Half-time seminar - Diletta Goglia: "Computational methods for studying persuasion in online social communication"

Welcome to a half-time seminar presented by Diletta Goglia.

Abstract (på engelska):

Nowadays, a substantial amount of social communication takes place online, where individuals are exposed to attempts of influencing their thoughts, emotions, and behavior. Understanding how persuasion operates online constitutes a central scientific challenge, aimed at mitigating risks and threats, as well as promoting safe and inclusive digital environments. Achieving this goal requires both new theoretical and methodological advances.

In this seminar, we discuss how persuasion operates online at three fundamental levels (platform, individual, and group), drawing on social psychology theories and integrating computational approaches from Social Network Analysis and Language Technologies. First, we illustrate a framework for studying social communication with network models, emphasizing the importance of conversational context. Second, we show how platform rules and community guidelines shape user participation, with measurable consequences for the structural properties of the resulting social networks. Then, we measure the presence of persuasive language in online discussions, as well as its variation as a function of whether individual opinions align with or oppose a group. Finally, we introduce a novel language model for the identification of a specific form of persuasion, i.e., emotional manipulation, providing a new tool for the empirical study of potentially harmful influence in online discourse.