Kiran Garimella and pals at Aalto University in Finland have found a way to spot the characteristics of a controversy in a collection of tweets and distinguish this from a noncontroversial conversation (…) And they think this structure can be spotted by studying various properties of the conversation, such as the network of connections between those involved in a topic; the structure of endorsements, who agrees with whom; and the sentiment of the discussion, whether positive and negative (…) Garimella and co map out the structure of these discussion by looking at the networks of retweets, follows, keywords and combinations of these (…) In all cases, the images clearly show the polarization, or lack of, in the debate.

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