United States

We present analyses from a real-time information monitoring system of online local news in the U.S. We study relationships among online local news coverage of COVID, cases and deaths in an area, and properties of local news outlets and their audiences. Our analysis relies on a unique dataset of the online content of over 300 local news outlets, encompassing over 750,000 articles over a period of 10 months spanning April 2020 to February 2021. We find that the rate of COVID coverage over time by local news outlets was primarily associated with death rates at the national level, but that this effect dissipated over the course of the pandemic as news about COVID was steadily displaced by sociopolitical events, like the 2020 U.S. elections. We also find that both the volume and content of COVID coverage differed depending on local politics, and outlet audience size, as well as evidence that more vulnerable populations received less pandemic-related news.

ICWSM 2022

Local News Online and COVID in the U.S.: Relationships among Coverage, Cases, Deaths, and Audience

local news

text analysis

covid

**ICWSM-2022 will be held from June 6th – 9th in a hybrid format, both in-person in Atlanta, Georgia and online.**

**The Workshop and Tutorial Sessions are accessible to those that registered separately for these sessions. If you registered to attend but are not able to access the these sessions from the [Schedule tab](https://underline.io/events/291/schedule?day=2022-06-06T04%3A00%3A00.000Z), please email icwsm@underline.io
**

The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) is a forum for researchers from multiple disciplines to come together to share knowledge, discuss ideas, exchange information, and learn about cutting-edge research in diverse fields with the common theme of online social media. This overall theme includes research in new perspectives in social theories, as well as computational algorithms for analyzing social media. ICWSM is a singularly fitting venue for research that blends social science and computational approaches to answer important and challenging questions about human social behavior through social media while advancing computational tools for vast and unstructured data.


ICWSM, now in its sixteenth year, has become one of the premier venues for computational social science, and previous years of ICWSM have featured papers, posters, and demos that draw upon network science, machine learning, computational linguistics, sociology, communication, and political science. The uniqueness of the venue and the quality of submissions have contributed to a rapidly growing conference, and a competitive acceptance rate of approximately 20% for full-length research papers published in the proceedings by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).


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The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) is a forum for researchers from multiple disciplines to come together to share knowledge, discuss ideas, exchange information, and learn about cutting-edge research in diverse fields with the common theme of online social media. This overall theme includes research in new perspectives in social theories, as well as computational algorithms for analyzing social media. ICWSM is a singularly fitting venue for research that blends social science and computational approaches to answer important and challenging questions about human social behavior through social media while advancing computational tools for vast and unstructured data.

technical paper

Social media reduces barriers for the formation of large, self-organizing grassroots communities. For political campaigns this poses significant opportunities to address declining party membership, but also reputational risks and potential loss of campaign coherence. While balancing these factors is often done informally, this study implements implement a data-driven method for measuring the alignment between online political communities and their corresponding campaigns. We apply this technique to the 2020 U.S. Democratic presidential primaries, providing novel insights into the important tension between campaigns and third-party actors.

Adopting a behavioural approach, we apply neural embedding techniques, creating a “community embedding”, to evaluate grassroots communities along various cultural, political, and demographic dimensions. Our embedding demonstrates that these communities align with the views of a candidate’s supporters. However, this does not necessarily reflect the campaign’s policy platforms. Finally, we introduce temporal aspects to our community embedding to evaluate the stability of political communities and their interrelations. Our methods provide new insights into how politics on Reddit operates in relation to its offline analogs.

Measuring Alignment of Online Grassroots Political Communities with Political Campaigns

We draw insights from the social psychology literature to identify two facets of Twitter deliberations about migrants, i.e., perceptions about migrants and behaviors towards migrants. Our theoretical anchoring helped us in identifying two prevailing perceptions (i.e., sympathy and antipathy) and two dominant behaviors (i.e., solidarity and animosity) of social media users towards migrants. We have employed unsupervised and supervised approaches to identify these perceptions and behaviors. In the domain of applied NLP, our study offers a nuanced understanding of migrant-related Twitter de-liberations. Our proposed transformer-based model, i.e., BERT + CNN, has reported an F1-score of 0.76 and outperformed other models. Additionally, we argue that tweets conveying antipathy or animosity can be broadly considered hate speech towards migrants, but they are not the same. Thus, our approach has fine-tuned the binary hate speech detection task by highlighting the granular differences between perceptual and behavioral aspects of hate speeches.

Unraveling Social Perceptions & Behaviors towards Migrants on Twitter

In this paper, we analyze the service providers that power 440 misinformation and hate sites, including hosting platforms, domain registrars, CDN providers, DDoS protection companies, advertising networks, donation processors, and e-mail providers. We find that several providers are disproportionately responsible for serving misinformation websites, most prominently Cloudflare. We further show that misinformation sites also disproportionately rely on several popular ad networks and payment processors, including RevContent and Google DoubleClick. When misinformation websites are deplatformed by hosting providers, DDoS protection services, and registrars, sites nearly always resurface through alternative providers. However, anecdotally, we find that sites struggle to remain online when mainstream monetization channels are severed. We conclude with insights for infrastructure providers and researchers working to stem the spread of misinformation and hateful content.

On the Infrastructure Providers that Support Misinformation Websites

Social media posts that direct users to YouTube videos are one of the most effective techniques for spreading misinformation. However, it has been observed that such posts rarely get deleted or flagged.
Since multi-modal misinformation that leads to compelling videos has more impact than using just textual content, it is important to characterize and detect such textual post and video pairs to help users from becoming victims of misinformation. To address this gap, we build a taxonomy of how links to YouTube videos are used on social media platforms. We then use pairs of posts and videos annotated with this taxonomy to test several classification models built using cross-platform features. Our work reveals several characteristics of post-video pairs, in terms of how posts and videos are related to each other, the type of content they share, and their collective outcome.
In addition, we find that traditional approaches to misinformation detection that rely only on text from posts miss a significant number of post-video pairs that contain misinformation.
More importantly, we find that to reduce the spread of misinformation via post and video pairs, classifiers would be more effective if they are designed to use data and features from multiple diverse platforms.

Cross-Platform Multimodal Misinformation: Taxonomy, Characteristics and Detection for Textual Posts and Videos

Twitter is one of the most popular social networks attracting millions of users, while a considerable proportion of online discourse is captured. It provides a simple usage framework with short messages and an efficient application programming interface (API) enabling the research community to study and analyze several aspects of this social network. However, the Twitter usage simplicity can lead to malicious handling by various bots. The malicious handling phenomenon expands in online discourse, especially during the electoral periods, where except the legitimate bots used for dissemination and communication purposes, the goal is to manipulate the public opinion and the electorate towards a certain direction, specific ideology, or political party.

This paper focuses on the design of a novel system for identifying Twitter bots based on labeled Twitter data. To this end, a supervised machine learning (ML) framework is adopted using an Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) algorithm, where the hyper-parameters are tuned via cross-validation. Our study also deploys Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) for explaining the ML model predictions by calculating feature importance, using the game theoretic-based Shapley values. Experimental evaluation on distinct Twitter datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach, in terms of bot detection accuracy, when compared against a recent state-of-the-art Twitter bot detection method.

Identification of Twitter Bots Based on an Explainable Machine Learning Framework: The US 2020 Elections Case Study

Malicious Twitter bots are detrimental to public discourse on social media. Past studies have looked at spammers, fake followers, and astroturfing bots, but retweet bots, which artificially inflate content, are not well understood. We present the first study focusing exclusively on retweet bots. We characterize retweet bots that have been uncovered by purchasing retweets from the black market. We detect whether they are fake or genuine accounts involved in inauthentic activities and what they do in order to appear legitimate. We also analyze their differences from human-controlled accounts. From our findings on the nature and life-cycle of retweet bots, we also point out several inconsistencies between the retweet bots used in this work and bots studied in prior works. Our findings challenge some of the fundamental assumptions related to bots and in particular how to detect them.

Characterizing Retweet Bots: The Case of Black Market Accounts

The effects of online social media on critical issues, such as polarization and misinformation, are under scrutiny due to the disruptive consequences that these phenomena can have on our societies. Among the algorithms routinely used by social media platforms, people-recommender systems are of special interest, as they directly contribute to the evolution of the social network structure, affecting the information and the opinions users are exposed to.

In this paper, we propose a novel framework to assess the effect of people recommenders on the evolution of opinions. Our proposal is based on Monte Carlo simulations combining link recommendation and opinion-dynamics models. In order to control initial conditions, we define a random network model to generate graphs with opinions, with tunable amounts of modularity and homophily. Finally, we join these elements into a methodology able to study the causal relationship between the recommender system and the echo chamber effect. Our method can also assess if such relationships are statistically significant. We also show how such a framework can be used to measure, by means of simulations, the impact of different intervention strategies.

Our thorough experimentation shows that people recommenders can in fact lead to a significant increase in echo chambers. However, this happens only if there is considerable initial homophily in the network. Also, we find that if the network already contains echo chambers, the effect of the recommendation algorithm is negligible. Such findings are robust to two very different opinion dynamics models, a bounded confidence model and an epistemological model.

The Effect of People Recommenders on Echo Chambers and Polarization

As  public  discourse  continues  to  move  and  grow  online,conversations  about  divisive  topics  on  social  media  plat-forms have also increased. These divisive topics prompt both contentious  and  non-contentious  conversations.  Although what distinguishes these conversations, often framed as what makes  these  conversations  contentious,  is  known  in  broad strokes, much less is known about the linguistic signature of these conversations. Prior work has shown that contentious content and structure can be a predictor for this task, however,most of them have been focused on conversation in general,very specific events, or complex structural analysis. Addition-ally, many models used in prior work have lacked interpret-ability, a key factor in online moderation. Our work fills these gaps by focusing on conversations from highly divisive topics (abortion, climate change, and gun control), operationalizing a set of novel linguistic and conversational characteristics and user factors, and incorporating them to build interpretable models. We demonstrate that such characteristics can largely improve the performance of prediction on this task, and also enable  nuanced  interpretability.  Our  case  studies  on  these three contentious topics suggest that certain generic linguistic characteristics are highly correlated with contentiousness in conversations while others demonstrate significant contextual influences on specific divisive topics.

Linguistic Characterization of Contentious Topics Online: Case Studies on Controversy in Abortion, Climate Change, and Gun Control

Influencers are key to the nature and networks of information propagation on social media. Influencers are particularly important in political discourse through their engagement with issues, and may derive their legitimacy either solely or in large part through online operation, or have an offline sphere of expertise such as entertainers, journalists etc. To quantify influencers' political engagement and polarity, we use Google's Universal Sentence Encoder (USE) to encode the tweets of 6k influencers and 26k Indian politicians during political crises in India. We then obtain aggregate vector representations of the influencers based on their tweet embeddings, which alongside retweet graphs help compute their stance and polarity with respect to these political issues. We find that influencers engage with the topics in a partisan manner, with polarized influencers being rewarded with increased retweeting and following. Moreover, we observe that specific groups of influencers are consistently polarized across all events. We conclude by discussing how our study provides insights into the political schisms of present-day India, but also offers a means to study the role of influencers in exacerbating political polarization in other contexts.

Divided We Rule: Influencer Polarization on Twitter During Political Crises in India

The ideological asymmetries in contested online spaces have been recently observed, where conservative voices seem to be relatively more pronounced even though liberals have the population advantage on digital platforms. Most of the prior works, however, focused on either a single platform or a single political topic. Whether one ideological group garners more attention across platforms and how the attention dynamics evolve have not been explored. In this work, we present a quantitative study that links collective attention across two social media platforms -- YouTube and Twitter, centered on online activities surrounding videos of controversial political topics including Abortion, Gun control, and Black Lives Matter over 16 months. We propose a set of video-centric metrics to characterize how online attention is accumulated from different political groups over time. Contrasting with prior observations, we find that neither ideological side is on a winning streak: left-leaning videos are overall more viewed, more engaging, but less tweeted than right-leaning videos. The attention unfolds quicker on left-leaning videos, but spans a longer period of time for right-leaning videos. Our network analysis on the early adopters and tweet cascades show that the diffusion for left-leaning videos tends to involve centralized actors, while the tweet cascades for right-leaning videos start earlier in the attention lifecycle. Our findings go beyond the static picture of ideological asymmetries in digital space and provide a set of methods to quantify attention dynamics across different social platforms.

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