Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Happy Toilet: A Social Analytics Approach To The Study Of Public Toilet Cleanliness, Eugene W. J. Choy, Winston M. K. Ho, Xiaohang Li, Ragini Verma, Li Jin Sim, Kyong Jin Shim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study presents a social analytics approach to the study of public toilet cleanliness in Singapore. From popular social media platforms, our system automatically gathers and analyzes relevant public posts that mention about toilet cleanliness in highly frequented locations across the Singapore island - from busy shopping malls to food 'hawker' centers.

Social And Geographical Disparities In Twitter Use During Hurricane Harvey, Lei Zou, Nina S.N. Lam, Shayan Shams, Heng Cai, Michelle A. Meyer, Seungwon Yang, Kisung Lee, Seung Jong Park, Margaret A. Reams

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Social media such as Twitter is increasingly being used as an effective platform to observe human behaviors in disastrous events. However, uneven social media use among different groups of population in different regions could lead to biased consequences and affect disaster resilience. This paper studies the Twitter use during 2017 Hurricane Harvey in 76 counties in Texas and Louisiana. We seek to answer a fundamental question: did social-geographical disparities of Twitter use exist during the three phases of emergency management (preparedness, response, recovery)? We employed a Twitter data mining framework to process the data and calculate two indexes: Ratio and …

Predicting Audience Engagement Across Social Media Platforms In The News Domain, Kholoud Khalil Aldous, Jisun An, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We analyze cross-platform factors for posts on both single and multiple social media platforms for numerous news outlets to better predict audience engagement, precisely the number of likes and comments. We collect 676,779 social media posts from 53 news outlets during eight months on four social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube), along with the associated comments (more than 31 million) and the number of likes (more than 840 million). We develop a framework for predicting the audience engagement based on both linguistic features of the post and social media platform factors. Among other findings, results show that content …

Detecting Toxicity Triggers In Online Discussions, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Haewoon Kwak

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite the considerable interest in the detection of toxic comments, there has been little research investigating the causes -- i.e., triggers -- of toxicity. In this work, we first propose a formal definition of triggers of toxicity in online communities. We proceed to build an LSTM neural network model using textual features of comments, and then, based on a comprehensive review of previous literature, we incorporate topical and sentiment shift in interactions as features. Our model achieves an average accuracy of 82.5% of detecting toxicity triggers from diverse Reddit communities.

Evaluating Vulnerability To Fake News In Social Networks: A Community Health Assessment Model, Bhavtosh Rath, Wei Gao, Jaideep Srivastava

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Understanding the spread of false information in social networks has gained a lot of recent attention. In this paper, we explore the role community structures play in determining how people get exposed to fake news. Inspired by approaches in epidemiology, we propose a novel Community Health Assessment model, whose goal is to understand the vulnerability of communities to fake news spread. We define the concepts of neighbor, boundary and core nodes of a community and propose appropriate metrics to quantify the vulnerability of nodes (individual-level) and communities (group-level) to spreading fake news. We evaluate our model on communities identified using …

Analysis Of Flickr, Snapchat, And Twitter Use For The Modeling Of Visitor Activity In Florida State Parks, Hartwig H. Hochmair, Levente Juhasz

GIS Center

Spatio-temporal information attached to social media posts allows analysts to study human activity and travel behavior. This study analyzes contribution patterns to the Flickr, Snapchat, and Twitter platforms in over 100 state parks in Central and Northern Florida. The first part of the study correlates monthly visitor count data with the number of Flickr images, snaps, or tweets, contributed within the park areas. It provides insight into the suitability of these different social media platforms to be used as a proxy for the prediction of visitor numbers in state parks. The second part of the study analyzes the spatial distribution …

View, Like, Comment, Post: Analyzing User Engagement By Topic At 4 Levels Across 5 Social Media Platforms For 53 News Organizations, Kholoud K. Aldous, Jisun An, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We evaluate the effects of the topics of social media posts on audiences across five social media platforms (i.e., Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit) at four levels of user engagement. We collected 3,163,373 social posts from 53 news organizations across five platforms during an 8month period. We analyzed the differences in news organization platform strategies by focusing on topic variations by organization and the corresponding effect on user engagement at four levels. Findings show that topic distribution varies by platform, although there are some topics that are popular across most platforms. User engagement levels vary both by topics and …

The Challenges Of Creating Engaging Content: Results From A Focus Group Study Of A Popular News Media Organization, Kholoud Khalil Aldous, Jisun An, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The process of content creation for distribution via social media platforms is not a trivial one for social media editors as the goal of creating both serious and engaging content is challenging, with no clear or differing guidelines or rules across and between platforms. For creators of serious content, such as news organizations, advertisers, or educational institutions, engagement has a deeper meaning beyond likes, shares, etc. that is aimed at the audience actually processing the underlying content associated with a social media post. In this research, we report findings from a group study that aimed to understand the process and …

Stock Returns And Investor Sentiment: Textual Analysis And Social Media, Zachary Mcgurk, Adam Nowak, Joshua C. Hall

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

The behavioral finance literature has found that investor sentiment has predictive ability for equity returns. This differs from standard finance theory, which provides no role for investor sentiment. We examine the relationship between investor sentiment and stock returns by employing textual analysis on social media posts. We find that our investor sentiment measure has a positive and significant effect on abnormal stock returns. These findings are consistent across a number of different models and specifications, providing further evidence against non-behavioral theories.

The Use Of Deep Learning Distributed Representations In The Identification Of Abusive Text, Susan Mckeever, Hao Chen, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

The selection of optimal feature representations is a critical step in the use of machine learning in text classification. Traditional features (e.g. bag of words and n-grams) have dominated for decades, but in the past five years, the use of learned distributed representations has become increasingly common. In this paper, we summarise and present a categorisation of the stateof-the-art distributed representation techniques, including word and sentence embedding models. We carry out an empirical analysis of the performance of the various feature representations using the scenario of detecting abusive comments. We compare classification accuracies across a range of off-the-shelf embedding models …

The Global Disinformation Order: 2019 Global Inventory Of Organised Social Media Manipulation, Samantha Bradshaw, Philip N. Howard

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Executive Summary

Over the past three years, we have monitored the global organization of social media manipulation by governments and political parties. Our 2019 report analyses the trends of computational propaganda and the evolving tools, capacities, strategies, and resources.

1. Evidence of organized social media manipulation campaigns which have taken place in 70 countries, up from 48 countries in 2018 and 28 countries in 2017. In each country, there is at least one political party or government agency using social media to shape public attitudes domestically.

2.Social media has become co-opted by many authoritarian regimes. In 26 countries, computational propaganda …