Seminar: The Double-edged Sword of Online Politics - Taha Yasseri (UCD)

14:00-15:00 (IST) Wednesday, April 21.

Please register for this event (opens in a new window)here.

Abstract: As people go about their daily lives using social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, they are invited to support myriad political causes by sharing, liking, endorsing, viewing and following. Chain reactions caused by these tiny acts of participation form a growing part of collective action today, from neighbourhood campaigns to global political movements. On the other hand these very activities produce large scale transactional data that are unprecedented in political science studies and provide the researchers with unique opportunities to study such collective actions.This lecture shows how most attempts at collective action online fail. Those that succeed can do so dramatically, but are unpredictable, unstable, and often unsustainable. The presented research is based on application of social network analysis, data and text mining and data science techniques to large scale transactional data generated on social media and other internet-based platforms.

About the speaker: Taha Yasseri is an Associate Professor at the School of Sociology and a Geary Fellow at the Geary Institute for Public Policy at University College Dublin, Ireland. Formerly he was a Senior Research Fellow in Computational Social Science at the Oxford Internet Institute, a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science, and a Research Fellow in Humanities and Social Sciences at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Taha Yasseri has interests in analysis of large-scale transactional data and conducting experiments to understand human dynamics, government-society interactions, mass collaboration and collective intelligence, information and opinion dynamics, collective behaviour, and online dating.