Research

COMPUTATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE · 3 PAPERS · 1 THESIS · ALL READABLE BY HUMANS

How Personal Narratives Empower Politically Disinclined Individuals to Engage in Political Discussions

Tejasvi Chebrolu, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Ashwin Rajadesingan · ACM WebSci 2025

✳ BEST PAPER, HONORABLE MENTION

People who never talk politics online will join in when someone opens with a story of their own. We measured how often, and why it works.

[ARXIV][PDF][DOI]

ABSTRACT — SHOWN

Political talk online is dominated by the already-loud. Analyzing large-scale Reddit discussions with a narrative classifier, we find that first-person stories reliably pull politically disinclined users into conversations — and keep those conversations warmer once they arrive.

BIBTEX

@inproceedings{chebrolu2025narratives,
  title     = {How Personal Narratives Empower Politically Disinclined
               Individuals to Engage in Political Discussions},
  author    = {Chebrolu, Tejasvi and Kumaraguru, Ponnurangam and
               Rajadesingan, Ashwin},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 17th ACM Web Science Conference},
  year      = {2025},
  doi       = {10.1145/3717867.3717899}
}

Personal Narratives in Cross-Partisan Political Discussions on Reddit

Ashwin Rajadesingan, Tejasvi Chebrolu · ICA 2025

✳ TOP PAPER, COMPUTATIONAL METHODS DIVISION

When left and right actually talk to each other, the exchanges that go well tend to begin with somebody's own story. We looked at which ones, and what happens next.

BIBTEX

@inproceedings{rajadesingan2025crosspartisan,
  title     = {Personal Narratives in Cross-Partisan Political Discussions
               on Reddit},
  author    = {Rajadesingan, Ashwin and Chebrolu, Tejasvi},
  booktitle = {75th Annual Conference of the International Communication
               Association},
  year      = {2025}
}

Framing the Fray: Conflict Framing in Indian Election News Coverage

Tejasvi Chebrolu, Rohan Modepalle, N. Harsha Vardhan, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Ashwin Rajadesingan · ACM WebSci 2025

Election coverage loves a fight. We traced how Indian outlets frame elections as conflict, and what that does to the story you end up reading.

[ARXIV][PDF][DOI]

BIBTEX

@inproceedings{chebrolu2025framing,
  title     = {Framing the Fray: Conflict Framing in Indian Election News
               Coverage},
  author    = {Chebrolu, Tejasvi and Modepalle, Rohan and Vardhan, N. Harsha
               and Kumaraguru, Ponnurangam and Rajadesingan, Ashwin},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 17th ACM Web Science Conference},
  year      = {2025},
  doi       = {10.1145/3717867.3717900}
}

M.S. THESIS — Personal Narratives in Online Political Discussions IIIT HYDERABAD · DEFENDED MAY 2025