Subhayan Mukerjee

National University of Singapore | NUS · Department of Communications & New Media

In contemporary political discourse, the concern of affective polarization, often fueled by uncivil and sexist discourse, is notably evident in digital communication contexts like WhatsApp. In this study we examined the potential effects of uncivil and sexist messages as well as moderator interventions against these messages coming from political i...

Uncivil campaign ads on social media may polarize and mobilize voters, both directly and indirectly, by fueling affective polarization in user comments. Uncivil campaign content may trigger uncivil comments, thereby further increasing polarization and mobilization. To test the effects of such dynamics, we conducted a survey-experiment during the as...

Uncivil campaign ads on social media may polarize and mobilize voters, both directly and indirectly, by fueling affective polarization in user comments. Uncivil campaign content may trigger uncivil comments, thereby further increasing polarization and mobilization. To test the effects of such dynamics, we conducted a survey-experiment during the as...

Social media metrics allow media outlets to get a granular, real-time understanding of audience preferences, and may therefore be used to decide what content to prioritize in the future. We test this mechanism in the context of Facebook, by using topic modeling and longitudinal data analysis on a large dataset comprising all posts published by majo...

Social media metrics allow media outlets to get a granular, real-time understanding of audience preferences, and may therefore be used to decide what content to prioritize in the future. We test this mechanism in the context of Facebook, by using topic modelling and longitudinal data analysis on a large dataset comprising all posts published by maj...

Algorithms play a critical role in steering online attention on social media. Many have alleged that algorithms can perpetuate bias. This study audited shadowbanning, where a user or their content is temporarily hidden on Twitter. We repeatedly tested whether a stratified random sample of American Twitter accounts (n ≈ 25,000) had been subject to v...

In this study, we analyzed >200,000 posts collected from Facebook public pages that were published in December 2020 during the rollout of the first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to the American public. We ran both topic modeling and sentiment analysis of the posts and found that first Facebook posts talked about not only treatment effectivene...

Prior research suggests that Twitter users in the United States are more politically engaged and more partisan than the American citizenry, who are generally characterized by low levels of political knowledge and disinterest in political affairs. This study seeks to understand this disconnect by conducting an observational analysis of the most popu...

Scholarly work that seeks to theorize about fragmentation of media audiences has largely been restricted to the experiences of advanced democracies in the west. This has resulted in a preponderance of research endeavors that have sought to understand this phenomenon through ideas that are pertinent, perhaps solely to those contexts, and not as appl...

Co-exposure networks offer a useful tool for analyzing audience behavior. In these networks, nodes are sources of information and ties measure the strength of audience overlap. Past research has used this method to analyze exposure to content on social media and the web. However, we still lack a systematic assessment of how different choices in the...

The use of community detection techniques for understanding audience fragmentation and selective exposure to information has received substantial scholarly attention in recent years. However, there exists no systematic comparison, that seeks to identify which of the many community detection algorithms are the best suited for studying these dynamics...

Scholarly work that seeks to theorize about fragmentation of media audiences has largely been restricted to the experiences of advanced democracies in the west. This has resulted in a preponderance of research endeavors that have sought to understand this phenomenon through ideas that are pertinent, perhaps solely to those contexts, and not as appl...

How do people in the world's largest democracy consume online news? This article reports findings from the analysis of a novel empirical dataset tracking the web-browsing behavior of more than 50,000 Indian internet users over 45 months. In doing so, it seeks to understand the digital news consumption landscape of a crucial, but understudied contex...

There are mounting concerns that the information environment on Twitter isfragmented along ideological lines, with users ensconced into echo chambers withlimited exposure to cross-cutting views. Previous studies have typically relied on small populations of political elites or opinion leaders to appraise this level of fragmentation.This study makes...

Social media platforms provide multiple affordances, which convey several cues to guide users in making decisions about which news to consume. Traditional factorial designs have failed to experimentally study the effects of multiple, simultaneous cues operating on social media. As a result, there is little consensus in the literature about their ex...

Social media platforms provide multiple affordances, which convey several cuesto guide users in making decisions about which news to consume. Traditionalfactorial designs have failed to experimentally study the effects of multiple, simultaneous cues operating on social media. As a result, there is little consensusin the literature about their exact...

A significant body of literature has emerged in recent years to understand large scale patterns of audience behavior in the context of news consumption and exposure to political information. A majority of these studies, however, have often ignored the global South, including India, the world’s largest democracy. As a result, we know very little abo...

This entry describes research analyzing social media with quantitative techniques. Recent studies using social media data are first situated in one of four categories as defined by the research design (observational or experimental) and the object of analysis (network structure or content). Several examples from the field of political communication...

We appreciate the chance to respond to Webster and Taneja’s comments to our article (Mukerjee, Majó-Vázquez, & González-Bailón, 2018). We take this as a welcome opportunity to engage in the always-pertinent discussion on why measurement and methods are so important to reach meaningful theoretical conclusions from empirical work. For the sake of tra...

How do people consume news online? Here, we propose a novel way to answer this question using the browsing behavior of web users and the networks they form while navigating news content. In these networks, two news outlets are connected if they share a fraction of their audiences. We propose two crucial improvements to the methodology employed in p...

In August 2013, Facebook, in a partnership with a few other companies, launched Internet.org—a new service that aimed to bring low cost and subsidized access to a few selected Internet services to developing countries in Asia and Africa. Ever since its announcement, and subsequent roll-out in India in 2015, activists around the world, and particula...