arXiv subjects

Amin Mekacher

Publications and source records attributed to Amin Mekacher.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

How Language, Culture, and Geography shape Online Dialogue: Insights from Koo

Koo is a microblogging platform based in India launched in 2020 with the explicit aim of catering to non-Western communities in their vernacular languages. With a near-complete dataset totalling over 71M posts and 399M user interactions, we show how Koo has attracted users from several countries including India, Nigeria and Brazil, but with variable levels of sustained user engagement. We highlight how Koo's interaction network has been shaped by multiple country-specific migrations and displays strong divides between linguistic and cultural communities, for instance, with English-speaking communities from India and Nigeria largely isolated from one another. Finally, we analyse the content shared by each linguistic community and identify cultural patterns that promote similar discourses across language groups. Our study raises the prospect that a multilingual and politically diverse platform like Koo may be able to cultivate vernacular communities that have, historically, not been prioritised by US-based social media platforms.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2024

The Koo Dataset: An Indian Microblogging Platform With Global Ambitions

Increasingly, alternative platforms are playing a key role in the social media ecosystem. Koo, a microblogging platform based in India, has emerged as a major new social network hosting high profile politicians from several countries (India, Brazil, Nigeria) and many internationally renowned celebrities. This paper presents the largest publicly available Koo dataset, spanning from the platform's founding in early 2020 to September 2023, providing detailed metadata for 72M posts, 75M comments, 40M shares, 284M likes and 1.4M user profiles. Along with the release of the dataset, we provide an overview of the platform including a discussion of the news ecosystem on the platform, hashtag usage and user engagement. Our results highlight the pivotal role that new platforms play in shaping online communities in emerging economies and the Global South, connecting local politicians and public figures with their followers. With Koo's ambition to become the town hall for diverse non-English speaking communities, our dataset offers new opportunities for studying social media beyond a Western context.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2023

The Systemic Impact of Deplatforming on Social Media

Deplatforming, or banning malicious accounts from social media, is a key tool for moderating online harms. However, the consequences of deplatforming for the wider social media ecosystem have been largely overlooked so far, due to the difficulty of tracking banned users. Here, we address this gap by studying the ban-induced platform migration from Twitter to Gettr. With a matched dataset of 15M Gettr posts and 12M Twitter tweets, we show that users active on both platforms post similar content as users active on Gettr but banned from Twitter, but the latter have higher retention and are 5 times more active. Then, we reveal that matched users are more toxic on Twitter, where they can engage in abusive cross-ideological interactions, than Gettr. Our analysis shows that the matched cohort are ideologically aligned with the far-right, and that the ability to interact with political opponents may be part of the appeal of Twitter to these users. Finally, we identify structural changes in the Gettr network preceding the 2023 Brasilia insurrections, highlighting how deplatforming from mainstream social media can fuel poorly-regulated alternatives that may pose a risk to democratic life.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2022

Growing polarisation around climate change on social media

Climate change and political polarisation are two of the 21st century's critical socio-political issues. Here, we investigate their intersection by studying the discussion around the UN Conference of The Parties on Climate Change (COP) using Twitter data from 2014 to 2021. First, we reveal a large increase in ideological polarisation during COP26, following low polarisation between COP20 and COP25. Second, we show that this increase is driven by growing right-wing activity, a 4-fold increase since COP21 relative to pro-climate groups. Finally, we identify a broad range of ''climate contrarian'' views during COP26, emphasising the theme of ''political hypocrisy'' as a topic of cross-ideological appeal; contrarian views and accusations of hypocrisy have become key themes in the Twitter climate discussion since 2019. With future climate action reliant on negotiations at COP27 and beyond, our results highlight the importance of monitoring polarisation, and its impacts, in the public climate discourse.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2022

Heterogeneous rarity patterns drive price dynamics in NFT collections

We quantify Non Fungible Token (NFT) rarity and investigate how it impacts market behaviour by analysing a dataset of 3.7M transactions collected between January 2018 and June 2022, involving 1.4M NFTs distributed across 410 collections. First, we consider the rarity of an NFT based on the set of human-readable attributes it possesses and show that most collections present heterogeneous rarity patterns, with few rare NFTs and a large number of more common ones. Then, we analyze market performance and show that, on average, rarer NFTs: (i) sell for higher prices, (ii) are traded less frequently, (iii) guarantee higher returns on investment (ROIs), and (iv) are less risky, i.e., less prone to yield negative returns. We anticipate that these findings will be of interest to researchers as well as NFT creators, collectors, and traders.

q-fin.ST↗

arXiv2022

"I Can't Keep It Up." A Dataset from the Defunct Voat.co News Aggregator

Voat.co was a news aggregator website that shut down on December 25, 2020. The site had a troubled history and was known for hosting various banned subreddits. This paper presents a dataset with over 2.3M submissions and 16.2M comments posted from 113K users in 7.1K subverses (the equivalent of subreddit for Voat). Our dataset covers the whole lifetime of Voat, from its developing period starting on November 8, 2013, the day it was founded, April 2014, up until the day it shut down (December 25, 2020). This work presents the largest and most complete publicly available Voat dataset, to the best of our knowledge. Along with the release of this dataset, we present a preliminary analysis covering posting activity and daily user and subverse registration on the platform so that researchers interested in our dataset can know what to expect. Our data may prove helpful to false news dissemination studies as we analyze the links users share on the platform, finding that many communities rely on alternative news press, like Breitbart and GatewayPundit, for their daily discussions. In addition, we perform network analysis on user interactions finding that many users prefer not to interact with subverses outside their narrative interests, which could be helpful to researchers focusing on polarization and echo chambers. Also, since Voat was one of the platforms banned Reddit communities migrated to, we are confident our dataset will motivate and assist researchers studying deplatforming. Finally, many hateful and conspiratorial communities were very popular on Voat, which makes our work valuable for researchers focusing on toxicity, conspiracy theories, cross-platform studies of social networks, and natural language processing.

cs.SI↗