Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Algorithmic Solutions To Combat Online Fake News, Xinyi Zhou

Dissertations - ALL

The unprecedented growth of new information producing, distributing, and consuming every moment on the Web has fostered the rise of ``fake news.'' Because of its detrimental effect on democracy, global economies, and public health, effectively combating online fake news has become an essential and urgent task.

This dissertation starts with making typological, theoretical, and empirical efforts to promote the public's comprehension of fake news and lay the foundation for algorithmically combating fake news. As there has been no universal definition of fake news, this dissertation discusses the definition of fake news from three dimensions: veracity, intention, and news, comparing it …

Hate-Clipper: Multimodal Hateful Meme Classification Based On Cross-Modal Interaction Of Clip Features, Gokul Karthik Kumar, Karthik Nandakumar

Computer Vision Faculty Publications

Hateful memes are a growing menace on social media. While the image and its corresponding text in a meme are related, they do not necessarily convey the same meaning when viewed individually. Hence, detecting hateful memes requires careful consideration of both visual and textual information. Multimodal pretraining can be beneficial for this task because it effectively captures the relationship between the image and the text by representing them in a similar feature space. Furthermore, it is essential to model the interactions between the image and text features through intermediate fusion. Most existing methods either employ multimodal pre-training or intermediate fusion, …

A Comparative Analysis Of Anti-Vax Discourse On Twitter Before And After Covid-19 Onset, Tareq Nasralah, Ahmed El Noshokaty, Omar El-Gayar, Mohammad A. Al-Ramahi, Abdullah Wahbeh

Computer Information Systems Faculty Publications

This study aimed to identify and assess the prevalence of vaccine-hesitancy-related topics on Twitter in the periods before and after the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak. Using a search query, 272,780 tweets associated with anti-vaccine topics and posted between 1 January 2011, and 15 January 2021, were collected. The tweets were classified into a list of 11 topics and analyzed for trends during the periods before and after the onset of COVID-19. Since the beginning of COVID-19, the percentage of anti-vaccine tweets has increased for two topics, “government and politics” and “conspiracy theories,” and decreased for “developmental disabilities.” Compared to …

Bounded Confidence: How Ai Could Exacerbate Social Media’S Homophily Problem, Dylan Weber, Scott Atran, Rich Davis

New England Journal of Public Policy

The advent of the Internet was heralded as a revolutionary development in the democratization of information. It has emerged, however, that online discourse on social media tends to narrow the information landscape of its users. This dynamic is driven by the propensity of the network structure of social media to tend toward homophily; users strongly prefer to interact with content and other users that are similar to them. We review the considerable evidence for the ubiquity of homophily in social media, discuss some possible mechanisms for this phenomenon, and present some observed and hypothesized effects. We also discuss how the …

Using Deep Learning To Detect Social Media ‘Trolls’, Áine Macdermott, Michal Motylinski, Farkhund Iqbal, Kellyann Stamp, Mohammed Hussain, Andrew Marrington

All Works

Detecting criminal activity online is not a new concept but how it can occur is changing. Technology and the influx of social media applications and platforms has a vital part to play in this changing landscape. As such, we observe an increasing problem with cyber abuse and ‘trolling’/toxicity amongst social media platforms sharing stories, posts, memes sharing content. In this paper we present our work into the application of deep learning techniques for the detection of ‘trolls’ and toxic content shared on social media platforms. We propose a machine learning solution for the detection of toxic images based on embedded …

Does Social Media Accelerate Product Recalls? Evidence From The Pharmaceutical Industry, Yang Gao, Wenjing Duan, Huaxia Rui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media has become a vital platform for voicing product-related experiences that may not only reveal product defects but also impose pressure on firms to act more promptly than before. This study scrutinizes the rarely-studied relationship between these voices and the speed of product recalls in the context of the pharmaceutical industry where social media pharmacovigilance is becoming increasingly important for the detection of drug safety signals. Using Federal Drug Administration (FDA) drug enforcement reports and social media data crawled from online forums and Twitter, we investigate whether social media can accelerate the product recall process in the context of …

How Can Social Networks Impact Careers In Game Development?, Tongzhang Wang

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

The game development industry is one characterized by young workers and fast worker turnover. The popularity of using twitter as a professional tool within the video games industry presents a potentially insightful view port into a professional's informal network. Investigating characteristics of the social networks of newly graduated students in the game development industry may reveal what factors contribute to fast worker turnover and how certain cohorts may face additional barriers.

Social Media Analytics With Applications In Disaster Management And Covid-19 Events, Md Yasin Kabir

Doctoral Dissertations

"Social media such as Twitter offers a tremendous amount of data throughout an event or a disastrous situation. Leveraging social media data during a disaster is beneficial for effective and efficient disaster management. Information extraction, trend identification, and determining public reactions might help in the future disaster or even avert such an event. However, during a disaster situation, a robust system is required that can be deployed faster and process relevant information with satisfactory performance in real-time. This work outlines the research contributions toward developing such an effective system for disaster management, where it is paramount to develop automated machine-enabled …

In A Digitally Connected World Through Likes, Hashtags And Followers - Advancing Surgical Research Through A Social Media: A Narrative Review, Sabah Uddin Saqib, Qamar` Riaz, Russell Seth Martins, Amna Riaz, Hasnain Zafar

Department for Educational Development

In this era of modern information technology, the world is now digitally connected through various platforms on social media, which has changed the way medical professionals work, communicate and learn. The use of social media in surgery is expanding, and it is now becoming an essential tool for surgical training, research and networking. Articles, journal clubs and surgical conferences are within reach of everyone regardless of geographical location worldwide. Electronic publications have now resoundingly replaced printed editions of journals. Collaborative research through social media platforms helps collect diverse data, enhancing the research's global generalisability. The current narrative review was planned …

Religious Violence And Twitter: Networks Of Knowledge, Empathy And Fascination, Samah Senbel, Carly Seigel, Emily Bryan

School of Computer Science & Engineering Faculty Publications

Twitter analysis through data mining, text analysis, and visualization, coupled with the application of actor-network-theory, reveals a coalition of heterogenous religious affiliations around grief and fascination. While religious violence has always existed, the prevalence of social media has led to an increase in the magnitude of discussions around the topic. This paper examines the different reactions on Twitter to violence targeting three religious communities: the 2015 Charleston Church shooting, the 2018 Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting, and the 2019 Christchurch Mosque shootings. The attacks were all perpetrated by white nationalists with firearms. By analyzing large Twitter datasets in response to the attacks, …

The State Of Innovation And Media Viability In East Africa: From Indepth Media House Surveys, Hesbon Hansen Owilla, Rose Kimani, Ann Hollifield, Julia Wegner, Dennis Reineck, Roland Schürhoff

Graduate School of Media and Communications

Media houses globally are grappling with how best to produce quality content while at the same time remaining financially viable in the wake of shrinking revenues, technological disruptions, the emergence of peripheral content creators, competition for advertisement revenues from big tech platforms, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a myriad of other changes in the ecosystem. Despite these challenges, it is in the interest of the public that news media organisations (NMOs) produce quality content and do so in a financially sustainable fashion. Media viability, that is, producing quality journalism in a financially sustainable way, is, therefore, a growing area of focus. …