Bridging the Narrative Divide: Cross-Platform Discourse Networks in Fragmented Ecosystems

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21729v1
• Date: Thu, 22 May 2025 16:53:52 GMT
• Title: Bridging the Narrative Divide: Cross-Platform Discourse Networks in Fragmented Ecosystems
• Authors: Patrick Gerard, Hans W. A. Hanley, Luca Luceri, Emilio Ferrara,
• Abstract summary: Political discourse increasingly fragmented across different social networks.<n>To understand how narratives traverse fragmented ecosystems, we offer a structural lens for anticipating how narratives traverse ecosystems.<n>These findings offer implications for crossplatform governance, content moderation, and policy interventions.
• Score: 9.119607936530038
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: 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.

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