Joan Massachs, Corrado Monti, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, and Francesco Bonchi.
Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Web Science (WebScience2020). ACM, 2020.
Awarded with a Honorable Mention for Best Paper! 🎖
The rise of digital nationalism on social media reveals how collective identities form around feedback and recognition. By predicting early Trump supporters on Reddit, this work tests competing sociological mechanisms—homophily, influence, and feedback—and finds that community reinforcement and social mirroring outweigh direct persuasion. The analysis shows how far-right mobilization emerges from everyday interaction dynamics, where belonging and affirmation become drivers of political identity.