Most Americans don’t follow political accounts on Twitter and see very little political content on average. However, 55% of Americans are worn out by the amount of political content they see on social media. Why? Political content spikes after key events, even (especially) in seemingly apolitical spaces.
We combine a higher-order dataset (Bluesky starter packs, which are user-created collections of accounts that other users can then follow en masse with one click) with a dyadic dataset (the Bluesky following network) in a dataset paper. The dataset will be available on SOMAR at ICPSR shortly, and we expect to have a preprint of the dataset paper ready in the next few days.
Using our A Blue Start dataset, which combines a higher-order Bluesky starter pack network with a dyadic following network, we want to figure out whether running influence maximization on a hypergraph (i.e. the starter pack network) can empirically also produce a highly influential set of seed nodes for spreading processes on the dyadic following network.
Transfeminine users on Bluesky are subject to a transmisogynistic politics of disposability. This manifests, either directly or indirectly, in intracommunity attacks that often end with the target ostracized from the community. We argue that these attacks are driven by on-platformm, distributed folklore that evolves emergently within the social network, aided by platform affordances.
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Published in MIT CMS/W Thesis, 2017
My undergraduate CMS/W thesis on The Discourse, a Tumblr-based debate around asexual inclusion in the LGBTQIA+ community
Recommended citation: Smith, Alyssa. 2017. “The Discourse: An Online Debate.” Undergraduate Thesis, Cambridge, MA: MIT.
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Published in EMNLP, 2021
An open-source tool to help researchers without computational backgrounds do automated frame detection
Recommended citation: Bhatia, Vibhu, Vidya Prasad Akavoor, Sejin Paik, Lei Guo, Mona Jalal, Alyssa Smith, David Assefa Tofu, et al. 2021. “OpenFraming: Open-Sourced Tool for Computational Framing Analysis of Multilingual Data.” In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, 242–50. Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic: Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-demo.28.
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Published in First Monday, 2023
What kinds of stories are told about Britney Spears online during the #FreeBritney movement?
Recommended citation: Smith, Alyssa Hasegawa, Adina Gitomer, and Brooke Foucault Welles. 2023. “You Want a Piece of Me: Britney Spears as a Case Study on the Prominence of Hegemonic Tales and Subversive Stories in Online Media.” First Monday, December. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v28i12.13314.
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Published in Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies, 2025
[IN PRESS] When it comes to coverage of transgender issues, the interplay between national news outlets and state outlets is more complicated than a simple national-to-local agenda-setting pattern.
Published in PNAS Nexus, 2025
Ever wondered how open triads become transitive? Amplification is one way this happens; we use causal inference and a novel Twitter API hack to empirically prove this.
Recommended citation: Alyssa Hasegawa Smith, Jon Green, Brooke Foucault Welles, David Lazer, Emergent structures of attention on social media are driven by amplification and triad transitivity, PNAS Nexus, 2025;, pgaf106, https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf106
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Published in The Journal of Autoethnography, 2025
I draw on my experiences of online bullying via TERFism to make sense of the forces that act in the neoliberal university classroom to preclude transformative learning.
Recommended citation: Smith, Alyssa Hasegawa. 2025. “It Has Been Handled: Hoping for Transformation in the Neoliberal University Setting.“ Journal of Autoethnography, Volume 6 Issue 2. 2025. https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2025.6.2.243
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Co-presenters: Layla Hashemi, Amy Magnus, and Temitayo Osinubi
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Undergraduate course, University 1, Department, 2014
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Workshop, University 1, Department, 2015
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