Analyzing Political Polarization on Social Media by Deleting Bot Spamming

Social media platforms are part of everyday life, allowing the interconnection of people around the world in large discussion groups relating to every topic, including important social or political issues. Therefore, social media have become a valuable source of information-rich data, commonly referred to as Social Big Data, effectively exploitable to study the behavior of people, their opinions, moods, interests and activities. However, these powerful communication platforms can be also used to manipulate conversation, polluting online content and altering the popularity of users, through spamming activities and misinformation spreading. Recent studies have shown the use on social media of automatic entities, defined as social bots, that appear as legitimate users by imitating human behavior aimed at influencing discussions of any kind, including political issues. In this paper we present a new methodology, namely TIMBRE (Time-aware opInion Mining via Bot REmoval), aimed at discovering the polarity of social media users during election campaigns characterized by the rivalry of political factions. This methodology is temporally aware and relies on a keyword-based classification of posts and users. Moreover, it recognizes and filters out data produced by social media bots, which aim to alter public opinion about political candidates, thus avoiding heavily biased information. The proposed methodology has been applied to a case study that analyzes the polarization of a large number of Twitter users during the 2016 US presidential election. The achieved results show the benefits brought by both removing bots and taking into account temporal aspects in the forecasting process, revealing the high accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed approach. Finally, we investigated how the presence of social bots may affect political discussion by studying the 2016 US presidential election. Specifically, we analyzed the main differences between human and artificial political support, estimating also the influence of social bots on legitimate users.

New cabinet will struggle to improve Haiti’s politics

Significance The assassination of President Jovenel Moise in July, surging violent crime and a weak economy have left the unpopular acting prime minister, Ariel Henry, struggling to establish a new government. His cabinet, appointed in November, represents a compromise among various political factions. However, as multiple interests put pressure on these factions, the cabinet looks unlikely to turn the country’s fortunes around. Impacts High rates of crime will encourage increased undocumented migration to the Dominican Republic, stoking bilateral tensions. The ongoing investigation into Moise’s death will continue to focus attention on links between political groupings and drug gangs. Rising deportations of Haitians from the United States will put additional pressure on the beleaguered social system.

Refashioning Kingship in Manipur in the 18th Century: The Politico-Religious Projects of Garibniwaz and Bhāgyacandra

In the 18th century, Manipuri kings Garibniwaz and Bhāgyacandra sought to transform the indigenous religious landscape to absorb Vaiṣṇava beliefs and practices due to increasing contact with other Indian states and hostilities with Burma. Garibniwaz aligned himself with the Rāmānandī Vaiṣṇava tradition because he saw it as an effective way to increase his military prowess. He refashioned kingship to portray himself as a warrior king and a devotee of Rāmā. However, he met with resistance from other royal elites for oppressing the indigenous religious practices of Manipur. In contrast, Bhāgyacandra aligned himself with the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition and established his sovereignty on the basis of being a devotee of Krishna and patron of the indigenous gods. By carefully curating a hybrid religious schema, he was able to refashion Manipur kingship for generations to come. I compare the two strategies of negotiating transculturation and sociopolitical transformation and show that the latter approach proved more successful in the long term because it allowed a more organic unification of religious and political factions.

Visual symbols, democracy and memory: The monument of Ivan Stepanovich Konev and the memory of communism in the Czech Republic

The article discusses a conflict surrounding the removal of the Soviet Marshal Ivan Stepanovich Konev monument in Prague in 2020. The text begins by presenting different narratives associated with the statue and proceeds to demonstrate how the monument became entangled in a battle between opposing political factions, both in the Czech Republic and on an international scale. The aim of the article is to examine this example in the context of memory studies and to indicate that the situation in the Czech Republic arises from different cultural, social and historical contexts, especially the legacy of communism and the complex Czech Russian relations, but is in many ways similar to the situation in the United States and other places around the world lately experiencing monument struggles.

Immigration and Revolution in Iran: Asylum politics and State Consolidation

In May 2019, remarks by the then Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi implying Iran might ask Afghans to leave the country as U.S. sanctions tightened sparked widespread criticism from various segments of Iranian society. Critics from civil society and political factions accused Araghchi of using Afghans as leverage to extract concessions from Europe, and ignoring revolutionary ideals. Drawing on literature emphasising the role of mobilities in shaping the state, we posit that migration politics and related social dynamics are an integral element in state formation in post-revolutionary Iran, offering insights into the nature of Iran’s political system. We argue that the Islamic Republic’s immigration and asylum politics reflect both the revolutionary legacy and a political system striving for normalization, looking at how Iran’s migration regime was formed, encompassing the institutionalization of migration governance, ad hoc policies, migration diplomacy, conflicting political factions, and bottom-up social pressures.

Complicating Entanglements: Societal Factors Intruding in the Ghana Armed Forces’ Civil–Military Relations

Scholarly debates on civil–military relations often focus on how the military impacts society. Adding to the vast literature of civil–military relations, this article examines how socio-cultural practices and societal developments in the host society affect the military. Based on long-term ethnographic engagement with the Ghana Armed Forces, the piece presents empirical observations of how culturally informed practices, such as begging via proxies ( djuan toa), infiltrate the Ghanaian military barracks and affect the institutions’ functioning. The article illustrates how two additional elements, skewed recruitment practices and the politicisation of the rank and file, are used as tools by political factions, such as Ghana’s two most prominent parties the New Patriotic Party and National Democratic Congress, seeking to gain control over the Ghanaian military. The article analyses how these approaches contribute to undermining the armed forces’ discipline and military professionalism and consequently affect the military institution as a whole.

NUANSA POLITIK DALAM MEMAHAMI HADIS: Analisa Metodologis-Historis

<p><span>Tulisan ini merupakan kajian terhadap adanya nuansa politis dalam memahami hadis. Kajian ini menjadi sangat penting karena karena ketika berbicara hadis, maka kita juga akan membincang mengenai orang-orang dan aliran politiknya dalam hadis tersebut yang berakibat pada kontroversi dalam memahami hadis. Metode penelitian ini menggunakan penelitian kualitatif, dimana data-data yang ada kemudian dipahami dan dianalisa dengan menggunakan metode kritik dan historis hadis pada pendekatannya. Sejalan dengan itu tulisan ini memetakan berbagai aliran dalam hadis sekaligus bagaimana pemahaman mereka terhadap suatu hadis. Hasil penelitian memperlihatkan bahwa terdapat setidaknya tiga atau lebih aliran politik dalam kesejarahan hadis yakni Sunni. Syiah, Muawiyah, Muktazilah dan lain lain. Perbedaan kelompok ini telah menstrukturkan pemahaman terhadap hadis dalam metodologis-historisnya. Perbedaan pemaknaan kelompok ini akan juga sekaligus berkosekuensi pada pemaknaan terhadap hadis itu sendiri. Penelitian ini menyimpulkan bahwa berdasarkan metode dalam ilmu hadis dan sejarahnya, terdapat perbedaan dalam faksi politik dimana perbedaan ini akan berpengaruh pada pemahaman hadis.</span></p><p>[<strong><span>Political Nuances in Understanding Hadith: Methodological-Historical Analysis</span></strong><span>. This paper is a study of the political nuances in understanding hadith. This study is very important because when we talk about hadith, we will also talk about the people and their political flow in the hadith which results in controversy in understanding hadith. This research method uses qualitative research, where the existing data is then understood and analyzed using the critical and historical method of hadith as an approach. So this paper maps out the various schools of hadith as well as their understanding of a hadith. The results show that there are at least two political schools in the history of hadith, namely Sunni. Shia, Muawiyah. The differences in these groups have structured the understanding of hadith in its historical-methodological terms. The difference in the meaning of this group will also have consequences on the meaning of the hadith itself. This study concludes that based on the method in hadith science and its history, there are differences in political factions where these differences will affect the understanding of hadith.</span>]</p>

A never requested triumph? Reframing gender boundaries in Fiume and Susak after 1918

The First World War unsettled not just the geopolitical arrangement of a large part of Europe, but also previously held gender roles and family relations. With the conflict's end, the bordering cities of Fiume and Susak went through a long transition characterised by administrative instability and economic uncertainty, as well as by political and national tensions, before being integrated into the Kingdom of Italy and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, respectively. Drawing on available sources in both Italian and Croatian, this article analyses the case study of a border area in order to investigate women's presence in the public sphere, considering both their political participation - to the extent this was allowed by the different forms of suffrage - and their associationism within political and philanthropic organisations. Moreover, in order to trace the reactions triggered by women's activism, the article examines gender representations in the local press, which was mostly linked to the main conflicting political factions and dominated by male journalists.