A survey of social media stance detection using non-textual features
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5753/jbcs.2026.5687Keywords:
Natural Language Processing, Stance, Social media, Network featuresAbstract
Stance detection is known as the computational task of estimating an individual's attitude towards a given target topic, which is often of a political or moral nature. In traditional NLP fashion, models of this kind have relied mainly on learning features extracted from social media text. However, social media may provide many other types of non-content information in conjunction with text, such as friends networks, interactions with other users, etc. These knowledge sources, despite being potentially useful for stance prediction, remain relatively little discussed in existing surveys of the field. To fill this gap in the literature, this article presents a survey of stance detection research focusing on the use of network-related features and on how these are combined with more standard text models.
Downloads
References
Abdine, H., Guo, Y., Rennard, V., and Vazirgiannis, M. (2022). Political communities on Twitter: Case study of the 2022 French presidential election. In LREC 2022 workshop on Natural Language Processing for Political Sciences, pages 62-71. Available at:[link].
Abeysinghe, B., Vulupala, G. R., and Sunderraman, R. (2022). Misinformation in social media platforms and web articles: a dataset to infer user stance. In IEEE 16th International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC), pages 269-273. IEEE. DOI: 10.1109/icsc52841.2022.00051.
Addawood, A., Schneider, J., and Bashir, M. (2017). Stance classification of twitter debates: The encryption debate as a use case. In 8th international conference on Social Media & Society, pages 1-10. DOI: 10.1145/3097286.3097288.
Akhtar, M. S., Ekbal, A., Narayan, S., and Singh, V. (2018). No, that never happened!! investigating rumors on twitter. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 33(5):8-15. DOI: 10.1109/mis.2018.2877279.
Al-Ayyoub, M., Rabab’ah, A., Jararweh, Y., Al-Kabi, M. N., and Gupta, B. (2018). Studying the controversy in online crowds’ interactions. Applied Soft Computing, pages 557-563. DOI: 10.1016/j.asoc.2017.03.022.
Aldayel, A. and Magdy, W. (2019). Your stance is exposed! analysing possible factors for stance detection on social media. In ACM proceedings on Human-Computer Interaction, volume 3, pages 1-20. ACM New York. DOI: 10.1145/3359307.
Aldayel, A. and Magdy, W. (2021). Stance detection on social media: State of the art and trends. Information Processing & Management, 58(4):102597. DOI: 10.1016/j.ipm.2021.102597.
Aldayel, A. and Magdy, W. (2022). Characterizing the role of bots’ in polarized stance on social media. Social Network Analysis and Mining, 12(1):30-30. DOI: 10.1007/s13278-022-00858-z.
Allaway, E. and McKeown, K. R. (2020). Zero-shot stance detection: A dataset and model using generalized topic representations. In EMNLP-2020 proceedings, pages 8913-8931, Online. Assoc. for Computational Linguistics. DOI: 10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.717.
Allaway, E. and McKeown, K. R. (2022). Zero-shot stance detection: Paradigms and challenges. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 5:1070429. DOI: 10.3389/frai.2022.1070429.
Bahuleyan, H. and Vechtomova, O. (2017). UWaterloo at SemEval-2017 task 8: Detecting stance towards rumours with topic independent features. In 11th intl. workshop on semantic evaluation (SemEval-2017), pages 461-464. DOI: 10.18653/v1/S17-2080.
Blackburn, M., Yu, N., Berrie, J., Gordon, B., Longfellow, D., Tirrell, W., and Williams, M. (2020). Corpus development for studying online disinformation campaign: A narrative + stance approach. In First International Workshop on Social Threats in Online Conversations: Understanding and Management, pages 41-47. Avaialble at:[link].
Boulahia, S. Y., Amamra, A., Madi, M. R., and Daikh, S. (2021). Early, intermediate and late fusion strategies for robust deep learning-based multimodal action recognition. Mach. Vision Appl., 32(6). DOI: 10.1007/s00138-021-01249-8.
Cavalheiro, L. C. L., Pavan, M. C., and Paraboni, I. (2023). Stance prediction from multimodal social media data. In 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, pages 242-248. DOI: 10.26615/978-954-452-092-2_027.
Chancellor, S. and De Choudhury, M. (2020). Methods in predictive techniques for mental health status on social media: a critical review. NPJ digital medicine, 3(1):43. DOI: 10.1038/s41746-020-0233-7.
Chang, W., Li, J., and Lee, C. (2019). Learning semantic-preserving space using user profile and multimodal media content from political social network. In IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), pages 3990-3994. IEEE. DOI: 10.1109/icassp.2019.8682596.
Chen, W. and Ku, L. (2018). We like, we post: A joint user-post approach for facebook post stance labeling. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 30:2013-2023. DOI: 10.1109/tkde.2018.2810875.
Cignarella, A. T., Lai, M., Bosco, C., Patti, V., Paolo, R., et al. (2020). Sardistance@ evalita2020: Overview of the task on stance detection in italian tweets. In 7th Evaluation Campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech Tools for Italian (EVALITA 2020). CEURWS.org. DOI: 10.4000/books.aaccademia.7084.
Costa, P. B., Pavan, M. C., Santos, W. R., Silva, S. C., and Paraboni, I. (2023). BERTabaporu: Assessing a genre-specific language model for Portuguese NLP. In Mitkov, R. and Angelova, G., editors, 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, pages 217-223, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria. Available at:[link].
Custódio, J. E. and Paraboni, I. (2021). Stacked authorship attribution of digital texts. Expert Systems with Applications, 176:114866. DOI: 10.1016/j.eswa.2021.114866.
Darwish, K., Magdy, W., and Zanouda, T. (2017). Improved stance prediction in a user similarity feature space. In IEEE/ACM International conference on advances in social networks analysis and mining 2017, pages 145-148. DOI: 10.1145/3110025.3110112.
de Oliveira, R. L. (2022). Detecção de posicionamento em tweets sobre Covid-19 no Brasil utilizando métodos de aprendizagem de máquina. Master's thesis, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco.Available at:[link].
de Souza, V. B., Nobre, J. C., and Becker, K. (2022). DAC stacking: A deep learning ensemble to classify anxiety, depression, and their comorbidity from Reddit texts. IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, 26(7):3303-3311. DOI: 10.1109/jbhi.2022.3151589.
de Vinco, D., Antelmi, A., Spagnuolo, C., and Aiello, L. M. (2024). Deciphering Conversational Networks: Stance Detection via Hypergraphs and LLMs. In Companion Publication of the 16th ACM Web Science Conference, page 3–4. DOI: 10.1145/3630744.3658418.
Derczynski, L., Bontcheva, K., Liakata, M., Procter, R., Hoi, G. W. S., and Zubiaga, A. (2017). Semeval-2017 task 8: Rumoureval: Determining rumour veracity and support for rumours. arXiv:1704.05972. DOI: 10.18653/v1/s17-2006.
Devlin, J., Chang, M., Lee, K., and Toutanova, K. (2019). BERT: pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. In Burstein, J., Doran, C., and Solorio, T., editors, Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 4171-4186. Association for Computational Linguistics. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1810.04805.
Dong, R., Sun, Y., Wang, L., Gu, Y., and Zhong, Y. (2017). Weakly-guided user stance prediction via joint modeling of content and social interaction. In 2017 ACM on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, pages 1249-1258. DOI: 10.1145/3132847.3133020.
dos Santos, P. D. and Goya, D. H. (2023). Detecção de Posicionamento e Rotulação Automática de Usuários do Twitter: o caso da CPI da Covid-19. iSys-Brazilian Journal of Information Systems, 16:15-1. DOI: 10.5753/brasnam.2022.223212.
dos Santos, V. G. and Paraboni, I. (2022). Myers-briggs personality classification from social media text using pre-trained language models. Journal of Universal Computer Science, 28(4):378-395. DOI: 10.3897/jucs.70941.
Dutta, S., Caur, S., Chakrabarti, S., and Chakraborty, T. (2022). Semi-supervised stance detection of tweets via distant network supervision. In 15th ACM International conf. on Web search and data mining, pages 241-251. DOI: 10.1145/3488560.3498511.
Ebeling, R., Sáenz, C. A. C., Nobre, J., and Becker, K. (2020). Quarenteners vs. chloroquiners: A framework to analyze how political polarization affects the behavior of groups. In 2020 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT), pages 203-210. IEEE. DOI: 10.1109/wiiat50758.2020.00031.
Espinosa, M. S., Agerri, R., Rodrigo, A., and Centeno, R. (2020). Deepreading@ sardistance: Combining textual, social and emotional features. In 7th Evaluation Campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech Tools for Italian (EVALITA 2020). CEURWS.org. DOI: 10.4000/books.aaccademia.7129.
Ferraccioli, F., Sciandra, A., Da Pont, M., Girardi, P., Solari, D., and Finos, L. (2020). Textwiller@ sardistance, haspeede2: Text or con-text? a smart use of social network data in predicting polarization. In 7th Evaluation Campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech Tools for Italian (EVALITA 2020). CEURWS.org. DOI: 10.4000/books.aaccademia.7152.
Flores, A. M., Pavan, M. C., and Paraboni, I. (2022). User profiling and satisfaction inference in public information access services. Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, 58(1):67-89. DOI: 10.1007/s10844-021-00661-w.
Fraisier, O., Cabanac, G., Pitarch, Y., Besancon, R., and Boughanem, M. (2018). Stance classification through proximity-based community detection. In 29th on Hypertext and Social Media, pages 220-228. DOI: 10.1145/3209542.3209549.
Geiss, H.-J., Sakketou, F., and Flek, L. (2022). OK boomer: Probing the socio-demographic divide in echo chambers. In Tenth International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media, pages 83-105. DOI: 10.18653/v1/2022.socialnlp-1.8.
Gorrell, G., Kochkina, E., Liakata, M., Aker, A., Zubiaga, A., Bontcheva, K., and Derczynski, L. (2019). SemEval-2019 task 7: RumourEval, determining rumour veracity and support for rumours. In 13th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, pages 845-854, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics. DOI: 10.18653/v1/S19-2147.
Graells-Garrido, E., Baeza-Yates, R., and Lalmas, M. (2020). Every colour you are: Stance prediction and turnaround in controversial issues. In 12th ACM Conference on Web Science, pages 174-183. DOI: 10.1145/3394231.3397907.
Grover, A. and Leskovec, J. (2016). node2vec: Scalable Feature Learning for Networks. In 22nd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pages 855-864, San Francisco, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/2939672.2939754.
Hardalov, M., Arora, A., Nakov, P., and Augenstein, I. (2022). A survey on stance detection for mis- and disinformation identification. arXiv:2103.00242. DOI: 10.18653/v1/2022.findings-naacl.94.
Igarashi, Y., Komatsu, H., Kobayashi, S., Okazaki, N., and Inui, K. (2016). Tohoku at SemEval-2016 task 6: Feature-based model versus convolutional neural network for stance detection. In 10th international workshop on sematic evaluation (SemEval-2016), pages 401-407. DOI: 10.18653/v1/S16-1065.
Islam, M. R., Muthiah, S., and Ramakrishnan, N. (2019). Rumorsleuth: Joint detection of rumor veracity and user stance. In 2019 IEEE/ACM intl. conf. on advances in social networks analysis and mining, pages 131-136. DOI: 10.1145/3341161.3342916.
Jamialahmadi, S., Sahebi, I., Sabermahani, M. M., Shariatpanahi, S. P., Dadlani, A., and Maham, B. (2022). Rumor stance classification in online social networks: the state-of-the-art, prospects, and future challenges. IEEE Access, 10:113131-113148. DOI: 10.1109/access.2022.3216835.
Jia, P., Du, Y., Lyu, B., and Hu, R. (2021). Stance detection using multi-head attention based bidirectional gru. In 7th International Conference on Computer and Communications (ICCC), pages 625-630. IEEE. DOI: 10.1109/iccc54389.2021.9674443.
Khiabani, P. J. and Zubiaga, A. (2024). Cross-target stance detection: A survey of techniques, datasets, and challenges. arXiv:2409.13594. DOI: 10.1016/j.eswa.2025.127790.
Kumar, A., Mishra, D., and Das, B. (2020). Twitter as a mirror - perspectives of common men and key personalities. In 2020 International Conference on Emerging Trends in Information Technology and Engineering (ic-ETITE), pages 1-5. IEEE. DOI: 10.1109/ic-etite47903.2020.436.
Kuo, K.-H., Wang, M.-H., Kao, H.-Y., and Dai, Y.-C. (2024). Advancing stance detection of political fan pages: A multimodal approach. In ACM on Web Conference, page 702–705. DOI: 10.1145/3589335.3651467.
Lai, M., Cignarella, A. T., Hernández Farías, D. I., Bosco, C., Patti, V., and Rosso, P. (2020a). Multilingual stance detection in social media political debates. Computer Speech & Language, 63:101075. DOI: 10.1016/j.csl.2020.101075.
Lai, M., Farías, D. I. H., Patti, V., and Rosso, P. (2017). Friends and enemies of clinton and trump: Using context for detecting stance in political tweets. In 15th Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, MICAI 2016, pages 155-168, Cancún, Mexico. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-62434-1_13.
Lai, M., Patti, V., Ruffo, G., and Rosso, P. (2020b). Brexit: Leave or remain? the role of user’s community and diachronic evolution on stance detection. Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, 39(2):2341-2352. DOI: 10.3233/jifs-179895.
Lai, M., Tambuscio, M., Patti, V., Ruffo, G., and Rosso, P. (2019). Stance polarity in political debates: A diachronic perspective of network homophily and conversations on twitter. Data & Knowledge Engineering, 124:101738. DOI: 10.1016/j.datak.2019.101738.
Li, Y. and Scarton, C. (2020). Revisiting rumour stance classification: Dealing with imbalanced data. In 3rd international workshop on rumours and deception in social media (RDSM), pages 38-44. Avaialble at:[link].
Liu, X., Wang, R., Sun, D., Li, J., Youn, C., Lyu, Y., Zhan, J., Wu, D., Xu, X., Liu, M., Lei, X., Xu, Z., Zhang, Y., Li, Z., Yang, Q., and Abdelzaher, T. (2023). Influence pathway discovery on social media. In 2023 IEEE 9th International Conference on Collaboration and Internet Computing (CIC), pages 105-109. DOI: 10.1109/cic58953.2023.00023.
Luo, Y., Ma, J., and Yeo, C. K. (2022). Identification of rumour stances by considering network topology and social media comments. Journal of Information Science, 48(1):118-130. DOI: 10.1177/0165551520944352.
Lynn, V., Giorgi, S., Balasubramanian, N., and Schwartz, H. A. (2019). Tweet classification without the tweet: An empirical examination of user versus document attributes. In 3rd workshop on natural language processing and computational social science, pages 18-28. DOI: 10.18653/v1/w19-2103.
Ma, J., Gao, W., and Wong, K.-F. (2018). Detect rumor and stance jointly by neural multi-task learning. In Companion proceedings of the the web conference 2018, pages 585-593. DOI: 10.1145/3184558.3188729.
Magdy, W., Darwish, K., Abokhodair, N., Rahimi, A., and Baldwin, T. (2016). #isisisnotislam or #deportallmuslims? predicting unspoken views. In 8th ACM Conference on Web Science, pages 95-106, Hannover, Germany. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/2908131.2908150.
Masood, M. A. and Abbasi, R. A. (2021). Using graph embedding and machine learning to identify rebels on twitter. Journal of Infometrics, 15(1):101121. DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2020.101121.
McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., and Cook, J. M. (2001). Birds of a feather: Homophily in social networks. Annual Review of Sociology, 27(1):415-444. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.soc.27.1.415.
Mohammad, S., Kiritchenko, S., Sobhani, P., Zhu, X., and Cherry, C. (2016). Semeval-2016 task 6: Detecting stance in tweets. In 10th international workshop on semantic evaluation (SemEval-2016), pages 31-41, San Diego, California. Association for Computational Linguistics. DOI: 10.18653/v1/s16-1003.
Onikoyi, B., Nnamoko, N., and Korkontzelos, I. (2023). Gender prediction with descriptive textual data using a machine learning approach. Natural Language Processing Journal, 4:100018. DOI: 10.1016/j.nlp.2023.100018.
Pavan, M. C. and Paraboni, I. (2022). Cross-target stance classification as domain adaptation. In Advances in Computational Intelligence - MICAI 2022 - Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence vol 13612, pages 15-25, Cham. Springer Nature Switzerland. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-19493-1_2.
Pavan, M. C. and Paraboni, I. (2024). A benchmark for portuguese zero-shot stance detection. Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society, 30(1):469-479. DOI: 10.5753/jbcs.2024.3932.
Pennebaker, J. W., Francis, M. E., and Booth, R. J. (2001). Inquiry and Word Count: LIWC. Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ. Book.
Penzo, N., Longa, A., Lepri, B., Tonelli, S., and Guerini, M. (2024). Putting context in context: the impact of discussion structure on text classification. In 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1793-1811. DOI: 10.18653/v1/2024.eacl-long.108.
Pereira, C., Pavan, M., Yoon, S., Ramos, R., Costa, P., Cavalheiro, L., and Paraboni, I. (2026). UstanceBR: a social media language resource for stance prediction. Language Resources and Evaluation, 60(14). DOI: 10.1007/s10579-025-09896-3.
Pougué-Biyong, J., Gupta, A., Haghighi, A., and El-Kishky, A. (2023). Learning stance embeddings from signed social graphs. In 16th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, page 177–185. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2201.11675.
Rezayi, S., Soleymani, S., Arabnia, H. R., and Li, S. (2021). Socially aware multimodal deep neural networks for fake news classification. In IEEE 4th international conference on multimedia information processing and retrieval (MIPR), pages 253-259. IEEE. DOI: 10.1109/mipr51284.2021.00048.
Rochert, D., Neubaum, G., Ross, B., and Stieglitz, S. (2022). Caught in a networked collusion? homogeneity in conspiracy-related discussion networks on youtube. Information Systems, 103:101866. DOI: 10.1016/j.is.2021.101866.
Sadiq, S., Yan, Y., Taylor, A., Shyu, M. L., Chen, S. C., and Feaster, D. (2017). Aafa: Associative affinity factor analysis for bot detection and stance classification in twitter. In 2017 IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integratiin (IRI), pages 356-365. DOI: 10.1109/iri.2017.25.
Sutter, M., Gourru, A., Trabelsi, A., and Largeron, C. (2024). Unsupervised stance detection for social media discussions: A generic baseline. In 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1782-1792. DOI: 10.18653/v1/2024.eacl-long.107.
Tyagi, A., Uyheng, J., and Carley, K. M. (2020). Affective polarization in online climate change discourse on twitter. In IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), pages 443-447. IEEE. DOI: 10.1109/asonam49781.2020.9381419.
Tyagi, A., Uyheng, J., and Carley, K. M. (2021). Heated conversations in a warming world: affective polarization in online climate change discourse follows real-world climate anomalies. Social Network Analysis and Mining, 11:1-12. DOI: 10.1007/s13278-021-00792-6.
Vanta, T. and Aono, M. (2020). Stance classification and rumor analysis: Using new dialog-act features and augmenting input tweets. In 7th International Conference on Advance Informatics: Concepts, Theory and Applications (ICAICTA), pages 1-6. IEEE. DOI: 10.1109/icaicta49861.2020.9429036.
Veyseh, A. P. B., Ebrahimi, J., Dou, D., and Lowd, D. (2017). A temporal attentional model for rumor stance classification. In 2017 ACM on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, pages 2335-2338. DOI: 10.1145/3132847.3133116.
Vilella, S., Lai, M., Paolotti, D., and Ruffo, G. (2020). Immigration as a divisive topic: Clusters and content diffusion in the italian twitter debate. Future internet, 12(10):173. DOI: 10.3390/fi12100173.
Wang, R., Zhou, D., Jiang, M., Si, J., and Yang, Y. (2019). A survey on opinion mining: From stance to product aspect. IEEE Access, 7:41101-41124. DOI: 10.1109/access.2019.2906754.
Williams, E. M. and Carley, K. M. (2023). Tspa: Efficient target-stance detection on twitter. In 2022 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, page 242–246. DOI: 10.1109/asonam55673.2022.10068608.
Wolpert, D. H. (1992). Stacked generalization. Neural networks, 5(2):241-259. DOI: 10.1016/s0893-6080(05)80023-1.
Xuan, K. and Xia, R. (2019). Rumor stance classification via machine learning with text, user and propagation features. In International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW), pages 560-566. IEEE. DOI: 10.1109/icdmw.2019.00085.
Yang, C., Li, J., Wang, R., Yao, S., Shao, H., Liu, D., Liu, S., Wang, T., and Abdelzaher, T. F. (2020). Hierarchical overlapping belief estimation by structured matrix factorization. In IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), pages 81-88. IEEE. DOI: 10.1109/asonam49781.2020.9381477.
Zhang, B., Dai, G., Niu, F., Yin, N., Fan, X., Wang, S., Cao, X., and Huang, H. (2024). A survey of stance detection on social media: New directions and perspectives. arXiv:2409.15690. DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2409.15690.
Zhao, C. and Caragea, C. (2024). EZ-STANCE: A large dataset for English zero-shot stance detection. In 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 15697-15714, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics. DOI: 10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.838.
Zubiaga, A., Aker, A., Bontcheva, K., Liakata, M., and Procter, R. (2018a). Detection and resolution of rumours in social media: A survey. Acm Computing Surveys (Csur), 51(2):1-36. DOI: 10.1145/3161603.
Zubiaga, A., Kochkina, E., Liakata, M., Procter, R., Lukasik, M., Bontcheva, K., Cohn, T., and Augenstein, I. (2018b). Discourse-aware rumour stance classification in social media using sequential classifiers. Information Processing & Management, 54(2):273-290. DOI: 10.1016/j.ipm.2017.11.009.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Laís Carraro Leme Cavalheiro, Ivandré Paraboni

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

