Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter permit experiments to be performed at minimal cost on populations of a size that scientists might previously have dreamt about. For instance, one experiment on Facebook involved over 60 million subjects. Such large scale experiments introduce new challenges as even small effects when multiplied by a large population can have a significant impact.
Recent revelations about the use of social media to manipulate voting behaviour compound such concerns. It is believed that the psychometric data used by Cambridge Analytica to target US voters was collected by Dr Aleksandr Kogan from Cambridge University using a personality quiz on Facebook. There is a real risk that researchers wanting to collect data and run experiments on social media platforms in the future will face a public backlash that hinders such studies from being conducted. We suggest that stronger safe guards are put in place to help prevent this, and ensure the public retain confidence in scientists using social media for behavioural and other studies.
Facebook as in social network is a great innovation of modern times. Among all social networking sites, Facebook is the most popular social network all over the world. Bangladesh is no exception. People use Facebook for various reasons e.g. social networking and communication, online shopping and business, knowledge and experience sharing etc. However, some recent incidents in Bangladesh, originated from or based on Facebook activities, led to arson and violence. Social network i.e. Facebook was used in these incidents mostly as a tool to trigger hatred and violence. This case study discusses …
As more and more people use social media to communicate their view and perception of elections, researchers have increasingly been collecting and analyzing data from social media platforms. Our research focuses on social media communication related to the 2013 election of the German parlia-ment [translation: Bundestagswahl 2013]. We constructed several social media datasets using data from Facebook and Twitter. First, we identified the most relevant candidates (n=2,346) and checked whether they maintained social media accounts. The Facebook data was collected in November 2013 for the period of…
Social media platforms have been trying to be more transparent about the political ads they run on their platforms, because the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that political campaigns are using social media on a large scale. One such transparency effort is the Facebook Ad Library, a public repository of all political ads run on Facebook and Instagram. This library provides journalist and researchers with data to get a better understanding of political advertising and microtargeting on Facebook's platforms. Unfortunately, the Facebook Ad Library only provides estimates and basic informati…
Online social networks support a vibrant ecosystem of third-party apps that get access to personal information of a large number of users. Despite several recent high-profile incidents, methods to systematically detect data misuse by third-party apps on online social networks are lacking. We propose CanaryTrap to detect misuse of data shared with third-party apps. CanaryTrap associates a honeytoken to a user account and then monitors its unrecognized use via different channels after sharing it with the third-party app. We design and implement CanaryTrap to investigate misuse of data shared wit…
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…
How does one develop a new online community that is highly engaging to each user and promotes social interaction? A number of websites offer friend-finding features that help users bootstrap social networks on the website by copying links from an established network like Facebook or Twitter. This paper quantifies the extent to which such social bootstrapping is effective in enhancing a social experience of the website. First, we develop a stylised analytical model that suggests that copying tends to produce a giant connected component (i.e., a connected community) quickly and preserves propert…
In this study, we examine the social networking practices of the 100 largest nonprofit organizations in the United States. More specifically, we develop a comprehensive classification scheme to delineate these organizations' use of Facebook as a stakeholder engagement tool. We find that there are 5 primary categories of Facebook "statuses", which can be aggregated into three key dimensions - "information", "community", and "action". Our analysis reveals that, though the "informational" use of Facebook is still significant, nonprofit organizations are better at using Facebook to strategically e…
We describe our work in the collection and analysis of massive data describing the connections between participants to online social networks. Alternative approaches to social network data collection are defined and evaluated in practice, against the popular Facebook Web site. Thanks to our ad-hoc, privacy-compliant crawlers, two large samples, comprising millions of connections, have been collected; the data is anonymous and organized as an undirected graph. We describe a set of tools that we developed to analyze specific properties of such social-network graphs, i.e., among others, degree di…
We present the design, implementation and evaluation of a new cloud-based social chatbot called MyMigrationBot, that is deployed to Facebook. The system asks and answers questions related to user's personality traits and person-job competency fit to give feedback, and potentially support migrant populations. The chatbot's response database is based on reputable socio-psychological tools and can be customised. The system's backend is written with Node.js, deployed to AWS and Twilio, and joined with Facebook through Graph and Messenger APIs. To our knowledge this is the first multilingual social…
Online Social Networks (OSNs) witness a rise in user activity whenever an event takes place. Malicious entities exploit this spur in user-engagement levels to spread malicious content that compromises system reputation and degrades user experience. It also generates revenue from advertisements, clicks, etc. for the malicious entities. Facebook, the world's biggest social network, is no exception and has recently been reported to face much abuse through scams and other type of malicious content, especially during news making events. Recent studies have reported that spammers earn $200 million j…
This study provides insights into the quantitative similarities, differences and relationships between users' spatial, face-to-face, urban social networks and their transpatial, online counterparts. We explore and map the social ties within a cohort of 2602 users, and how those ties are mediated via physical co-presence and online tools. Our analysis focused on isolating two distinct segments of the social network: one mediated by physical co-presence, and the other mediated by Facebook. Our results suggest that as a whole the networks exhibit homogeneous characteristics, but individuals' invo…
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 …
Women in Peru are exposed daily to gender violence and exclusion. Several feminist groups have used social media to share information, debate, denounce, organize, and provide help to victims. This contribution analyzes the meaning of female solidarity, sisterhood or sororidad, as a feminist political concept among members of one feminist Facebook group. We reviewed the how various feminist and sisterhood concepts clustered together in the group communications by reviewing group publications and comments as far as interviewing key former and current members. The sisterhood concept was found to …
Understanding social dynamics that govern human phenomena, such as communications and social relationships is a major problem in current computational social sciences. In particular, given the unprecedented success of online social networks (OSNs), in this paper we are concerned with the analysis of aggregation patterns and social dynamics occurring among users of the largest OSN as the date: Facebook. In detail, we discuss the mesoscopic features of the community structure of this network, considering the perspective of the communities, which has not yet been studied on such a large scale. To…
Many researchers have been concerned with social media and possible negative impacts on the well-being of their audience. With the popularity of social networking sites (SNS) steadily increasing, psychological and social sciences have shown great interest in their effects and consequences on humans. Unfortunately, it appears to be difficult to find correlations between SNS and the results of their works. We, therefore, investigate Facebook using the tools of HCI to find connections between interface features and the concerns raised by these domains. With a nod towards Dark Patterns, we use an …
Social media has been used for political campaigns of presidential candidates in a number of democratic countries, including Indonesia.The candidates for president and vice president have been following the latest trends in the virtual world by using social media such as: 1) Facebook, and 2) Twitter.The author's continuing research with a focus on the popularity of candidates for president and vice president of the Indonesian presidential election in July 9, 2014.The authors found that Facebook remains a social media most widely used in Indonesia for presidential campaigns. Prabowo secured the…
This study investigated perceptions and patterns of Facebook use among Filipino and Japanese undergraduate students and the relationship of these factors to creating and maintaining students social capital, international posture, and willingness to communicate. The survey of undergraduate students was conducted online and 483 valid responses were obtained. Data revealed the characteristic uses of FB by Filipino and Japanese undergraduate students. An interrelation model among six factors, International Posture, WTC, Perception, Bridging, Bonding, and Utilization for Filipino students showed th…
Facebook, the largest social networking site in the world, has overcome the structural barriers that historically constrain individuals to reach out to different others. Through the platform, people from all walks of life and virtually any location can develop diverse friendships online. However, friendships on Facebook have been as segregated as friendships in real life. This research sought to understand why the leading social networking site intended to 'bring the world closer together' retains segregated friendship. In doing so, we employed a series of agent-based simulations based on the …
Psychological, political, cultural, and even societal factors are entangled in the reasoning and decision-making process towards vaccination, rendering vaccine hesitancy a complex issue. Here, administering a series of surveys via a Facebook-hosted application, we study the worldviews of people that "Liked" supportive or vaccine resilient Facebook Pages. In particular, we assess differences in political viewpoints, moral values, personality traits, and general interests, finding that those sceptical about vaccination, appear to trust less the government, are less agreeable, while they are emph…
Social media in scientific research offer a unique digital observatory of human behaviours and hence great opportunities to conduct research at large scale answering complex sociodemographic questions. We focus on the identification and assessment of biases in social media administered surveys. This study aims to shed light on population, self-selection and behavioural biases, empirically comparing the consistency between self-reported information collected traditionally versus social media administered questionnaires, including demographic and psychometric attributes. We engaged a demographic…
Pervasive socio-technical networks bring new conceptual and technological challenges to developers and users alike. A central research theme is evaluation of the intensity of relations linking users and how they facilitate communication and the spread of information. These aspects of human relationships have been studied extensively in the social sciences under the framework of the "strength of weak ties" theory proposed by Mark Granovetter.13 Some research has considered whether that theory can be extended to online social networks like Facebook, suggesting interaction data can be used to pre…
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…
With the rapid proliferation and adoption of social media among healthcare professionals and organizations, social media-based HIV/AIDS intervention programs have become increasingly popular. However, the question of the effectiveness of the HIV/AIDS messages disseminated via social media has received scant attention in the literature. The current study applies content analysis to examine the relationship between Facebook messaging strategies employed by 110 HIV/AIDS nonprofit organizations and audience reactions in the form of liking, commenting, and sharing behavior. The results reveal that …
Social media trolling is a powerful tactic to manipulate public opinion on issues with a high moral component. Troll farms, as evidenced in the past, created fabricated content to provoke or silence people to share their opinion on social media during the US presidential election in 2016. In this paper, we introduce an alternate way of provoking or silencing social media discourse by manipulating how users perceive authentic content. This manipulation is performed by man-in-the-middle malware that covertly rearranges the linguistic content of an authentic social media post and comments. We cal…
Online social media are information resources that can have a transformative power in society. While the Web was envisioned as an equalizing force that allows everyone to access information, the digital divide prevents large amounts of people from being present online. Online social media in particular are prone to gender inequality, an important issue given the link between social media use and employment. Understanding gender inequality in social media is a challenging task due to the necessity of data sources that can provide large-scale measurements across multiple countries. Here we show …
Recent studies have shown that online users tend to select information adhering to their system of beliefs, ignore information that does not, and join groups - i.e., echo chambers - around a shared narrative. Although a quantitative methodology for their identification is still missing, the phenomenon of echo chambers is widely debated both at scientific and political level. To shed light on this issue, we introduce an operational definition of echo chambers and perform a massive comparative analysis on more than 1B pieces of contents produced by 1M users on four social media platforms: Facebo…
California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）；CIMEC - University of Trento（心智/脑科学中心 - 特伦托大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Verona（维罗纳大学）；FBK（布鲁诺·凯斯勒基金会）
People spend considerable effort managing the impressions they give others. Social psychologists have shown that people manage these impressions differently depending upon their personality. Facebook and other social media provide a new forum for this fundamental process; hence, understanding people's behaviour on social media could provide interesting insights on their personality. In this paper we investigate automatic personality recognition from Facebook profile pictures. We analyze the effectiveness of four families of visual features and we discuss some human interpretable patterns that …
There has been concern about the proliferation of the "QAnon" conspiracy theory on Facebook, but little is known about how its misleading narrative propagated on the world's largest social media platform. Thus, the present research analyzed content generated by 2,813 Facebook pages and groups that contributed to promoting the conspiracy narrative between 2017 and 2020. The result demonstrated that activities of QAnon pages and groups started a significant surge months before the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. We found that these pages and groups increasingly relied on internal sources, i.e.,…
This workshop paper reports on an ongoing mixed-methods study on the two arguably most popular social network sites, Facebook and Twitter, for the same users. The overarching goal of the study is to shed light into the nuances of social media selection and cross-platform use by combining survey data about participants' motivations with usage data collected via API extraction. We describe the set-up of the study and focus our discussion on the challenges and insights relating to participant recruiting and data collection, handling and dimensionalizing usage data, and comparing usage data across…
Evaluation of A National Digitally-Enabled Health Promotion Campaign for Mental Health Awareness using Social Media Platforms Tik Tok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube
IUSS Institute for Advanced Study（IUSS高等研究院）；IMT Institute for Advanced Studies（IMT高等研究院）
In online social networks, users tend to select information that adhere to their system of beliefs and to form polarized groups of like minded people. Polarization as well as its effects on online social interactions have been extensively investigated. Still, the relation between group formation and personality traits remains unclear. A better understanding of the cognitive and psychological determinants of online social dynamics might help to design more efficient communication strategies and to challenge the digital misinformation threat. In this work, we focus on users commenting posts publ…
Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy (SUDEP) remains a leading cause of death in people with epilepsy. Despite the constant risk for patients and bereavement to family members, to date the physiological mechanisms of SUDEP remain unknown. Here we explore the potential to identify putative predictive signals of SUDEP from online digital behavioral data using text and sentiment analysis. Specifically, we analyze Facebook timelines of six epilepsy patients deceased due to SUDEP, donated by surviving family members. We find preliminary evidence for behavioral changes detectable by text and sentimen…
Misinformation promotes distrust in science, undermines public health, and may drive civil unrest. Vaccine misinformation, in particular, has stalled efforts to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic, prompting social media platforms' attempts to reduce it. Some have questioned whether "soft" content moderation remedies -- e.g., flagging and downranking misinformation -- were successful, suggesting that the addition of "hard" content remedies -- e.g., deplatforming and content bans -- is necessary. We therefore examined whether Facebook's vaccine misinformation content removal policies were effective.…
Research on social-media platforms has tended to rely on textual analysis to perform research tasks. While text-based approaches have significantly increased our understanding of online behavior and social dynamics, they overlook features on these platforms that have grown in prominence in the past few years: click-based responses to content. In this paper, we present a new dataset of Facebook Reactions to scholarly content. We give an overview of its structure, analyze some of the statistical trends in the data, and use it to train and test two supervised learning algorithms. Our preliminary …
This dissertation is based on five empirical research articles investigating the different latent factors that motivate and hinder the process of digital-photo interaction in computer-mediated platforms. Study I examine the current practices surrounding digital photos in the context of personal photo repositories (N=15). Study II investigates the gratifications and impeding factors associated with photo-tagging activity on Facebook (N=67). Study III develops and tests an instrument for understanding the gratifications of Facebook photo-sharing (N=368). Study IV examines the impact of various a…
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…
We have analyzed the fully-anonymized headers of 362 million messages exchanged by 4.2 million users of Facebook, an online social network of college students, during a 26 month interval. The data reveal a number of strong daily and weekly regularities which provide insights into the time use of college students and their social lives, including seasonal variations. We also examined how factors such as school affiliation and informal online friend lists affect the observed behavior and temporal patterns. Finally, we show that Facebook users appear to be clustered by school with respect to thei…
This chapter discusses important challenges of designing the data collection setup for social media studies. It outlines how it is necessary to carefully think about which data to collect and to use, and to recognize the effects that a specific data collection approach may have on the types of analyses that can be carried out and the results that can be expected in a study. We will highlight important questions one should ask before setting up a data collection framework and relate them to the different options for accessing social media data. The chapter will mainly be illustrated with exampl…
The Ubiquitous nature of smartphones has significantly increased the use of social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and LinkedIn, etc., among the public, government, and businesses. Facebook generated ~70 billion USD in 2019 in advertisement revenues alone, a ~27% increase from the previous year. Social media has also played a strong role in outbreaks of social protests responsible for political changes in different countries. As we can see from the above examples, social media plays a big role in business intelligence and international politics. In this paper, we present an…
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…
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…
The value and relevance of indigenous knowledge towards sustainability of human societies drives for its preservation. This work explored the use of Facebook groups to promote indigenous knowledge among Igorot peoples in the diaspora. The virtual communities help intensify the connection of Igorot migrants to their traditional culture despite the challenges of assimilation to a different society. A survey of posts on 20 Facebook groups identified and classified the indigenous cultural elements conveyed through social media. A subsequent survey of 56 Igorot migrants revealed that popular social…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；W.E. Upjohn Institute（W.E.厄普约翰研究所）
In this paper we introduce a framework for annotating a social media text corpora for various categories. Since, social media data is generated via individuals, it is important to annotate the text for the individuals demographic attributes to enable a socio-technical analysis of the corpora. Furthermore, when analyzing a large data-set we can often annotate a small sample of data and then train a prediction model using this sample to annotate the full data for the relevant categories. We use a case study of a Facebook comment corpora on student loan discussion which was annotated for gender, …
University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
A body of literature has demonstrated that users' mental health conditions, such as depression and anxiety, can be predicted from their social media language. There is still a gap in the scientific understanding of how psychological stress is expressed on social media. Stress is one of the primary underlying causes and correlates of chronic physical illnesses and mental health conditions. In this paper, we explore the language of psychological stress with a dataset of 601 social media users, who answered the Perceived Stress Scale questionnaire and also consented to share their Facebook and Tw…
