Alexandros Efstratiou

@alextheefstra.bsky.social

273 Followers 196 Following

Postdoc at UW iSchool/Center for an Informed Public, previously Cybersecurity PhD @UCL. Computational social science // polarization and misinformation, online social networks, and meta-science. Opinions my own.

A figure showing a precedence network between contrarian superspreaders, conformist superspreaders, low-trust news outlets, and high-trust news outlets. Both types of superspreaders precede both types of news most of the time. News outlets typically only precede each other.
Violin plot that shows the kinds of media outlet neighbors for conformist and contrarian superspreaders. Whereas conformists mostly align with high-trust, mainstream media outlets, contrarians mostly share similar papers with low-trust media outlets, including pseudoscientific and conspiratorial outlets.
Two bar charts comparing who the coordinated network retweets, and who the rest of the network retweets. The coordinated network focuses its retweets around contrarian superspreaders (and some other contrarian users). The rest of the network predominantly retweets conformist (non-contrarian) users, with conformist superspreaders being the most-retweeted overall in this network.
A figure showing a coordinated retweet network. The network consists of six sub-clusters, with one being much larger than the rest.
A plot showing that accounts with increased visibility in the engagement feed are not legacy-verified, not left-leaning, get more attention from Elon Musk, are more agitating, less political, and post fewer links.
Plots showing distributions of how centrality differs between engagement and chronological feeds. In the engagement feed, centrality is higher for right-leaning accounts and is much more skewed towards the platform's owner, Elon Musk, compared to the chronological feed.