Showing papers on "Social media published in 2018"
TL;DR: It is found that Republicans who followed a liberal Twitter bot became substantially more conservative posttreatment, whereas Democrats exhibited slight increases in liberal attitudes after following a conservative Twitter bot, although these effects are not statistically significant.
Abstract: There is mounting concern that social media sites contribute to political polarization by creating “echo chambers” that insulate people from opposing views about current events. We surveyed a large sample of Democrats and Republicans who visit Twitter at least three times each week about a range of social policy issues. One week later, we randomly assigned respondents to a treatment condition in which they were offered financial incentives to follow a Twitter bot for 1 month that exposed them to messages from those with opposing political ideologies (e.g., elected officials, opinion leaders, media organizations, and nonprofit groups). Respondents were resurveyed at the end of the month to measure the effect of this treatment, and at regular intervals throughout the study period to monitor treatment compliance. We find that Republicans who followed a liberal Twitter bot became substantially more conservative posttreatment. Democrats exhibited slight increases in liberal attitudes after following a conservative Twitter bot, although these effects are not statistically significant. Notwithstanding important limitations of our study, these findings have significant implications for the interdisciplinary literature on political polarization and the emerging field of computational social science.
794 citations
TL;DR: The integrated view of the extant literature that the study presents can help avoid duplication by future researchers, whilst offering fruitful lines of enquiry to help shape research for this emerging field of social media research.
Abstract: Social media comprises communication websites that facilitate relationship forming between users from diverse backgrounds, resulting in a rich social structure. User generated content encourages inquiry and decision-making. Given the relevance of social media to various stakeholders, it has received significant attention from researchers of various fields, including information systems. There exists no comprehensive review that integrates and synthesises the findings of literature on social media. This study discusses the findings of 132 papers (in selected IS journals) on social media and social networking published between 1997 and 2017. Most papers reviewed here examine the behavioural side of social media, investigate the aspect of reviews and recommendations, and study its integration for organizational purposes. Furthermore, many studies have investigated the viability of online communities/social media as a marketing medium, while others have explored various aspects of social media, including the risks associated with its use, the value that it creates, and the negative stigma attached to it within workplaces. The use of social media for information sharing during critical events as well as for seeking and/or rendering help has also been investigated in prior research. Other contexts include political and public administration, and the comparison between traditional and social media. Overall, our study identifies multiple emergent themes in the existing corpus, thereby furthering our understanding of advances in social media research. The integrated view of the extant literature that our study presents can help avoid duplication by future researchers, whilst offering fruitful lines of enquiry to help shape research for this emerging field.
670 citations
TL;DR: The authors provide an overview of research into social media rumours with the ultimate goal of developing a rumour classification system that consists of four components: rumour detection, rumor tracking, rumour stance classification, and rumour veracity classification.
Abstract: Despite the increasing use of social media platforms for information and news gathering, its unmoderated nature often leads to the emergence and spread of rumours, i.e., items of information that are unverified at the time of posting. At the same time, the openness of social media platforms provides opportunities to study how users share and discuss rumours, and to explore how to automatically assess their veracity, using natural language processing and data mining techniques. In this article, we introduce and discuss two types of rumours that circulate on social media: long-standing rumours that circulate for long periods of time, and newly emerging rumours spawned during fast-paced events such as breaking news, where reports are released piecemeal and often with an unverified status in their early stages. We provide an overview of research into social media rumours with the ultimate goal of developing a rumour classification system that consists of four components: rumour detection, rumour tracking, rumour stance classification, and rumour veracity classification. We delve into the approaches presented in the scientific literature for the development of each of these four components. We summarise the efforts and achievements so far toward the development of rumour classification systems and conclude with suggestions for avenues for future research in social media mining for the detection and resolution of rumours.
498 citations
TL;DR: The authors provide an overview of the current state of the literature on the relationship between social media; political polarization; and political "disinformation", a term used to encompass a wide range of types of information about politics found online.
Abstract: The following report is intended to provide an overview of the current state of the literature on the relationship between social media; political polarization; and political “disinformation,” a term used to encompass a wide range of types of information about politics found online, including “fake news,” rumors, deliberately factually incorrect information, inadvertently factually incorrect information, politically slanted information, and “hyperpartisan” news. The review of the literature is provided in six separate sections, each of which can be read individually but that cumulatively are intended to provide an overview of what is known — and unknown — about the relationship between social media, political polarization, and disinformation. The report concludes by identifying key gaps in our understanding of these phenomena and the data that are needed to address them.
494 citations
TL;DR: An extended and structured literature analysis is conducted through which the most important challenges for researchers are discussed and potential solutions proposed and used to extend an existing framework on social media analytics.
492 citations
TL;DR: The ubiquitous social media landscape has created an information ecosystem populated by a cacophony of opinion, true and false information, and an unprecedented quantity of data on many topics, which can have adverse effects on public health.
Abstract: The ubiquitous social media landscape has created an information ecosystem populated by a cacophony of opinion, true and false information, and an unprecedented quantity of data on many topics. Policy makers and the social media industry grapple with the challenge of curbing fake news, disinformation, and hate speech; and the field of medicine is similarly confronted with the spread of false, inaccurate, or incomplete health information.1 From the discourse on the latest tobacco products, alcohol, and alternative therapies to skepticism about medical guidelines, misinformation on social media can have adverse effects on public health. For example, the social media rumors circulating during the Ebola outbreak in 2014 created hostility toward health workers, posing challenges to efforts to control the epidemic.2 Another example is the increasingly prevalent antivaccine social media posts that seemingly legitimize debate about vaccine safety and could be contributing to reductions in vaccination rates and increases in vaccine-preventable disease.3 The spread of health-related misinformation is exacerbated by information silos and echo chamber effects. Social media feeds are personally curated and tailored to individual beliefs, partisan bias, and identity. Consequently, information silos are created in which the likelihood for exchange of differing viewpoints
486 citations
01 Jan 2018
TL;DR: The concept of affordance as a key term for understanding and analysing social media interfaces and the relations between technology and its users is discussed in this paper, where five different ways in which affordance has been conceptualized and subsequently employed to analyse social media in particular.
Abstract: This chapter reflects on the concept of affordance as a key term for understanding and analysing social media interfaces and the relations between technology and its users. In outlining its specific intellectual trajectory from psychology, to technology and design studies, sociology, and communication and media studies, our intention is to focus on some of the many–and sometimes conflicting–ways in which affordance has been conceptualized and operationalized across various disciplinary boundaries. Following the renewed debates over affordances in recent scholarship on social, we address some of the new directions in which media and communication scholars have proposed to define and analytically deploy the concept. We first describe five different–but related–ways in which affordance has been conceptualized and subsequently address how it has been employed to analyse social media in particular. We then outline a platform-sensitive approach to affordance as an analytical tool for examining social media based on recent examples of changes to the Twitter platform.
444 citations
TL;DR: The study explores patterns created by the aggregated interactions of online users on Facebook during disaster responses and provides insights to understand the critical role of social media use for emergency information propagation.
441 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined how consumers' engagement with social media platforms drives engagement with advertising embedded in these platforms and subsequently, evaluations of this advertising and found that engagement is highly context specific; it comprises various types of experiences on each social media platform such that each is experienced in a unique way.
Abstract: This study examines how consumers’ engagement with social media platforms drives engagement with advertising embedded in these platforms and, subsequently, evaluations of this advertising. Our survey (N = 1,346, aged 13 and older) maps social media users’ engagement experiences with Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat and their experiences with and evaluations of advertising on these platforms. Our findings show that engagement is highly context specific; it comprises various types of experiences on each social media platform such that each is experienced in a unique way. Moreover, on each platform, a different set of experiences is related to advertising evaluations. It is further shown that engagement with social media advertising itself is key in explaining how social media engagement is related to advertising evaluations. The general conclusion is that there is no such thing as “social media.”
TL;DR: With the revelation that Facebook handed over personally identifiable information of more than 87 million users to Cambridge Analytica, it is now imperative that comprehensive privacy policy laws be developed.
Abstract: With the revelation that Facebook handed over personally identifiable information of more than 87 million users to Cambridge Analytica, it is now imperative that comprehensive privacy policy laws be developed. Technologists, researchers, and innovators should meaningfully contribute to the development of these policies.
TL;DR: Recommendations for social media campaigns to correct global health misinformation, including encouraging users to refute false or misleading health information, and providing them appropriate sources to accompany their refutation, are discussed.
Abstract: Social media are often criticized for being a conduit for misinformation on global health issues, but may also serve as a corrective to false information. To investigate this possibility, an experiment was conducted exposing users to a simulated Facebook News Feed featuring misinformation and different correction mechanisms (one in which news stories featuring correct information were produced by an algorithm and another where the corrective news stories were posted by other Facebook users) about the Zika virus, a current global health threat. Results show that algorithmic and social corrections are equally effective in limiting misperceptions, and correction occurs for both high and low conspiracy belief individuals. Recommendations for social media campaigns to correct global health misinformation, including encouraging users to refute false or misleading health information, and providing them appropriate sources to accompany their refutation, are discussed.
Book•
08 Jun 2018
TL;DR: The 6th edition of as discussed by the authors provides a step-by-step guide from initial concept through to completion of a final written research report, including how to use blogs, sharing ideas on research community sites, crowdsourcing, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
Abstract: Step-by-step advice on completing an outstanding research project. This is the market-leading book for anyone doing a research project for the first time. Clear, concise and extremely readable, this bestselling resource provides a practical, step-by-step guide from initial concept through to completion of your final written research report. Thoroughly updated but retaining its well-loved style, this 6th edition provides: A brand new chapter describing the benefits of using social media in research, including how to use blogs, sharing ideas on research community sites, crowdsourcing, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook Tips on using online tools such as Delicious, Mendeley, Dropbox, EndNote and RefWorks to manage and organize your research Guidance on searching efficiently and effectively online using Google Scholar, Google Books and library databases and on correctly citing online sources Advice on creating online surveys for your research project, plus new material on using Skype and Google Hangouts for online interviewing To support your learning, each chapter contains introductory key points, "Dead End" boxes to warn of pitfalls, "Success" checklists and further reading sections. This practical, no-nonsense guide is vital reading for all those embarking on undergraduate or postgraduate study in any discipline, and for professionals in such fields as social science, education and health.
TL;DR: The findings reveal that SNSs’ participation motivations positively influence customer participation, which in turn significantly affects brand trust and brand loyalty, which contributes as a mediator between customer participation andbrand loyalty on social media brand communities.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe the effect of social media advertising content on customer engagement using data from Facebook and find that inclusion of widely used content related to brand personality is associated with higher levels of consumer engagement (Likes, comments, shares) with a message.
Abstract: We describe the effect of social media advertising content on customer engagement using data from Facebook. We content-code 106,316 Facebook messages across 782 companies, using a combination of Amazon Mechanical Turk and natural language processing algorithms. We use this data set to study the association of various kinds of social media marketing content with user engagement—defined as Likes, comments, shares, and click-throughs—with the messages. We find that inclusion of widely used content related to brand personality—like humor and emotion—is associated with higher levels of consumer engagement (Likes, comments, shares) with a message. We find that directly informative content—like mentions of price and deals—is associated with lower levels of engagement when included in messages in isolation, but higher engagement levels when provided in combination with brand personality–related attributes. Also, certain directly informative content, such as deals and promotions, drive consumers’ path to conversio...
TL;DR: This study aims to identify and test the main factors related to social media advertising that could predict purchase intention and provide a number of theoretical and practical guidelines on how marketers can effectively plan and implement their ads over social media platforms.
TL;DR: The incidentally exposed users use significantly more online news sources than non-users, and the effect of incidental exposure is stronger for younger people and those with low interest in news and stronger for users of YouTube and Twitter than for Users of Facebook.
Abstract: Scholars have questioned the potential for incidental exposure in high-choice media environments. We use online survey data to examine incidental exposure to news on social media (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter) in four countries (Italy, Australia, United Kingdom, United States). Leaving aside those who say they intentionally use social media for news, we compare the number of online news sources used by social media users who do not see it as a news platform, but may come across news while using it (the incidentally exposed), with people who do not use social media at all (non-users). We find that (a) the incidentally exposed users use significantly more online news sources than non-users, (b) the effect of incidental exposure is stronger for younger people and those with low interest in news and (c) stronger for users of YouTube and Twitter than for users of Facebook.
TL;DR: A computer-assisted literature review, where the roots of sentiment analysis are in the studies on public opinion analysis at the beginning of 20th century and in the text subjectivity analysis performed by the computational linguistics community in 1990's, and the top-20 cited papers from Google Scholar and Scopus are presented.
Proceedings Article•
01 Aug 2018
TL;DR: The Shared Task on Aggression Identification organised as part of the First Workshop on Trolling, Aggression and Cyberbullying (TRAC - 1) at COLING 2018 was to develop a classifier that could discriminate between Overtly Aggression, Covertly Aggressive, and Non-aggressive texts.
Abstract: In this paper, we present the report and findings of the Shared Task on Aggression Identification organised as part of the First Workshop on Trolling, Aggression and Cyberbullying (TRAC - 1) at COLING 2018. The task was to develop a classifier that could discriminate between Overtly Aggressive, Covertly Aggressive, and Non-aggressive texts. For this task, the participants were provided with a dataset of 15,000 aggression-annotated Facebook Posts and Comments each in Hindi (in both Roman and Devanagari script) and English for training and validation. For testing, two different sets - one from Facebook and another from a different social media - were provided. A total of 130 teams registered to participate in the task, 30 teams submitted their test runs, and finally 20 teams also sent their system description paper which are included in the TRAC workshop proceedings. The best system obtained a weighted F-score of 0.64 for both Hindi and English on the Facebook test sets, while the best scores on the surprise set were 0.60 and 0.50 for English and Hindi respectively. The results presented in this report depict how challenging the task is. The positive response from the community and the great levels of participation in the first edition of this shared task also highlights the interest in this topic.
TL;DR: An exploratory survey of Twitter users’ perceptions of the use of tweets in research finds that these attitudes are highly contextual, depending on factors such as how the research is conducted or disseminated, who is conducting it, and what the study is about.
Abstract: Social computing systems such as Twitter present new research sites that have provided billions of data points to researchers. However, the availability of public social media data has also presented ethical challenges. As the research community works to create ethical norms, we should be considering users’ concerns as well. With this in mind, we report on an exploratory survey of Twitter users’ perceptions of the use of tweets in research. Within our survey sample, few users were previously aware that their public tweets could be used by researchers, and the majority felt that researchers should not be able to use tweets without consent. However, we find that these attitudes are highly contextual, depending on factors such as how the research is conducted or disseminated, who is conducting it, and what the study is about. The findings of this study point to potential best practices for researchers conducting observation and analysis of public data.
TL;DR: It is found that positive expressions were generally perceived as more appropriate than negative expressions across all platforms, and some gender differences were found, while age showed little variations.
Abstract: The main aim of this study was to examine the norms of expressing emotions on social media. Specifically, the perceived appropriateness (i.e. injunctive norms) of expressing six discrete emotions (i.e. sadness, anger, disappointment, worry, joy, and pride) was investigated across four different social media platforms. Drawing on data collected in March 2016 among 1201 young Dutch users (15–25 years), we found that positive expressions were generally perceived as more appropriate than negative expressions across all platforms. In line with the objective of the study, some platform differences were found. The expression of negative emotions was rated as most appropriate for WhatsApp, followed by Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. For positive emotion expression, perceived appropriateness was highest for WhatsApp, followed by Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Additionally, some gender differences were found, while age showed little variations. Overall, the results contribute to a more informed understanding of emotion expression online.
TL;DR: The authors' findings highlight the potential pitfalls of lengthy social media use for young people's mental health and calls on industry to more tightly regulate hours of social mediause.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on the use of social media platforms in political communication and examine how politicians use different platforms in their campaigns, focusing on the German federal election in 2017.
Abstract: 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 fe...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors conducted interviews with Syrians who recently obtained refugee status in the Netherlands and found that the majority of migrants have access to social media information before and during migration, often through the use of smartphones.
Abstract: Social media are increasingly popular channels of information on which migrants base their decisions on whether to migrate and the destinations where to settle. While social media offer a relatively cheap, easily accessible, and media-rich means of communication, their use is not without challenges for asylum migrants. Various studies describe issues with access and evaluation of the truthfulness of available information for this specific group of migrants. This article discusses social media use by asylum migrants prior to and during migration. This study is based on in-depth interviews with 54 Syrian asylum migrants who recently obtained refugee status in the Netherlands. Syrians were the largest group of migrants applying for asylum in European Union (EU) member states in 2015 and 2016. The findings show that the majority of Syrian asylum migrants have access to social media information before and during migration, often through the use of smartphones. Besides uneven access to technologies, fear of government surveillance restricts the smartphone use of asylum migrants. The results of this study indicate that Syrian asylum migrants prefer social media information that originates from existing social ties and information that is based on personal experiences. Generally, this information is considered more trustworthy. Asylum migrants use various strategies to validate rumors that are present on social media and come from unknown sources. These strategies include checking the source of information, validating information with trusted social ties, triangulation of online sources, and comparing information with their own experience.
TL;DR: In this paper, tourists' preferences for biodiversity obtained from a traditional survey conducted in Kruger National Park, South Africa, with observed preferences assessed from over 13,600 pictures shared on Instagram and Flickr by tourists visiting the park in the same period.
Abstract: Can social media data be used as an alternative to traditional surveys to understand tourists´ preferences for nature-based experiences in protected areas? We explored this by comparing preferences for biodiversity obtained from a traditional survey conducted in Kruger National Park, South Africa, with observed preferences assessed from over 13,600 pictures shared on Instagram and Flickr by tourists visiting the park in the same period. We found no significant difference between the preferences of tourists as stated in the surveys and the preferences revealed by social media content. Overall, large-bodied mammals were found to be the favorite group, both in the survey and on social media platforms. However, Flickr was found to better match tourists’ preference for less-charismatic biodiversity. Our findings suggest that social media content can be used as a cost-efficient way to explore, and for more continuous monitoring of, preferences for biodiversity and human activities in protected areas.
This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved
TL;DR: The Social Connectedness Index is a new measure of social connectedness at the US county level based on friendship links on Facebook, the global online social networking service, which provides the first comprehensive measure of friendship networks at a national level.
Abstract: Social networks can shape many aspects of social and economic activity: migration and trade, job-seeking, innovation, consumer preferences and sentiment, public health, social mobility, and more. In turn, social networks themselves are associated with geographic proximity, historical ties, political boundaries, and other factors. Traditionally, the unavailability of large-scale and representative data on social connectedness between individuals or geographic regions has posed a challenge for empirical research on social networks. More recently, a body of such research has begun to emerge using data on social connectedness from online social networking services such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. To date, most of these research projects have been built on anonymized administrative microdata from Facebook, typically by working with coauthor teams that include Facebook employees. However, there is an inherent limit to the number of researchers that will be able to work with social network data through such collaborations. In this paper, we therefore introduce a new measure of social connectedness at the US county level. Our Social Connectedness Index is based on friendship links on Facebook, the global online social networking service. Specifically, the Social Connectedness Index corresponds to the relative frequency of Facebook friendship links between every county-pair in the United States, and between every US county and every foreign country. Given Facebook's scale as well as the relative representativeness of Facebook's user body, these data provide the first comprehensive measure of friendship networks at a national level.
TL;DR: It is argued that relationships between publishers and platforms are characterized by a tension between (1) short-term, operational opportunities and (2) long-term strategic worries about becoming too dependent on intermediaries.
Abstract: The rise of digital intermediaries such as search engines and social media is profoundly changing our media environment. Here, we analyze how news media organizations handle their relations to these increasingly important intermediaries. Based on a strategic case study, we argue that relationships between publishers and platforms are characterized by a tension between (1) short-term, operational opportunities and (2) long-term strategic worries about becoming too dependent on intermediaries. We argue that these relationships are shaped by news media’s fear of missing out, the difficulties of evaluating the risk/reward ratios, and a sense of asymmetry. The implication is that news media that developed into an increasingly independent institution in the 20th century—in part enabled by news media organizations’ control over channels of communication—are becoming dependent upon new digital intermediaries that structure the media environment in ways that not only individual citizens but also large, resource-ri...
01 Nov 2018
TL;DR: It is shown that AGR consistently operationalises gender in a trans-exclusive way, and consequently carries disproportionate risk for trans people subject to it.
Abstract: Automatic Gender Recognition (AGR) is a subfield of facial recognition that aims to algorithmically identify the gender of individuals from photographs or videos. In wider society the technology has proposed applications in physical access control, data analytics and advertising. Within academia, it is already used in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to analyse social media usage. Given the long-running critiques of HCI for failing to consider and include transgender (trans) perspectives in research, and the potential implications of AGR for trans people if deployed, I sought to understand how AGR and HCI understand the term "gender", and how HCI describes and deploys gender recognition technology. Using a content analysis of papers from both fields, I show that AGR consistently operationalises gender in a trans-exclusive way, and consequently carries disproportionate risk for trans people subject to it. In addition, I use the dearth of discussion of this in HCI papers that apply AGR to discuss how HCI operationalises gender, and the implications that this has for the field's research. I conclude with recommendations for alternatives to AGR, and some ideas for how HCI can work towards a more effective and trans-inclusive treatment of gender.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors aim to recapitulate 15 years of social media in emergencies and its research with a special emphasis on use patterns, role patterns and perception patterns that can be found across different cases in order to point out what has been achieved so far, and what future potentials exist.
Abstract: Social media has been established in many larger emergencies and crises. This process has not started just a few years ago, but already 15 years ago in 2001 after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. In the following years, especially in the last 10, sometimes summarized under the term crisis informatics, a variety of studies focusing on the use of ICT and social media before, during or after nearly every crisis and emergency has arisen. This article aims to recapitulate 15 years of social media in emergencies and its research with a special emphasis on use patterns, role patterns and perception patterns that can be found across different cases in order to point out what has been achieved so far, and what future potentials exist.