Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Evaluating Universities Twitter Web Pages Responding To The Black Lives Matter Movement, Hind Albadi, Thomas Kenny

Faculty Publications: Communication

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in May 2020, many colleges and universities responded by making statements on their website and social media channels condemning racism. Higher education institutions began initiatives for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) for faculty, staff, administrators, and students on campus. Three years later, this study investigates whether universities are still offering and promoting workshops, classes, events, and activities related to DEI to campus communities. To do so, the researchers conducted a content analysis on Twitter categorizing tweets over a one-month period, then they classified the Tweets using the top 10 colleges …

Impact Of Difficult Negatives On Twitter Crisis Detection, Yuhao Zhang, Siaw Ling Lo, Phyo Yi Win Myint

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter has become an alternative information source during a crisis. However, the short, noisy nature of tweets hinders information extraction. While models trained with standard Twitter crisis datasets accomplished decent performance, it remained a challenge to generalize to unseen crisis events. Thus, we proposed adding “difficult” negative examples during training to improve model generalization for Twitter crisis detection. Although adding random noise is a common practice, the impact of difficult negatives, i.e., negative data semantically similar to true examples, was never examined in NLP. Most of existing research focuses on the classification task, without considering the primary information need of …

Understanding The Consumption Of Antimicrobial Resistance–Related Content On Social Media: Twitter Analysis, Hyunuk Kim, Chris R. Proctor, Dylan Walker, Ronan R. Mccarthy

Business Faculty Articles and Research

Background: Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the most pressing concerns in our society. Today, social media can function as an important channel to disseminate information about AMR. The way in which this information is engaged with depends on a number of factors, including the target audience and the content of the social media post.

Objective: The aim of this study is to better understand how AMR-related content is consumed on the social media platform Twitter and to understand some of the drivers of engagement. This is essential to designing effective public health strategies, raising awareness about antimicrobial …

Agendamelding And Covid-19: The Dance Of Horizontal And Vertical Media In A Pandemic, J. Benjamin Taylor, Milad Minooie, Chris J. Vargo

Faculty and Research Publications

How are attitudes formed in the 21st Century, and who sets the agenda for initial COVID-19 coverage in the United States? We explore these questions using a random sample of 6 million tweets from a population of 224 million tweets collected between January 2020 and June 2020. In conjunction with a content analysis of legacy media such as newspapers, we examine the second-level agendamelding process during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. The findings demonstrate that in the early weeks of the pandemic, public opinion on Twitter about the virus was distinctly different than the coverage …

Centering Transgender Consumers In Conceptualizations Of Marketplace Marginalization And Digital Spaces, Beck Hansman, Jenna Drenten Ph.D.

School of Business: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The purpose of this study is to center transgender consumers in the conceptualizations between marketplace marginalization and digital spaces. We examine trans-gender crowdfunding as a hashtag-bounded digital space created by and for the transgender community–namely, the #TransCrowdFund digital space on Twitter. We draw on trans digital geographies as a novel analytical lens to focus attention on transgender consumers' unique experiences in and between digital spaces. Through qualitative hashtag mapping, we analyzed a sample of 200 Twitter profiles and accompanying tweets drawn from individuals using the#TransCrowdFund hashtag. Findings suggest transgender consumers utilize crowdfunding as a hashtag-bounded digital space in three ways: …

Champions For Social Good: How Can We Discover Social Sentiment And Attitude-Driven Patterns In Prosocial Communication?, Raghava Rao Mukkamala, Robert J. Kauffman, Helle Zinner Henriksen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The UN High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) is pursuing a social media strategy to inform people about displaced populations and refugee emergencies. It is actively engaging public figures to increase awareness through its prosocial communications and improve social informedness and support for policy changes in its services. We studied the Twitter communications of UNHCR social media champions and investigated their role as high-profile influencers. In this study, we offer a design science research and data analytics framework and propositions based on the social informedness theory we propose in this paper to assess communication about UNHCR’s mission. Two variables—refugee-emergency and champion …

Use Of Twitter Among College Students For Academics: A Mixed-Methods Approach, Stefanie Amiruzzaman, Md Amiruzzaman

Languages & Cultures Faculty Publications

For almost a decade, Twitter use and its impact on students' academic performance have been explored by many researchers. Despite growing scholarly interest, studies have been mostly quantitative in nature. The findings of previous studies are conflicting; thus, an in-depth study is needed to determine how and what impacts college students' academic performance (i.e., GPA) when they spend time on Twitter. The purpose of this study was to understand the effects of Twitter use on college students' academic performance. The present study shows that individual analysis techniques, such as quantitative or qualitative tools, are not enough to understand the underlying …

Twilytics: A Social Perception Analysis Of Public Transit Systems During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Egbe-Etu Etu, Imokhai Tenebe, Ankur Parma, Likhitha Yelamanchili, Dang Minh Nhu Nguyen, Louis Tran, Ihor Markevych

Mineta Transportation Institute

In the United States, public transit ridership in 2020 declined by 79% compared to 2019 levels. With lockdowns implemented during the early days of the pandemic, direct human-to-human interactions migrated to virtual platforms (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit). Social media platforms have aided researchers in answering numerous questions about current societal dilemmas, including COVID-19. This study investigates the public’s perception of transit systems via a social media analysis given the emergence of vaccines and other COVID-19 preventive measures. Findings revealed themes of fear and confusion concerning the use of public transportation during the pandemic. The public had doubts regarding the …

Did Twitter Deliberately Mislead Elon Musk In His Acquisition Bid?, Mark Humphery-Jenner

Perspectives@SMU

Elon Musk has officially ended his bid to acquire Twitter on the grounds that it misled the market in its disclosures, writes UNSW Business School's Mark Humphery-Jenner

Using Social Media In Kenya To Quantify Road Safety: An Analysis Of Novel Data, J. Austin Lee, Lyndsey Armes, Benjamin Wachira

Emergency Medicine, East Africa

Background: Road trafc injuries are a large and growing cause of morbidity and mortality in low- and middleincome countries, especially in Africa. Systematic data collection for trafc incidents in Kenya is lacking and in many low- and middle-income countries available data sources are disparate or missing altogether. Many Kenyans use social media platforms, including Twitter; many road trafc incidents are publicly reported on the microblog platform. This study is a prospective cohort analysis of all tweets related to road trafc incidents in Kenya over a 24-month period (February 2019 to January 2021).

Results: A substantial number of unique …

Storm The Capitol: Linking Offline Political Speech And Online Twitter Extra-Representational Participation On Qanon And The January 6 Insurrection, Claire Seungeun Lee, Juan Merizalde, John D. Colautti, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The transfer of power stemming from the 2020 presidential election occurred during an unprecedented period in United States history. Uncertainty from the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing societal tensions, and a fragile economy increased societal polarization, exacerbated by the outgoing president's offline rhetoric. As a result, online groups such as QAnon engaged in extra political participation beyond the traditional platforms. This research explores the link between offline political speech and online extra-representational participation by examining Twitter within the context of the January 6 insurrection. Using a mixed-methods approach of quantitative and qualitative thematic analyses, the study combines offline speech information with Twitter …

Twitter Demonstrates Why Poison Pills Are Bad For Shareholders, Mark Humphery-Jenner

Perspectives@SMU

Twitter’s poison pill appears to be an attempt to entrench the board rather than delivering shareholder value, writes UNSW Business School's Mark Humphery-Jenner

Ukraine-Russia War: Nevada Twitter And Disinformation Trends, Mary Blankenship, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Elections & Governance

This fact sheet analyzes responses to the ongoing Ukraine-Russia War posted on Twitter by users located in Nevada and identifies the most circulated narratives and disinformation topics.

Conversing Or Diffusing Information? An Examination Of Public Health Twitter Chats, Lauren Bayliss, Yuner Zhu, King-Wa Fu, Lindsay Mullican, Ferdous Ahmeda, Hai Liang, Zion Tse, Nitin Saroha, Jingjing Yin, Isaac Fung

Department of Communication Arts Faculty Publications (1993-2022)

This study examines the one-way information diffusion and two-way dialogic engagement present in public health Twitter chats. Network analysis assessed whether Twitter chats adhere to one of the key principles for online dialogic communication, the dialogic loop (Kent & Taylor, 1998) for four public health-related chats hosted by CDC Twitter accounts. The features of the most retweeted accounts and the most retweeted tweets also were examined. The results indicate that very little dialogic engagement took place. Moreover, the chats seemed to function as pseudoevents primarily used by organizations as opportunities for creating content. However, events such as #PublicHealthChat may serve …

Executive Tweets, Richard M.Crowley, Wenli Huang, Hai Lu

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

We explore the tweeting behavior of S&P 1500 firms’ executives (CEOs and CFOs) and its market consequences during the period of 2011 to 2018. We document that executives tweet financial information related to their firms and time these tweets to firms’ major events, and that investors respond to executive tweets in addition to firm tweets. Using the latest machine learning techniques, we develop an innovative construct measuring the content similarity between executive tweets and firm tweets. We use this measure to disentangle whether the market reaction comes from new information or trust. We show evidence consistent with the view that …

Does Active Service Intervention Drive More Complaints On Social Media? The Roles Of Service Quality And Awareness, Shujing Sun, Yang Gao, Huaxia Rui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite many advantages of social media as a customer service channel, there is a concern that active service intervention encourages excessive service complaints. Our paper casts doubt on this misconception by examining the dynamics between social media customer complaints and brand service interventions. We find service interventions indeed cause more complaints, yet this increase is driven by service awareness rather than chronic complaining. Due to the publicity and connectivity of social media, customers learn about the new service channel by observing customer service delivery to others – a mechanism that is unique to social media customer service and does not …

#Thesistuesday At University Of The Pacific, Michele Gibney

University Libraries Librarian and Staff Presentations

In 2020, the institutional repository manager who also had responsibilities over the social media accounts for the library, decided to attempt a year-long experiment titled #ThesisTuesday, a weekly social media campaign to promote ETDs and connect with campus stakeholders, researchers, and readers. At the time, the library had two social media student assistants who were tasked with sourcing images for the 52 chosen ETDs completed during 2020. The repository manager then used an online graphic creation tool, Canva to create a template for each ETD, plug in an image and swap out titles/authors. She also created short links for …

You And I: Parasocial Relationships, Social Media, And Fan Labor In The One Direction Fandom, Kathryn Meese

Honors College Theses

This study aims to analyze the ways in which fans of the band One Direction developed parasocial relationships, or one-sided, non-reciprocal relationships with media personae, through social media marketing, and to explore the economic implications of these relationships in terms of fans’ free promotional labor. At the heart of social media marketing is relationship marketing, or attracting and maintaining customer relationships, a strategy we explore here within the context of the music industry. Previous studies have explored the dynamics of online fan communities, or fandoms, and the free labor they carry out on the part of an artist, such as …

Recognizing Bias In Social Media News: Resources For Teaching Media Literacy In Special Education, Melinda S. Burchard Ph.D., Lori Konopasek, Betsy Layman, Sarah Myers, Linda Poston

Faculty Educator Scholarship

With the empowerment of social media news literacy, students in special education can interact with their world with deeper competencies of critical thinking skills and civic engagement. In exploring personal and news biases, online users will have the tools to effectively grapple with the content found in their newsfeeds.

The included lesson uses current social media news stories. Students will be able to identify vocabulary communicating possible bias, including absolute words or phrases, words or phrases communicating degree, and words or phrases that are positively or negatively charged.

Re-Spatializing Gangs: An Exponential Random Graph Model Of Twitter Data To Analyze The Geospatial Distribution Of Gang Member Connections, Ryan J. Roberts

Political Science & Geography Faculty Publications

Gang studies often use location-based approaches to explain gang members’ interconnectedness. Although this perspective remains consistent with the proximity principle that the smaller the geographic space, the greater the likelihood of observing connections between individuals, location-based studies limit our understanding of gang member connections to narrowly defined geographic spaces at specific points in time. The advent of social media has re-spatialized gang member interconnectedness to unbounded geographic spaces, where the preservation of online activity can extend indefinitely. Despite having an online presence, most research examining the digital footprint of gangs tends to be descriptive. This study collects Twitter data to …

Social Media Self-Regulation And The Rise Of Vaccine Misinformation, Ana Santos Rutschman

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay examines the main characteristics and shortcomings of mainstream social media responses to vaccine misinformation and disinformation. Parts I and II contextualize the recent expansion of vaccine information and disinformation in the online environment. Part III provides a survey and taxonomy of ongoing responses to vaccine misinformation adopted by mainstream social media. It further notes the limitations of current self-regulatory modes and illustrates these limitations by presenting a short case study on Facebook—the largest social media vehicle for vaccine-specific misinformation, currently estimated to harbor approximately half of the social media accounts linked to vaccine misinformation. Part IV examines potential …

Misinformation More Likely To Use Non-Specific Authority References: Twitter Analysis Of Two Covid-19 Myths, Joseph Mcglynn, Maxim Baryshevtsev, Zane A. Dayton

Communication Graduate Research

This research examines the content, timing, and spread of COVID-19 misinformation and subsequent debunking efforts for two COVID-19 myths. COVID-19 misinformation tweets included more non-specific authority references (e.g., “Taiwanese experts”, “a doctor friend”), while debunking tweets included more specific and verifiable authority references (e.g., the CDC, the World Health Organization, Snopes). Findings illustrate a delayed debunking response to COVID-19 misinformation, as it took seven days for debunking tweets to match the quantity of misinformation tweets. The use of non-specific authority references in tweets was associated with decreased tweet engagement, suggesting the importance of citing specific sources when refuting health misinformation.

Assessing The Reliability Of Relevant Tweets And Validation Using Manual And Automatic Approaches For Flood Risk Communication, Xiaohui Liu, Bandana Kar, Francisco Alejandro Montiel Ishino, Chaoyang Zhang, Faustine Williams

Faculty Publications

© 2020 by the authors. While Twitter has been touted as a preeminent source of up-to-date information on hazard events, the reliability of tweets is still a concern. Our previous publication extracted relevant tweets containing information about the 2013 Colorado flood event and its impacts. Using the relevant tweets, this research further examined the reliability (accuracy and trueness) of the tweets by examining the text and image content and comparing them to other publicly available data sources. Both manual identification of text information and automated (Google Cloud Vision, application programming interface (API)) extraction of images were implemented to balance accurate …

Discretionary Dissemination On Twitter, Richard M. Crowley, Wenli Huang, Hai Lu

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Using an unsupervised machine learning approach to analyze 12.8 million tweets posted by S&P 1500 firms from 2012 to 2016, we find that firms tweet more financial information around significantly negative or positive earnings announcements or accounting filings. Specifically, we observe a symmetric U-shaped relation between the number of financial tweets and the materiality of accounting information events. This relation is consistent with the theoretical prediction in Hummel et al. (2018) which assumes that managers are sensitive to their firm’s fundamental value. We document that this relation also holds for hyperlink usage in tweets about financial information around important events, …

Differences Between Teacher-Focused Twitter Hashtags And Implications For Professional Development, Spencer P. Greenhalgh

Information Science Faculty Publications

Twitter hashtags may serve as valuable means for teachers' professional development. However, given the diversity of hashtag spaces and teacher needs, teachers must assess a given hashtag and compare it to their learning needs and preferences before determining whether it would be helpful. To support this reflection, I examine data associated with 60 Regional Educational Twitter Hashtags (RETHs) during the first six months of 2016 to begin describing the variety of teacher learning-focused Twitter spaces and make distinctions between them. My results indicate that these RETHs vary according to their relative focus on sharing, intimacy of personal connection, and volume …

A Content Analysis Of Rachel Held Evans’ Impact Through Her Virtual Community Of Faith, Maddie Christy

English and Journalism Student Works

This research discusses the impact of Rachel Held Evans’ life, work, and death on her virtual community of faith. Evans’ work as a writer and theologian in the progressive evangelical Christian world was analyzed in this study through the Twitter hashtag #becauseofRHE, a space that emerged on Twitter after her death to commemorate how she had impacted followers’ lives. In addition to an outpouring of grief the hashtag presented three key impacts: radical inclusiveness, accepting and encouraging doubts, and helping followers keep their faith in God and the Church.

Blurring Boundaries: Exploring Tweets As A Legitimate Journalism Artifact, Zhaoxi Liu, D. Berkowitz

Communication Faculty Research

This study explores journalists’ use of Twitter and what it means for their craft. Based on 8 weeks newsroom observation and more than a dozen in-depth interviews with reporters and editors at a big metro newspaper, the study found that journalists had contradicting views on whether or not to accept tweets, a form of snippet artifact, as a legitimate journalism artifact, leading to the blurring artifact boundary. Related, journalists faced uncertainties and ambiguities regarding the implications of such snippet artifact for the journalism craft and its core mission of informing the public.

Covid-19: Economic Recovery, Twitter, And Public Perception Of Las Vegas, Mary Blankenship, Caitlin Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Economic Development & Workforce

This Fact Sheet analyzes responses posted on Twitter following an interview conducted by CNN reporter Anderson Cooper, who interviewed Carolyn Goodman, Mayor of the City of Las Vegas, concerning the re-opening of the Las Vegas economy during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Exploring Crisis Communication And Information Dissemination On Social Media: Social Network Analysis Of Hurricane Irma Tweets, Xianlin Jin

Communication Graduate Research

This study utilized social network analysis to identify the top 10 Twitter influentials during the Hurricane Irma crisis period and examined the relationship between social media attributes and the bridge influence of controlling information flow. The number of a user’s followers and tweets significantly predicted one’s control of information. Crisis information tended to be shared in scattered subgroups. Social network boundaries impeded information diffusion, and the communication pattern was largely one-way. The findings partially supported the opinion leader argument while indicating that influentials can directly generate information, which is consistent with the social-mediated crisis communication model. Such findings will contribute …

How Misinformation Spreads Through Twitter, Mary Blankenship

Student Research

While living in the age of information, an inherent drawback to such high exposure to content lends itself to the precarious rise of misinformation. Whether it is called “alternative facts,” “fake news,” or just incorrect information, because of its pervasiveness in nearly every political and policy discussion, the spread of misinformation is seen as one of the greatest challenges to overcome in the 21st century. As new technologies emerge, a major piece of both content creation and the perpetuation of misinformation are social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. As news events emerge, whether be a pandemic, a mass …