levels across different conversation topics on the platform. While the unsigned Meneame network effectively delineates ideological communities, only by incorporating negative ties can we identify ideologically extreme users who engage in antagonistic behaviors: without them, the most extreme users remain indistinguishable from their less confrontational ideological peers.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.05590v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.05590v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"negative-ties-highlight-hidden-extremes-in","repo_url":"https://github.com/elenacandellone/negative-ties-polarization","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}