Negative Ties Highlight Hidden Extremes in Social Media Polarization

Meneame.net User Interaction Dataset (Dec 2022 – Aug 2023) This dataset contains user activity and interaction networks from Meneame.net, a Spanish social news platform where users submit, comment on, and vote on stories. The data covers the period from December 2022 to August 2023, offering a comprehensive view of user behavior, voting dynamics, and emergent social structures. The dataset is composed of two main components: 1. Event-level interaction logs These files record all user-generated events over the specified period: events_2022-12_to_2023-08.csv.zst events_2022-12_to_2023-08.parquet Each row corresponds to a timestamped user action — such as posting a story, commenting, or voting. The data includes: Column Type Description user string Username of the actor. Sourced from username_post (for posts) or username_vote(for votes). anon_id int64 Surrogate key 0 … *N – 1 identifying the target object (comment or story). time datetime64[ns] UTC timestamp of the event, calculated as raw timestamp minus a global time_offset for pseudoanonymity event string Type of user action: post_comment, vote_comment, post_story, or vote_story. vote int8 / float Present only for rows where event starts with vote_. Value is the recorded vote (e.g. +1, −1). Missing (NaN) for posting events. 2. User-user interaction networks These graphs represent user-to-user interactions derived from comments and votes to comments. Each node represents a user, and edges capture the aggregate votes, with positive and negative edge signs. Files: network_Politics.gmlFull interaction network about the Broad Politics topic. network_Politics_subset.gml A reduced version of the above, useful for visualization. network_Russia.gml Full interaction network about the Russia/Ukraine war topic. network_Russia_subset.gml A reduced version of the above, useful for visualization.