Taking the temperature of social media Circulation
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References
Antagonistic relations between groups
Constructive relations between groups
Social media plays an important role today in shaping our views, and the analysis of online platforms can provide a better understanding of public opinion. We spoke to Dr Eckehard Olbrich about the work of the Odycceus project in seeking ways to both tap into the information swirling around on social media, and also use it to help resolve conflicts.
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The major social media platforms and
Odycceus project
discussion forums can provide a snapshot of public opinion on all manner of topics, from climate change to geopolitics and everything inbetween. News stories often provoke debate among social media users, and this can become heated when people encounter differing world views or opinions they deem to be offensive, an issue central to the work of the Odycceus project, an EU-backed initiative which brings together eight academic partners from across Europe. “Under what conditions does debate become hostile? What possibilities are there to resolve that?” asks Dr Eckehard Olbrich, the project’s coordinator. The wider aim in the project is to develop methods to analyse the content of debate on social media platforms and take the temperature of public opinion, work which is built around a few main research pillars. “In one pillar of the project we are developing theoretical concepts such as projective game theory for understanding cultural differences,” says Dr Olbrich.
The other pillars in the project centre around modelling, text analysis and developing tools to help scientists, journalists and the general public deal with the huge amount of information and opinion that is available via social media and discussion forums. Researchers in the project are analysing a variety of different text corpora as part of this wider goal. “We’re using different techniques including topic modelling, word embeddings and semantic frame extraction to analyse these data. Our partners at Ca’Foscari in Venice and at the University of Amsterdam are working with word embeddings,” says Dr Olbrich. “A Summer School was held last year as part of the project, in which participants developed media monitoring tools and investigated their potential applications, for example in monitoring the spread of hate speech and excitable speech.” Researchers in the project are also employing these methods to study the use of anti-semitic language. Researchers at the Ca’ Foscari University in Venice use diachronic word
embeddings to analyse a corpus of French documents over the period between 17891914 to observe the different dimensions of the antisemitic discourse (economic, social, religious, racial, conspiratorial, ethic). “For instance, it can be used for analysing electoral manifestos, but we have also used it for the analysis of twitter data,” continues Dr Olbrich. One group of researchers in the project analysed large volumes of Twitter data on the climate change debate. “We used our methods to understand what the different groups on Twitter – like the media, NGOs, climate-change sceptics, activists – discuss, and how they engage with each other,” outlines Dr Olbrich. “If you look at who re-tweets whom, then do a network representation of that and look at the clusters, then you can analyse how a debate evolves.” A tool called the twitter explorer has been developed during the project to represent different strands of opinion in a visual, easily accessible way, from which researchers can then look to build a deeper understanding of the dynamics of a debate.
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While in the past people may have relied on newspapers, TV and radio for information about current affairs, nowadays people may be influenced by internet memes from a variety of different sources, another topic of interest to Dr Olbrich and his colleagues in the project. “One group in the project, in the digital methods initiative based at the University of Amsterdam, did a lot of research on 4Chan, a website which generates a lot of new memes. 4Chan is an image port, a platform for exchange,” he says. “A conspiracy theory called QAnon comes from 4Chan, a lot of fringe communities are there. It’s the source of a lot of alt-right ideas and memes. We’re also looking at other platforms which have attracted less research attention.” The spread of these ideas and memes has been compared by some observers to the spread of a virus, an analogy of interest to some researchers in the systems science field. However, while many of us have grown used to limiting social contact to prevent the spread of Covid-19, limiting the spread of ideas runs the risk of stifling public debate. “In our models we study polarisation. These models are related more to attitude changes and less to information diffusion. We are currently looking at how to effectively combine the two,” he explains. The idea of complex contagion is important here. “This basically means that ideas are not spread simply through this social contact process. The extent to which an idea can be transmitted is governed by a more complex process,” continues Dr Olbrich. “The analogy of the spread of a virus is however still relevant to these complex contagion models, and our project partners in Amsterdam are exploring these ideas.”
Penelope platform A number of different tools and methods have been developed in the project which will be integrated on an open modular platform called Penelope, along with other components from outside Odycceus. The idea is that these components, essentially web services that can be accessed by APIs, can then be incorporated in different applications. “One component for instance is a causal frame detector; you have a text, and you try to identify causal arguments. We have applied it on the climate change debate, but it can also be applied in other contexts,” says Dr Olbrich. These interfaces can be used for different kinds of analysis, while Dr Olbrich and his colleagues are also working to develop an interface that can be used in a more intuitive way. Researchers are also developing several interfaces that use the Penelope components, including a Climate change opinion observatory, 4cat or the twitter explorer, which are designed to help citizens assess the overall picture with respect to a certain debate. While a lot of effort currently goes into filtering content in online debate, Dr Olbrich and his colleagues are thinking more about what has to be done to improve the quality of debate, which is the central idea behind the Opinion Facilitator – another tool developed by the project. “This is about essentially making the kind of representations that different sides of a debate use more transparent,” he says. The priority in the project is scientific investigation and technical development, yet Dr Olbrich is very much aware of the wider context in terms of understanding the opinions and content swirling around on social media. “At this stage, we are focused on getting the science right. But if we achieve what we want to, then in future we may engage with digital media organisations,” he says.
We use our methods to understand what the different groups on Twitter – like the media, NGOs, climatechange sceptics, and activists – discuss, and how they engage with each other.
www.euresearcher.com
ODYCCEUS Opinion Dynamics and Cultural Conflict in European Spaces Project Objectives
The growth of social media is having far-reaching effects on how both individuals and communities communicate with each other and organise. Can the information and opinions swirling around on social media be tapped in order to provide deeper insights into the challenges facing modern society? The ODYCCEUS project combines theoretical, modelling and empirical research, together with the development of new tools and methods to tap into social media. This could offer a way to monitor diverging opinions and detect and address social problems before they become acute.
Project Funding
This infrastructure is part of a project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 732942. (Overall budget € 5 817 276,25)
Project Partners
• Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences (Leipzig) • Università Ca’Foscari Venezia, Departments: Dipartimento di Management, Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici • Chalmers University of Technology (Gothenburg), Departments: Energy and Environment • Sorbonne Université (Paris), Laboratoire d’Informatique de Paris 6 (LIP6) • Université de Paris, Departments: Géographie • Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Artificial Intelligence Lab • Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR) and the Digital Methods Initiative• Universität Leipzig, Institute of Sociology https://www.odycceus.eu/consortium/partners/
Contact Details
Project Coordinator, Dr. Eckehard Olbrich Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences Inselstrasse 22 D-04103 Leipzig Germany T: +49 341 9959 568 E: olbrich@mis.mpg.de W: https://www.odycceus.eu Eckehard Olbrich
Eckehard Olbrich is group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences (MPIMiS). He studied physics at the TU Dresden (Germany) and has a PhD in theoretical solid state physics. He is working on several aspects of complex systems theory, such as information decomposition, complex networks, game theory and mathematical modeling of social dynamics and communication with a focus on data analysis.
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