Social Media Commons^™

Operation Overload - Matryoshka's Next Layer, Leland Fecher, Patrick Warren, Laura Adams, Bb Fonseca, Kylie Gilbert, Alexa Gubanich, Lexi Katramados, Miles Rockow, Alexander Sharp, Katelyn Smith, Lee White

Media Forensics Hub Creative Inquiry Reports

For this project our team expanded our search for inauthentic actors to new locations, specifically Bluesky. With the help of internet watchdogs Antibot4Navalny and dTeam, we began investigating a network known as “Matryoshka”1, aka “Operation Overload”2, aka “Storm-1679.”3 We discovered the network was stealing the identities of moderately known people of influence ranging from political candidates to university staff members. Because Twitter/X users had not created versions of themselves on Bluesky, due to its relatively new arrival on the social media scene, their identities were ripe for the taking by nefarious actors. During the time we observed this campaign (January …

Online Community Dynamics: An Analysis Using Louvain During Major Sporting Events, Anushka Jaint, Yashodhan Karulkar, Kashish Jindal, Sri Sai Harshita Gadavarthi, Sanya Gulati

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

With the power of social media transforming the way people connect and interact with each other, the dynamics of community formation on platforms such as X during major events are of crucial importance. While social media is an increasingly key driver in determining interactions, little is known about the online influence forming and developing fan communities in high-stakes events. This study looks into the development of user communities for datasets drawn from Kaggle on two of the world’s largest sporting events: the FIFA World Cup 2022, or football, and the T20 World Cup 2022, or cricket, with the aim of …

Misinformation Regulations: Early Evidence On Corporate Social Media Strategy, Richard M. Crowley, Yun Lou, Samuel T. Tan, Liandong Zhang

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Against the backdrop of an increasing threat of misinformation on social media, several countries have enacted regulations to curb the spread of misinformation. This study examines how corporate social media strategy responds to misinformation regulations. Using a large cross-country dataset of corporate tweets and a stacked regression analysis, we show that misinformation regulations lead to less corporate social media disclosure. This result suggests that by deterring misinformation, these regulations reduce firms’ need to use social media to counteract its adverse effects. Additional analyses show that the effect is more pronounced among countries with higher social media usage and countries with …

To What Extent Is Social Media A Tool For Political Mobilization?, Bridget Westrum

Political Science Theses and Capstones

This study looks at the potential impacts of social media advocacy on mobilizing the pubic. Drawing from the Pew Research Center’s 2018 American Trends Panel, I look at Americans’ views of technology, political involvement, and their perceptions of social media and online engagement. I found that younger respondents view social media as more important to their political engagements. I find a significant relationship between census region and perceived importance of social media on issue involvement, as well. Respondents from the southern United States who consider themselves to be "very liberal" report a greater influence of social media on their involvement …

Do Universities Choose The Right Strategies For X Engagement? The Case Of Six Universities In Thailand, Mathupayas Thongmak

Higher Learning Research Communications

Objective: The purpose of this study is to understand how Thai public universities engage their stakeholders on X (the social media platform previously known as Twitter). This article answers the following research questions: 1) What are the X message strategies of six public universities? 2) Do they choose the most effective strategies to drive X engagement in terms of favorites and reposts?

Method: Data was automatically collected using anX analytic tool, and the potential variables were extracted semi-automatically using tools appropriate to text mining, sentiment analysis, word cloud, and so on. Posts from six universities in Thailand were investigated.

Results: …

Toward An Ecosystem Of Non-Fungible Tokens From Mapping Public Opinions On Social Media, Yunfei Xing, Justin Z. Zhang, Yuming He, Yueqi Li

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

As blockchain technology advances, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are emerging as unconventional assets in the commercial market. However, it is necessary to establish a comprehensive NFT ecosystem that addresses the prevailing public concerns. This study aimed to bridge this gap by analyzing user-generated content on prominent social media platforms such as Twitter, Weibo, and Reddit. Employing text clustering and topic modeling techniques, such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation, we constructed an analytical framework to delve into the intricacies of the NFT ecosystem. Our investigation revealed seven distinct topics from Twitter and Reddit data and eight topics from Weibo data. Weibo users predominantly …

An Integrated Machine Learning Approach For Identifying Emergency Rescue Messages On Social Media During Natural Disasters, Wael Khallouli, Jiang Li, Jingwei Huang, Ghaith Rabadi, Samuel Kovacic

School of Cybersecurity Faculty Publications

During large-scale disasters, emergency call centers are often overwhelmed by the large volume of rescue requests and calls for help. Consequently, people are turning to social media platforms to seek assistance. Rescue information posted on these platforms is extremely valuable for first responders to make informed rescue decisions. Therefore, the automatic identification of these requests from the vast amount of data posted on social media during crises is critical yet challenging. This work presents our ongoing research on applying deep learning techniques to extract actionable rescue information from social media during crises. We proposed a novel deep learning model that …

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

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

The study provides large-scale descriptive evidence on the timing and nature of corporate financial tweeting. Using an unsupervised machine learning approach to analyze 24 million tweets posted by S&P 1500 firms from 2012 to 2020, we find that firms are more likely to tweet financial information around significantly negative or positive news events, such as earnings announcements and the filing of financial statements. This convex U-shaped relation between the likelihood of posting financial tweets and the materiality of accounting events becomes stronger over time. Whereas research based on early samples concludes that firms are less likely to disseminate financial information …

The Constant String Of Crises: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Twitter Responses To Celebrity Crisis Communications, Megan Willman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Celebrity crises are more prominent in today’s social-media-fueled world than ever before. Public relations teams are hired to handle these instances on behalf of the celebrity, but no one can control the discourse that ensues on social media. The end goal of these teams is to restore trust and reputation with stakeholders and fans. Although there have been many studies on crisis communications, there are few studies thus far that have examined the strategy as well as the discourse of such timely crises. The public figures included in this paper are Ashton Kutcher, Lizzo, Luke Combs, Mila Kunis, and Taylor …

Groomer Discourse: A Transgender-Sensitive Critical Discourse Analysis Of Queerphobic Hate Speech On Twitter, William Evans

Honors Theses

In recent times, online internet hate speech has received more and more attention due to its adaptive and mutative nature, emerging not in a vacuum but instead sprouting from the seeds of social inequity. A specific form of queerphobic hate speech known as groomer discourse or predation libel has taken new form in online spaces. This recent development, targeted almost exclusively towards the queer community and their allies, is uniquely situated at the intersection of transgender rights and sexual education in the United States. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, this study expands Spallaccia’s gender-sensitive critical discourse analysis (CDA) into a …

Online Political Participation Among Younger Generations: A Case Study Of The Nigerian Presidential Election, Bowale Odukale

All Theses

The 2023 presidential elections in Nigeria represented a significant milestone in the nation's democratic progression, capturing the interest of observers both within the country and abroad. This study identifies the key online opinion leaders who participated in the electoral discourse, their generational affiliation, and the role of social media in facilitating youth engagement throughout the political process. Using Sprinkl, an online monitoring tool to harvest publicly available tweets containing the hashtag #NigeriaDecides2023 from February 11 to March 15, coupled with interviews, the study identified the prominent opinion leaders with significant influence, their types of messages and the motives behind youth …

Queer Rural Youth Online: A Digital Ethnography, Joseph Robert Burns

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis is based on digital ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2023 within Queer subcommunities on the social media sites Reddit and Twitter (now known as X) and data collected from interviews with Queer rural youth members of these communities. The data reveal that social media use directly influences the lives and actions of Queer rural youth, who use the space to build social connections, shape their personal identities, and seek advice pertaining to their in-person lives and decisions. By using these spaces, Queer rural youth build both bonding and bridging social capital, learn to subvert restrictions to their Internet access, …

Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis: A Case Of A Palestinian Movement, Mohammedwesam Amer

An-Najah University Journal for Research - B (Humanities)

The paper examines digital discourses of and on the Palestinian movement, Hamas on Twitter. The data corpus contains tweets and retweets by Shehab News Agency (Hamas’s agency), and all tweets associated with the hashtag #hamas and produced by any tweeter. The data resources were extracted in January 2022. The paper uses Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (1996 & 2006) social semiotic approach and critical discourse tools to examine online, textual and visual features of tweets. The findings show that the word occupation الاحتلال is the most frequent word in the tweets of Shehab News Agency, and it is associated with hashtags …

Content Moderation On Social Media: Social And Computational Standards And Implications, Mohit Singhal

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Social media has become a powerful tool that reflects human communication's best and worst aspects. They allow individuals to freely express opinions, communicate with others, and learn about new stories. On the other hand, they have become fertile grounds for several forms of abuse, harassment, and the dissemination of misinformation. Social media platforms have established and employed content moderation to counteract the spread of abuse and misinformation.

Some critical challenges hinder the understanding of the social media content moderation ecosystem. This dissertation investigates various aspects of content moderation, including their coverage, fairness, and effectiveness. Firstly, it investigates how, in practice, …

Effects Of Dehumanization And Disgust-Eliciting Language On Attitudes Toward Immigration: A Sentiment Analysis Of Twitter Data, Katherine S. Wahrer, Cynthia J. Najdowski, John V. Passarelli

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Attitudes towards immigration have been shown to be driven by dehumanization and disgust. The more people dehumanize immigrants and the more disgusted they feel, the more negative attitudes they tend to have toward immigrants. However, little is known about how exposure to social media content that links dehumanization, disgust, and immigration influences users’ attitudes on this issue. This is important to consider because the majority of adults in the United States are on social media. We used Twitter data, machine learning, and sentiment analysis to investigate whether exposure to dehumanizing or disgust-eliciting tweets about immigration impacts users’ own sentiment toward …

Incivility In 2022 Senatorial Elections, Mark Meyer

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

This honors capstone project will examine the effect of social media, specifically Twitter, on U.S. senate elections in 2022. It will track the tweets of personal and official campaign Twitter accounts from the end of the primary until election night in two “Toss Up” or highly contested seats in the 2022 senate elections. This project will examine the winner of the Republican and Democrat primaries only. All the tweets from the timeframe will be tracked and categorized by intention or use of the tweet. These categories will break down the tweet into what it was meant to do be it …

#Disruptjmm: Online Social Justice Advocacy And Community Building In Mathematics, Rachel Roca, Carrie Diaz Eaton, Drew Lewis, Joseph Hibdon, Stefanie Marshall

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

In 2019, \#DisruptJMM, a Twitter hashtag, began circulating after an Inclusion/Exclusion blog by Dr. Piper H pointing to the need to make commonplace conversations about human suffering in the Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM). While the \#DisruptJMM hashtag has been used since 2019, the vast majority of use was in the JMM 2020 meetings. Twitter hashtags are used by activists to push forward conversations, join communities around a single idea, and create change. In this article, we draw on frameworks from community building seen in other equity and inclusion advocacy hashtags such as \#GirlsLikeUs [7] to qualitatively code and analyze tweets …

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 …

The Power Of The Virtual Platform: A Look Into Fandom Interactions Via Twitter (X), Samantha Hacker

Undergraduate Theses

Using social media to communicate has become increasingly popular since the medium was created. Twitter has been a popular breeding ground for fan communities to form social spaces. Parasocial relationship theory, as well as face negotiation theory, tie heavily into the discussion of fandoms and the creation of safe spaces on the platform. How people present themselves online is entirely dependent on the user and their level of comfort on the app. One fandom in particular that utilizes this app the most is the fan base for the seven-member South Korean boy band, BTS, who in reference to the band, …

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 …

Antisemitic Rhetoric From Influential Individuals On Social Media During The Recent Rise Of Jewish Hate In The United States Of America, Jimmy Warshawsky, Jason Jarvis Ph.D.

Honors Thesis

Experts have said that in recent months, we have been living through the highest point in American antisemitism we've ever had. Much of this is because of certain very influential people like Donald Trump and Kanye West who have been spreading antisemitic tropes and conspiracies on the internet. In this paper, I will first discuss the history of antisemitism in America to give important and relevant context to my study. I will then explain the recent rise in antisemitism and address viewpoints from various experts and contributors on what, why, and how this is happening. I’ll go over each of …

Toxicity And Reddit: A Study Of Harmful Effects On User Engagement And Community Health, Nahiyan Bin Noor

Theses and Dissertations

The rise of social media has led to an alarming increase in harmful content, including abusive language, disrespect, and hate speech. While social media platforms have attempted to address this issue, harmful content cannot be completely eradicated before it impacts individuals or communities. In this thesis, we conduct a comparative analysis of toxicity on three social media platforms: Twitter, Parler, and Reddit. Using Reddit data, our study employs a tree structure to visualize and divide each conversation thread, allowing for an in-depth examination of the impact of toxic content on communities. We also used different machine learning algorithms to classify …

A Fake Future: The Threat Of Foreign Disinformation On The U.S. And Its Allies, Brandon M. Rubsamen

Global Tides

This paper attempts to explain the threat that foreign disinformation poses for the United States Intelligence Community and its allies. The paper examines Russian disinformation from both a historical and contemporary context and how its effect on Western democracies may only be exacerbated in light of Chinese involvement and evolving technologies. Fortunately, the paper also studies practices and strategies that the United States Intelligence Community and its allied foreign counterparts may use to respond. It is hoped that this study will help shed further light on Russian and Chinese disinformation campaigns and explain how the Intelligence Community can efficiently react.

Extracting Information From Twitter Screenshots, Tarannum Zaki, Michael L. Nelson, Michele C. Weigle

Modeling, Simulation and Visualization Student Capstone Conference

Screenshots are prevalent on social media as a common approach for information sharing. Users rarely verify before sharing screenshots whether they are fake or real. Information sharing through fake screenshots can be highly responsible for misinformation and disinformation spread on social media. There are services of the live web and web archives that could be used to validate the content of a screenshot. We are going to develop a tool that would automatically provide a probability whether a screenshot is fake by using the services of the live web and web archives.

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: …

“Tweeting During Emergencies”: The Egyptian Ministry Of Health Twitter Communication Strategy Under The Umbrella Of The Crisis And Emergency Risk Communication Model (Cerc) Case Study: Covid-19 Pandemic, Pakinam Elgohary

Theses and Dissertations

This research investigates using the Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication Model (CERC) for COVID- 19 communication by analyzing the content of Twitter messages posted by the Government of Egypt through the Egyptian Ministry of Health (MOHP). It further examines how official communicators and institutions utilize social media to contact the public during emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting critical strategies of recommendations. Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication (CERC), a five-staged theory, recommends a set of messaging and pertained communication characteristics to implement at each stage of the identified following stages: (1) “Pre-crisis, (2) Initial event, (3) Maintenance, (4) Resolution, and …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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