publications

2024

1. Intellectual dark web, alt-lite and alt-right: Are they really that different? a multi-perspective analysis of the textual content produced by contrarians

   Breno Matos, Rennan Lima, Marcos Gonçalves, and 1 more author

   Social Network Analysis and Mining, Jan 2024

   Abs

   Contrarian groups, notably Intellectual Dark Web, Alt-lite, and Alt-right, are present across the Web, ranging from fringe websites to mainstream social media. Such massive presence raises major concerns as contrarians often engage in the spread of conspiracy theories and hate speech toward particular groups of people. Historically, there is a general sense that these groups exhibit different degrees of extremism, with Alt-right standing out as the most extremist one. In particular, prior work often takes participation in Alt-right communities as a proxy for radicalization. Yet, to which extent are these groups really different? While most previous analyses have focused on a content consumption (i.e., viewer) standpoint, no prior work analyzed these groups (i.e., contrarians) from a content production perspective. Are there significant differences in the content produced by them? Toward tackling this question, we here analyze the textual data associated with videos shared by the three aforementioned groups. Specifically, we analyze 14 years of content produced by contrarians on YouTube with data from 355,000 videos. Firstly, we assess the degree of toxicity of the content created by each contrarian group, comparing them to one another and, for control purposes, against traditional media content. The results show that all contrarian groups have a more skewed toxicity distribution than traditional media. Yet, all three groups exhibit very similar textual toxicity properties. Further analyses based on psycholinguistic properties and semantic (text) classification reinforce the observation that indeed there is great similarity among the content created by all three contrarian groups. These results suggest that, despite the different definitions, the three contrarian groups are indeed much more similar, in terms of the content produced and shared by them, than the general wisdom (and literature) seems to suggest. Moreover, we also identify a significant temporal increase in content toxicity in all three groups, corroborating prior observations regarding the escalation in the harmfulness of online speech over the years.

2022

1. On the Presence of Abusive Language in Mis/Disinformation

   Breno Matos, Rennan C Lima, Jussara M Almeida, and 2 more authors

   In Social Informatics: 13th International Conference, SocInfo 2022, Glasgow, UK, October 19–21, 2022, Proceedings, Jan 2022

2021

1. A Nudez como Estereótipo de Beleza através das Lentes do Instagram

   Breno Matos, Fabrı́cio Benevenuto, and Ana Paula Couto Silva

   In Anais do X Brazilian Workshop on Social Network Analysis and Mining, Jan 2021

2020

1. Mining Portuguese Comparative Sentences in Online Reviews

   Daniel Kansaon, Michele A Brandão, Julio CS Reis, and 3 more authors

   In Proceedings of the Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and the Web, Jan 2020

2019

1. Modeling dynamic ideological behavior in political networks

   Carlos Henrique Gomes Ferreira, Fabricio Murai Ferreira, Breno Sousa Matos, and 1 more author

   The Journal of Web Science, Jan 2019

2018

1. Analyzing Dynamic Ideological Communities in Congressional Voting Networks

   Carlos Henrique Gomes Ferreira, Breno Sousa Matos, and Jussara M. Almeira

   In Social Informatics, Jan 2018

   Abs

   We here study the behavior of political party members aiming at identifying how ideological communities are created and evolve over time in diverse (fragmented and non-fragmented) party systems. Using public voting data of both Brazil and the US, we propose a methodology to identify and characterize ideological communities, their member polarization, and how such communities evolve over time, covering a 15-year period. Our results reveal very distinct patterns across the two case studies, in terms of both structural and dynamic properties.

2. Analisando a governabilidade presidencial a partir de padroes de homofilia na Câmara dos Deputados: Estudos de Casos no Brasil e nos EUA

   Breno Sousa Matos, Carlos HG Ferreira, and Jussara M Almeida

   In Anais do VII Brazilian Workshop on Social Network Analysis and Mining, Jan 2018