Properties of Social Network in an Internet Political Discussion Forum

We present an analysis of the properties of a social network, formed by users participating in one of the most popular Polish political discussion forums, during a period of two years. We find that despite communication motivated mostly by controversy and negative emotions, the resulting social network is remarkably similar to networks found in discussion boards based on similarity of views. All collected messages have been analyzed to determine their content type, author's political sympathies and emotion level. This has allowed us to discover almost complete stability of the political sympathies of the users writing comments during the studied period. Using the data on reader evaluation of the comments we present estimates of the political sympathies of the "silent majority" of forum readers and found that they follow closely the distribution of sympathies of comment authors. The data from the observations are used as the input for an agent based computer simulation model, reproducing many observed statistical characteristics of the forum.

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