Generics (unquantified generalizations) are thought to be pervasive in communication and when they are about social groups, this may offend and polarize people because generics gloss over variations between individuals. Generics about social groups might be particularly common on Twitter (X). This remains unexplored, however. Using machine learning (ML) techniques, we therefore developed an automatic classifier for social generics, applied it to more than a million tweets about people, and analyzed the tweets. We found that most tweets (78%) about people contained no generics. However, tweets with social generics received more 'likes' and retweets. Furthermore, while recent psychological research may lead to the prediction that tweets with generics about political groups are more common than tweets with generics about ethnic groups, we found the opposite. However, consistent with recent claims that political animosity is less constrained by social norms than animosity against gender and ethnic groups, negative tweets with generics about political groups were significantly more prevalent and retweeted than negative tweets about ethnic groups. Our study provides the first ML-based insights into the use and impact of social generics on Twitter.
Gund Institute for Environment, University of Vermont（佛蒙特大学冈德环境研究所）；Vermont Complex Systems Center, University of Vermont（佛蒙特大学复杂系统中心）；Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, University of Vermont（佛蒙特大学鲁宾斯坦环境与自然资源学院）；Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Vermont（佛蒙特大学数学与统计系）
With more people living in cities, we are witnessing a decline in exposure to nature. A growing body of research has demonstrated an association between nature contact and improved mood. Here, we used Twitter and the Hedonometer, a world analysis tool, to investigate how sentiment, or the estimated happiness of the words people write, varied before, during, and after visits to San Francisco's urban park system. We found that sentiment was substantially higher during park visits and remained elevated for several hours following the visit. Leveraging differences in vegetative cover across park t…
On 6 January 2021, a mob of right-wing conservatives stormed the USA Capitol Hill interrupting the session of congress certifying 2020 Presidential election results. Immediately after the start of the event, posts related to the riots started to trend on social media. A social media platform which stood out was a free speech endorsing social media platform Parler; it is being claimed as the platform on which the riots were planned and talked about. Our report presents a contrast between the trending content on Parler and Twitter around the time of riots. We collected data from both platforms b…
The growing popularity of E-cigarettes, an alternative to cigarettes, has motivated us to study trends of the brands, flavors and online market activity using posts from Reddit and Twitter. The main motivation for this world-wide study is to emphasize the difference that laws and regulations have on the usage and availability of different flavors and brands of vapes in different countries. Data has been obtained from subreddits belonging to e-cigarette communities from Australia, Canada, Europe, and the UK. Extensive cleaning of data, and rigorous text mining operations provide varying results…
Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California（南加州大学信息科学研究所）
Although multiple COVID-19 vaccines have been available for several months now, vaccine hesitancy continues to be at high levels in the United States. In part, the issue has also become politicized, especially since the presidential election in November. Understanding vaccine hesitancy during this period in the context of social media, including Twitter, can provide valuable guidance both to computational social scientists and policy makers. Rather than studying a single Twitter corpus, this paper takes a novel view of the problem by comparatively studying two Twitter datasets collected betwee…
West Windsor-Plainsboro High School South（西温莎-普兰斯堡南高中）
Understanding the relationship between structure and sentiment is essential in highlighting future operations with online social networks. More specifically, within popular conversation on Twitter. This paper provides a development on the relationship between the two variables: structure, defined as the composition of a directed network, and sentiment, a quantified value of the positive/negative connotations of a conversation. We highlight thread sentiment to be inversely proportional to the strength and connectivity of a network. The second portion of this paper highlights differences in quer…
Bot Detection is an essential asset in a period where Online Social Networks(OSN) is a part of our lives. This task becomes more relevant in crises, as the Covid-19 pandemic, where there is an incipient risk of proliferation of social bots, producing a possible source of misinformation. In order to address this issue, it has been compared different methods to detect automatically social bots on Twitter using Data Selection. The techniques utilized to elaborate the bot detection models include the utilization of features as the tweets metadata or the Digital Fingerprint of the Twitter accounts.…
In recent years, bullying and aggression against users on social media have grown significantly, causing serious consequences to victims of all demographics. In particular, cyberbullying affects more than half of young social media users worldwide, and has also led to teenage suicides, prompted by prolonged and/or coordinated digital harassment. Nonetheless, tools and technologies for understanding and mitigating it are scarce and mostly ineffective. In this paper, we present a principled and scalable approach to detect bullying and aggressive behavior on Twitter. We propose a robust methodolo…
Being a matter of cognition, user interests should be apt to classification independent of the language of users, social network and content of interest itself. To prove it, we analyze a collection of English and Russian Twitter and Vkontakte community pages by interests of their followers. First, we create a model of Major Interests (MaIs) with the help of expert analysis and then classify a set of pages using machine learning algorithms (SVM, Neural Network, Naive Bayes, and some other). We take three interest domains that are typical of both English and Russian-speaking communities: footbal…
The experimental landscape in natural language processing for social media is too fragmented. Each year, new shared tasks and datasets are proposed, ranging from classics like sentiment analysis to irony detection or emoji prediction. Therefore, it is unclear what the current state of the art is, as there is no standardized evaluation protocol, neither a strong set of baselines trained on such domain-specific data. In this paper, we propose a new evaluation framework (TweetEval) consisting of seven heterogeneous Twitter-specific classification tasks. We also provide a strong set of baselines a…
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…
With the recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), various organizations and individuals are debating about the progress of AI as a blessing or a curse for the future of the society. This paper conducts an investigation on how the public perceives the progress of AI by utilizing the data shared on Twitter. Specifically, this paper performs a comparative analysis on the understanding of users belonging to two categories -- general AI-Tweeters (AIT) and expert AI-Tweeters (EAIT) who share posts about AI on Twitter. Our analysis revealed that users from both the categories express dist…
Social media platforms are revolutionizing the way users communicate by increasing the exposure to highly stigmatized issues in the society. Sexual abuse is one such issue that recently took over social media via attaching the hashtag #metoo to the shared posts. Individuals with different backgrounds and ethnicities began sharing their unfortunate personal experiences of being assaulted. Through comparative analysis of the tweets via #meToo on Twitter versus the posts shared on the #meToo subreddit, this paper makes an initial attempt to assess public reactions and emotions. Though nearly equa…
While social media has become an empowering agent to individual voices and freedom of expression, it also facilitates anti-social behaviors including online harassment, cyberbullying, and hate speech. In this paper, we present the first comparative study of hate speech instigators and target users on Twitter. Through a multi-step classification process, we curate a comprehensive hate speech dataset capturing various types of hate. We study the distinctive characteristics of hate instigators and targets in terms of their profile self-presentation, activities, and online visibility. We find that…
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccines have been an important topic in public discourse. The discussions around vaccines are polarized as some see them as an important measure to end the pandemic, and others are hesitant or find them harmful. This study investigates posts related to COVID-19 vaccines on Twitter and focuses on those which have a negative stance toward vaccines. A dataset of 16,713,238 English tweets related to COVID-19 vaccines was collected covering the period from March 1, 2020, to July 31, 2021. We used the Scikit-learn Python library to apply a support vector ma…
Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education, University of Tennessee at Knoxville（田纳西大学诺克斯维尔分校布雷德森跨学科研究与研究生教育中心）；Center for Biomedical Informatics, Department of Pediatrics, College of Medicine, University of Tennessee Health Science Center（田纳西大学健康科学中心医学院儿科系生物医学信息学中心）；Hubert Department of Global Health, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University（埃默里大学罗林斯公共卫生学院休伯特全球卫生系）
This study investigated and compared public sentiment related to COVID-19 vaccines expressed on two popular social media platforms, Reddit and Twitter, harvested from January 1, 2020, to March 1, 2022. To accomplish this task, we created a fine-tuned DistilRoBERTa model to predict sentiments of approximately 9.5 million Tweets and 70 thousand Reddit comments. To fine-tune our model, our team manually labeled the sentiment of 3600 Tweets and then augmented our dataset by the method of back-translation. Text sentiment for each social media platform was then classified with our fine-tuned model u…
Amrita School Of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham（阿姆里塔大学阿姆里塔工程学院）；Texas State University（德克萨斯州立大学）；Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Centre（辛辛那提儿童医院医学中心）
In recent days, the amount of Cyber Security text data shared via social media resources mainly Twitter has increased. An accurate analysis of this data can help to develop cyber threat situational awareness framework for a cyber threat. This work proposes a deep learning based approach for tweet data analysis. To convert the tweets into numerical representations, various text representations are employed. These features are feed into deep learning architecture for optimal feature extraction as well as classification. Various hyperparameter tuning approaches are used for identifying optimal te…
Crisis-induced differences in attention towards Ukraine in Twitter 2008-2023
Tallinn University（塔林大学）；Estonian Literary Museum（爱沙尼亚文学博物馆）；Baltic Film, Media and Arts School, Tallinn University（塔林大学波罗的海电影、媒体与艺术学院）；Vermont Complex Systems Institute（佛蒙特复杂系统研究所）；University of Vermont（佛蒙特大学）；Santa Fe Institute（圣塔菲研究所）；Complexity Science Hub（复杂性科学中心）
The automatic content analysis of mass media in the social sciences has become necessary and possible with the raise of social media and computational power. One particularly promising avenue of research concerns the use of opinion mining. We design and implement the POPmine system which is able to collect texts from web-based conventional media (news items in mainstream media sites) and social media (blogs and Twitter) and to process those texts, recognizing topics and political actors, analyzing relevant linguistic units, and generating indicators of both frequency of mention and polarity (p…
Guanxi, roughly translated as "social connection", is a term commonly used in the Chinese language. In this research, we employed a linguistic approach to explore popular discourses on Guanxi. Although sharing the same Confucian roots, Chinese communities inside and outside Mainland China have undergone different historical trajectories. Hence, we took a comparative approach to examine guanxi in Mainland China and in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau (TW-HK-M). Comparing guanxi discourses in two Chinese societies aims at revealing the divergence of guanxi culture. The data for this research were co…
The present paper uses Twitter to analyze the current state of the worldwide, Spanish-language, independent publishing market. The main purposes are to determine whether certain Latin American Spanish-language independent publishers function as gatekeepers of World Literature and to analyze the geopolitical structure of this global market, addressing both the Europe-America dialectic and neocolonial practices. After selecting the sample of publishers, we conducted a search for their Twitter profiles and located 131; we then downloaded data from the corresponding Twitter APIs. Finally, we appli…
With the recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), various organizations and individuals started debating about the progress of AI as a blessing or a curse for the future of the society. This paper conducts an investigation on how the public perceives the progress of AI by utilizing the data shared on Twitter. Specifically, this paper performs a comparative analysis on the understanding of users from two categories -- general AI-Tweeters (AIT) and the expert AI-Tweeters (EAIT) who share posts about AI on Twitter. Our analysis revealed that users from both the categories express dist…
Recent research brought awareness of the issue of bots on social media and the significant risks of mass manipulation of public opinion in the context of political discussion. In this work, we leverage Twitter to study the discourse during the 2018 US midterm elections and analyze social bot activity and interactions with humans. We collected 2.6 million tweets for 42 days around the election day from nearly 1 million users. We use the collected tweets to answer three research questions: (i) Do social bots lean and behave according to a political ideology? (ii) Can we observe different strateg…
Understanding community structure of social media is critical due to its broad applications such as friend recommendations, user modeling and content personalizations. Existing research uses structural metrics such as modularity and conductance and functional metrics such as ground truth to measure the qualify of the communities discovered by various community detection algorithms, while overlooking a natural and important dimension, community size. Recently, anthropologist Dunbar suggests that the size of stable community in social media should be limited to 150, referred to as Dunbar's numbe…
Social platforms such as Gab and Parler, branded as `free-speech' networks, have seen a significant growth of their user base in recent years. This popularity is mainly attributed to the stricter moderation enforced by mainstream platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. In this work we provide the first large scale analysis of hate-speech on Parler. We experiment with an array of algorithms for hate-speech detection, demonstrating limitations of transfer learning in that domain, given the illusive and ever changing nature of the ways hate-speech is delivered. In order to improve classi…
The storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 has led to the killing of 5 people and is widely regarded as an attack on democracy. The storming was largely coordinated through social media networks such as Parler. Yet little is known regarding how users interacted on Parler during the storming of the Capitol. In this work, we examine the emotion dynamics on Parler during the storming with regard to heterogeneity across time and users. For this, we segment the user base into different groups (e.g., Trump supporters and QAnon supporters). We use affective computing (Kratzwald et al. 2018) …
After the pandemic of SARS-CoV-2, it has influenced the health care practices around the world. Initial investigations indicate that patients with comorbidities are more fragile to this SARS-CoV-2 infection. They suggested postponing the routine treatment of cancer patients. However, few meta-analyses suggested evidences are not sufficient to hold the claim of the frailty of cancer patients to COVID-19, and they are not in favour of shelving the scheduled procedures. There are recent studies in which medical professionals, according to their competence, are referring to change the routine prac…
Censorship in social media has been well studied and provides insight into how governments stifle freedom of expression online. Comparatively less (or no) attention has been paid to detecting (self) censorship in traditional media (e.g., news) using social media as a bellweather. We present a novel unsupervised approach that views social media as a sensor to detect censorship in news media wherein statistically significant differences between information published in the news media and the correlated information published in social media are automatically identified as candidate censored event…
Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California（南加州大学信息科学研究所）
Although the recent rise and uptake of COVID-19 vaccines in the United States has been encouraging, there continues to be significant vaccine hesitancy in various geographic and demographic clusters of the adult population. Surveys, such as the one conducted by Gallup over the past year, can be useful in determining vaccine hesitancy, but can be expensive to conduct and do not provide real-time data. At the same time, the advent of social media suggests that it may be possible to get vaccine hesitancy signals at an aggregate level (such as at the level of zip codes) by using machine learning m…
Social media provides many opportunities to monitor and evaluate political phenomena such as referendums and elections. In this study, we propose a set of approaches to analyze long-running political events on social media with a real-world experiment: the debate about Brexit, i.e., the process through which the United Kingdom activated the option of leaving the European Union. We address the following research questions: Could Twitter-based stance classification be used to demonstrate public stance with respect to political events? What is the most efficient and comprehensive approach to meas…
Negative news posts are less prevalent and generate lower user engagement than non-negative news posts across six countries
Center for Excellence in Social Science, University of Warsaw（社会科学研究卓越中心，华沙大学）；Department of Communication, University of California, Davis（传播学系，加州大学戴维斯分校）；Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling, University of Warsaw（数学与计算建模跨学科中心，华沙大学）
