Bridging the Narrative Divide: Cross-Platform Discourse Networks in Fragmented Ecosystems
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866917085161979904 |
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| author | Gerard, Patrick Hanley, Hans W. A. Luceri, Luca Ferrara, Emilio |
| author_facet | Gerard, Patrick Hanley, Hans W. A. Luceri, Luca Ferrara, Emilio |
| contents | Political discourse has grown increasingly fragmented across different social platforms, making it challenging to trace how narratives spread and evolve within such a fragmented information ecosystem. Reconstructing social graphs and information diffusion networks is challenging, and available strategies typically depend on platform-specific features and behavioral signals which are often incompatible across systems and increasingly restricted. To address these challenges, we present a platform-agnostic framework that allows to accurately and efficiently reconstruct the underlying social graph of users' cross-platform interactions, based on discovering latent narratives and users' participation therein. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in key network-based tasks: information operation detection, ideological stance prediction, and cross-platform engagement prediction$\unicode{x2013}$$\unicode{x2013}$while requiring significantly less data than existing alternatives and capturing a broader set of users. When applied to cross-platform information dynamics between Truth Social and X (formerly Twitter), our framework reveals a small, mixed-platform group of $\textit{bridge users}$, comprising just 0.33% of users and 2.14% of posts, who introduce nearly 70% of $\textit{migrating narratives}$ to the receiving platform. These findings offer a structural lens for anticipating how narratives traverse fragmented information ecosystems, with implications for cross-platform governance, content moderation, and policy interventions. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_21729 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Bridging the Narrative Divide: Cross-Platform Discourse Networks in Fragmented Ecosystems Gerard, Patrick Hanley, Hans W. A. Luceri, Luca Ferrara, Emilio Social and Information Networks Computers and Society Political discourse has grown increasingly fragmented across different social platforms, making it challenging to trace how narratives spread and evolve within such a fragmented information ecosystem. Reconstructing social graphs and information diffusion networks is challenging, and available strategies typically depend on platform-specific features and behavioral signals which are often incompatible across systems and increasingly restricted. To address these challenges, we present a platform-agnostic framework that allows to accurately and efficiently reconstruct the underlying social graph of users' cross-platform interactions, based on discovering latent narratives and users' participation therein. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in key network-based tasks: information operation detection, ideological stance prediction, and cross-platform engagement prediction$\unicode{x2013}$$\unicode{x2013}$while requiring significantly less data than existing alternatives and capturing a broader set of users. When applied to cross-platform information dynamics between Truth Social and X (formerly Twitter), our framework reveals a small, mixed-platform group of $\textit{bridge users}$, comprising just 0.33% of users and 2.14% of posts, who introduce nearly 70% of $\textit{migrating narratives}$ to the receiving platform. These findings offer a structural lens for anticipating how narratives traverse fragmented information ecosystems, with implications for cross-platform governance, content moderation, and policy interventions. |
| title | Bridging the Narrative Divide: Cross-Platform Discourse Networks in Fragmented Ecosystems |
| topic | Social and Information Networks Computers and Society |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21729 |