This paper describes how people living in armed conflict environments use social media as a participatory news platform, in lieu of damaged state and media apparatuses. We investigate this by analyzing the microblogging practices of Mexican citizens whose everyday life is affected by the Drug War. We provide a descriptive analysis of the phenomenon, combining content and quantitative Twitter data analyses. We focus on three interrelated phenomena: general participation patterns of ordinary citizens, the emergence and role of information curators, and the tension between governmental regulation and drug cartel intimidation. This study reveals the complex tensions among citizens, media actors, and the government in light of large scale organized crime.
In this paper we examine the information sharing practices of people living in cities amid armed conflict. We describe the volume and frequency of microblogging activity on Twitter from four cities afflicted by the Mexican Drug War, showing how citizens use social media to alert one another and to comment on the violence that plagues their communities. We then investigate the emergence of civic media "curators," individuals who act as "war correspondents" by aggregating and disseminating information to large numbers of people on social media. We conclude by outlining the implications of our ob…
Nowadays social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), not only simply as communication media, but also for promotion. Social networking media offers many business benefits for companies and organizations. Research purposes is to determine the model of social network media utilization as a promotional media for handicraft business in Palembang city. Qualitative and quantitative research design are used to know how handicraft business in Palembang city utilizing social media networking as a promotional media. The research results show 35% craft businesses already utilizing social media as a promotion…
The use of social media is ubiquitous and nowadays well-established in our everyday life, but increasingly also before, during or after emergencies. The produced data is spread across several types of social media and can be used by different actors, such as emergency services or volunteer communities. There are already systems available that support the process of gathering, analysing and distributing information through social media. However, dependent on the goal of analysis, the analysis methods and available systems are limited based on technical or business-oriented restrictions. This pa…
Information technology (IT) has been used widely in many aspects of our daily life. After discuss politics related aspects for some articles. In this article author would like to discuss social media for students learning environment. Social media as a leading application on the internet has changed many aspects of life become more globalized. This article discusses the use of social media to support learning activities for students in the faculty of computer science. The author uses Facebook and WordPress as an alternative to electronic learning: 1) online attendance tool, 2) media storage an…
Social media generate data on human behaviour at large scales and over long periods of time, posing a complementary approach to traditional methods in the social sciences. Millions of texts from social media can be processed with computational methods to study emotions over time and across regions. However, recent research has shown weak correlations between social media emotions and affect questionnaires at the individual level and between static regional aggregates of social media emotion and subjective well-being at the population level, questioning the validity of social media data to stud…
Media organisations are essential communication stakeholders in social media disaster communication during extreme events. They perform gatekeeper and amplification roles which are crucial for collective sense-making processes. In that capacity, media organisations distribute information through social media, use it as a source of information, and share such information across different channels. Yet, little is known about the role of media organisations on social media as supposed sense-givers to effectively support the creation of mutual sense. This study investigates the communication strat…
Social media has become something that is important to enhance social networking and sharing of information through the website. Social media have not only changed social networking, they provide a valuable tool for social organization, activism, political, healthcare and even academic relations in the university. The researchers conducted present study with objectives to a). examine the academic use of social media by universities, b). measure the popularity and visibility of social media owned by universities. This study was delimited to the universities in Indonesia. The population of the s…
The study explores whether the use of Twitter in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) promotes the interaction among learners. The social network analysis shows that instructors still play a very central role in the social media communication and the communication network between students shrinking over time. The mere use of social media fails to promote learner-learner interaction. More research is needed for understanding learner motivation and how instructional design can help increase their engagement and participation.
This study examined the impact of social media in the fight against the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in Anambra state, Nigeria. The key objectives are to: find out if the numbers of social media users increased in Anambra state since the wake of coronavirus pandemic; find out if the social media is being utilised in the fight against the spread of coronavirus pandemic in Anambra state; find out how the social media is being utilised in the fight against the spread of coronavirus pandemic in Anambra state; and discover the impact of social media in the fight against the spread of c…
Social media data has been increasingly used to facilitate situational awareness during events and emergencies such as natural disasters. While researchers have investigated several methods to summarize, visualize or mine the data for analysis, first responders have not been able to fully leverage research advancements largely due to the gap between academic research and deployed, functional systems. In this paper, we explore the opportunities and barriers for the effective use of social media data from first responders' perspective. We present the summary of several detailed interviews with f…
Social media have become a valuable source for extracting data about societal crises and an important outlet to disseminate official information. Government agencies are increasingly turning to social media to use it as a mouthpiece in times of crisis. Gaining intelligence through social media analytics, however, remains a challenge for government agencies, e.g. due to a lack of training and instruments. To mitigate this shortcoming, government agencies need tools that support them in analysing social media data for the public good. This paper presents a design science research approach that g…
The pervasive use of social media has grown to over two billion users to date, and is commonly utilized as a means to share information and shape world events. Evidence suggests that passive social media usage (i.e., viewing without taking action) has an impact on the user's perspective. This empirical influence over perspective could have significant impact on social events. Therefore, it is important to understand how social media contributes to the formation of an individual's perspective. A set of experimental tasks were designed to investigate empirically derived thresholds for opinion fo…
In this paper we investigate what folk models of misinformation exist through semi-structured interviews with a sample of 235 social media users. Work on social media misinformation does not investigate how ordinary users - the target of misinformation - deal with it; rather, the focus is mostly on the anxiety, tensions, or divisions misinformation creates. Studying the aspects of creation, diffusion and amplification also overlooks how misinformation is internalized by users on social media and thus is quick to prescribe "inoculation" strategies for the presumed lack of immunity to misinforma…
Social media offers a unique window into attitudes like racism and homophobia, exposure to which are important, hard to measure and understudied social determinants of health. However, individual geo-located observations from social media are noisy and geographically inconsistent. Existing areas by which exposures are measured, like Zip codes, average over irrelevant administratively-defined boundaries. Hence, in order to enable studies of online social environmental measures like attitudes on social media and their possible relationship to health outcomes, first there is a need for a method t…
In the last years researchers in the field of intelligent transportation systems have made several efforts to extract valuable information from social media streams. However, collecting domain-specific data from any social media is a challenging task demanding appropriate and robust classification methods. In this work we focus on exploring geo-located tweets in order to create a travel-related tweet classifier using a combination of bag-of-words and word embeddings. The resulting classification makes possible the identification of interesting spatio-temporal relations in São Paulo and Rio de …
Social media platforms provide active communication channels during mass convergence and emergency events such as disasters caused by natural hazards. As a result, first responders, decision makers, and the public can use this information to gain insight into the situation as it unfolds. In particular, many social media messages communicated during emergencies convey timely, actionable information. Processing social media messages to obtain such information, however, involves solving multiple challenges including: handling information overload, filtering credible information, and prioritizing …
Do people trust social media? If so, why, in what contexts, and how does that trust impact their lives? Researchers, companies, and journalists alike have increasingly investigated these questions, which are fundamental to understanding social media interactions and their implications for society. However, trust in social media is a complex concept, and there is conflicting evidence about the antecedents and implications of trusting social media content, users, and platforms. More problematic is that we lack basic agreement as to what trust means in the context of social media. Addressing thes…
Social media data has been increasingly used to study biomedical and health-related phenomena. From cohort level discussions of a condition to planetary level analyses of sentiment, social media has provided scientists with unprecedented amounts of data to study human behavior and response associated with a variety of health conditions and medical treatments. Here we review recent work in mining social media for biomedical, epidemiological, and social phenomena information relevant to the multilevel complexity of human health. We pay particular attention to topics where social media data analy…
We demonstrate the critical need to identify social situation and instability factors by acquiring public social satisfaction in this research. However, subject to the large amount of manual work cost in subject recruitment and data processing, conventional self-reported method cannot be implemented in real time or applied in large scale investigation. To solve the problem, this paper proposed an approach to predict users' social satisfaction, especially for the economy-related satisfaction based on users' social media records. We recruited 2,018 Cantonese active participants from each city in…
So-called 'social bots' have garnered a lot of attention lately. Previous research showed that they attempted to influence political events such as the Brexit referendum and the US presidential elections. It remains, however, somewhat unclear what exactly can be understood by the term 'social bot'. This paper addresses the need to better understand the intentions of bots on social media and to develop a shared understanding of how 'social' bots differ from other types of bots. We thus describe a systematic review of publications that researched bot accounts on social media. Based on the result…
The present study argues that political communication on social media is mediated by a platform's digital architecture, defined as the technical protocols that enable, constrain, and shape user behavior in a virtual space. A framework for understanding digital architectures is introduced, and four platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat) are compared along the typology. Using the 2016 US election as a case, interviews with three Republican digital strategists are combined with social media data to qualify the studyies theoretical claim that a platform's network structure, functio…
The information technology applications in cyberspace (the internet) are currently dominated by social media. The author investigates and explores the advantages of social media implementation of any political party in Indonesian general legislative elections 2014. There are twelve national political parties participating in the election as contestants plus three local political parties in Aceh. In this research, author focus on national political parties only. The author visited, analyzed, and learnt the social media used by the contestants. Those social media are : 1) Facebook, 2) Twitter, a…
University of Pretoria（比勒陀利亚大学）；CSIR（南非科学与工业研究理事会）；Mail and Guardian（《邮卫报》）
Social Media can be used to extract discussion topics during a disaster. With the COVID-19 pandemic impact on South Africa, we need to understand how the law and regulation promulgated by the government in response to the pandemic contrasts with discussion topics social media users have been engaging in. In this work, we expand on traditional media analysis by using Social Media discussions driven by or directed to South African government officials. We find topics that are similar as well as different in some cases. The findings can inform further study into social media during disaster setti…
Background: A new illness could first come to the public attention over social media before it is medically defined, formally documented or systematically studied. One example is a phenomenon known as breast implant illness (BII) that has been extensively discussed on social media, though vaguely defined in medical literature. Objectives: The objective of this study is to construct a data analysis pipeline to understand emerging illness using social media data, and to apply the pipeline to understand key attributes of BII. Methods: We conducted a pipeline of social media data analysis using Na…
A UK-based online questionnaire investigating aspects of usage of user-generated media (UGM), such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, attracted 587 participants. Results show a high degree of engagement with social networking media such as Facebook, and a significant engagement with other media such as professional media, microblogs and blogs. Participants who experience information overload are those who engage less frequently with the media, rather than those who have fewer posts to read. Professional users show different behaviours to social users. Microbloggers complain of information over…
Social media as a trend in the Internet is now used as a medium for political campaigns. Author explores the advantages and social media implementation of any political party in Indonesia legislative elections 2014. Author visited and analyzed social media used by the contestants, such as: Facebook, and Twitter. Author collected data from social media until the end of April 2014. This article discusses the use of social media by political parties and their features. The results of this study indicate that social media are: 1) effective tool for current and future political campaigns, 2) reach …
Social media data is now widely used by many academic researchers. However, long-term social media data collection projects, which most typically involve collecting data from public-use APIs, often encounter issues when relying on local-area network servers (LANs) to collect high-volume streaming social media data over long periods of time. In this technical report, we present a cloud-based data collection, pre-processing, and archiving infrastructure, and argue that this system mitigates or resolves the problems most typically encountered when running social media data collection projects on …
In this paper we aim at providing a general reflection around the present and future of social media metrics (or altmetrics) and how they could evolve into a new discipline focused on the study of the relationships and interactions between science and social media, in what could be seen as the social media studies of science.
Among the general population, students are especially sensitive to social media and smartphones because of their pervasiveness. Several studies have shown that there is a negative correlation between social media and academic performance since they can lead to behaviors that hurt students' careers, e.g., addictedness. However, these studies either focus on smartphones and social media addictedness or rely on surveys, which only provide approximate estimates. We propose to bridge this gap by i) parametrizing social media usage and academic performance, and ii) combining smartphones and time dia…
Many foreign companies see social media as a low cost marketing space for entering the vast Chinese market. This is fraught with complexity, requiring an understanding of social media behaviour, social media marketing, and the Chinese context. In this exploratory pilot study, we develop the notion of franding (online freinding of brands) as a unifying metaphor, and suggest that effective social media brand strategies resemble effective online friend behaviours. Based on this we develop some propositions and evaluate them qualitatively in interviews with young Chinese consumers. Our study sugge…
The combination of large open data sources with machine learning approaches presents a potentially powerful way to predict events such as protest or social unrest. However, accounting for uncertainty in such models, particularly when using diverse, unstructured datasets such as social media, is essential to guarantee the appropriate use of such methods. Here we develop a Bayesian method for predicting social unrest events in Australia using social media data. This method uses machine learning methods to classify individual postings to social media as being relevant, and an empirical Bayesian a…
Social media platforms are increasingly being used by governments to foster user interaction. Particularly in cities with enhanced ICT infrastructures (i.e., Informational World Cities) and high internet penetration rates, social media platforms are valuable tools for reaching high numbers of citizens. This empirical investigation of 31 Informational World Cities will provide an overview of social media services used for governmental purposes, of their popularity among governments, and of their usage intensity in broadcasting information online.
The availability and interactive nature of social media have made them the primary source of news around the globe. The popularity of social media tempts criminals to pursue their immoral intentions by producing and disseminating fake news using seductive text and misleading images. Therefore, verifying social media news and spotting fakes is crucial. This work aims to analyze multi-modal features from texts and images in social media for detecting fake news. We propose a Fake News Revealer (FNR) method that utilizes transform learning to extract contextual and semantic features and contrastiv…
Social media technologies are increasingly utilized by patients, leading to development of online social groups where patients share experiences and offer support to their peers on these platforms. There is limited research investigating actual use of social media platforms by patients, issues faced in using such platforms and how appropriation of these platforms impact patient outcomes. A conceptual model based on social support theory and model of technology appropriation is proposed in order to investigate factors that influence this phenomenon. The authors propose that social support theor…
Although considerable research has concentrated on online campaigning, it is still unclear how politicians use different social media platforms in political communication. Focusing on the German federal election campaign 2013, this article investigates whether election candidates address the topics most important to the mass audience and to which extent their communication is shaped by the characteristics of Facebook and Twitter. Based on open-ended responses from a representative survey conducted during the election campaign, we train a human-interpretable Bayesian language model to identify …
Currently, the significance of social media in disseminating noteworthy information on topics such as health, politics, and the economy is indisputable. During the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-vaxxers use social media to distribute fake news and anxiety-provoking information about the vaccine, which may harm the public. Here, we characterize the psycho-linguistic features of anti-vaxxers on the online social network Twitter. For this, we collected COVID-19 related tweets from February 2020 to June 2021 to analyse vaccination stance, linguistic features, and social network characteristics. Our resul…
It is a considerable task to collect digital trace data at a large scale and at the same time adhere to established academic standards. In the context of political communication, important challenges are (1) defining the social media accounts and posts relevant to the campaign (content validity), (2) operationalizing the venues where relevant social media activity takes place (construct validity), (3) capturing all of the relevant social media activity (reliability), and (4) sharing as much data as possible for reuse and replication (objectivity). This project by GESIS - Leibniz Institute for …
Social media provides an extended space for collective action, as netizens leverage it as a tool for claim-making and for demanding the dividends of governance. However, political regimes often greet expanding use of social media with censorship, which netizens often have to contend with, particularly in the quest for development outcomes. While existing studies having expansively explored multiple uses of social media, the specific features that signal their massive uptake and how this intersects with the quest for political power has not been substantially documented. This paper argues that …
In the last decade, social media has evolved as one of the leading platform to create, share, or exchange information; it is commonly used as a way for individuals to maintain social connections. In this online digital world, people use to post texts or pictures to express their views socially and create user-user engagement through discussions and conversations. Thus, social media has established itself to bear signals relating to human behavior. One can easily design user characteristic network by scraping through someone's social media profiles. In this paper, we investigate the potential o…
The increasing threat of social engineers targeting social media channels to advance their attack effectiveness on company data has seen many organizations introducing initiatives to better understand these vulnerabilities. This paper examines concerns of social engineering through social media within the enterprise and explores countermeasures undertaken to stem ensuing risk. Also included is an analysis of existing social media security policies and guidelines within the public and private sectors.
Increased use of social media by police to connect with citizens has encouraged researchers to study different aspects of information exchange (e.g. type of information, credibility and propagation) during emergency and crisis situation. Research studies lack understanding of human behavior such as engagement, emotions and social interaction between citizen and police department on social media. Several social media studies explore and show technological implications of human behavioral aspects in various contexts such as workplace interaction and depression in young mothers. In this paper, we…
California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Online harassment is a significant social problem. Prevention of online harassment requires rapid detection of harassing, offensive, and negative social media posts. In this paper, we propose the use of word embedding models to identify offensive and harassing social media messages in two aspects: detecting fast-changing topics for more effective data collection and representing word semantics in different domains. We demonstrate with preliminary results that using the GloVe (Global Vectors for Word Representation) model facilitates the discovery of new and relevant keywords to use for data co…
With hundreds of thousands of individuals using social media to discuss health concerns, sensitive personal data is self-disclosed on these platforms every day. Previous research indicates an understanding of social privacy concerns by patients with chronic illnesses, but there is a lack of understanding in the perception of information privacy concerns. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 38 patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) using social media platforms to engage with online communities. Using thematic analysis, we identified that patients typically demonstrate the privacy…
Social networks are a prominent feature of many social media sites, a new generation of Web sites that allow users to create and share content. Sites such as Digg, Flickr, and Del.icio.us allow users to designate others as "friends" or "contacts" and provide a single-click interface to track friends' activity. How are these social networks used? Unlike pure social networking sites (e.g., LinkedIn and Facebook), which allow users to articulate their online professional and personal relationships, social media sites are not, for the most part, aimed at helping users create or foster online relat…
This is a programmatic paper, marking out two directions in which the study of social media can contribute to broader problems of social science: understanding cultural evolution and understanding collective cognition. Under the first heading, I discuss some difficulties with the usual, adaptationist explanations of cultural phenomena, alternative explanations involving network diffusion effects, and some ways these could be tested using social-media data. Under the second I describe some of the ways in which social media could be used to study how the social organization of an epistemic commu…
Social Media has been transforming numerous activities of everyday life, impacting also healthcare. However, few studies investigate the medical use of social media by patients and medical practitioners, especially in the Arabian Gulf region and Kuwait. To understand the behavior of patients and medical practitioners in social media toward healthcare and medical purposes, we conducted user studies. Through an online survey, we identified a decrease in patients and medical practitioners use of social media for medical purposes. Patients reported to be more aware than practitioners concerning: h…
Existing social media platforms (SMPs) make it incredibly difficult for researchers to conduct studies on social media, which in turn has created a knowledge gap between academia and industry about the effects of platform design on user behavior. To close the gap, we introduce Yourfeed, a research tool for conducting ecologically valid social media research. We introduce the platform architecture, as well key opportunities such as assessing the effects of exposure of content on downstream beliefs and attitudes, measuring attentional exposure via dwell time, and evaluating heterogeneous newsfee…
In order to better understand the effect of social media in the dissemination of scholarly articles, employing the daily updated referral data of 110 PeerJ articles collected over a period of 345 days, we analyze the relationship between social media attention and article visitors directed by social media. Our results show that social media presence of PeerJ articles is high. About 68.18% of the papers receive at least one tweet from Twitter accounts other than @PeerJ, the official account of the journal. Social media attention increases the dissemination of scholarly articles. Altmetrics coul…
In recent years, social media has become ubiquitous and important for social networking and content sharing. And yet, the content that is generated from these websites remains largely untapped. In this paper, we demonstrate how social media content can be used to predict real-world outcomes. In particular, we use the chatter from Twitter.com to forecast box-office revenues for movies. We show that a simple model built from the rate at which tweets are created about particular topics can outperform market-based predictors. We further demonstrate how sentiments extracted from Twitter can be furt…
