Beyond the culture effect on credibility perception on microblogs

We investigated the credibility perception of tweet readers from the USA and by readers from eight Arabic countries; our aim was to understand if credibility was affected by country and/or by culture. Results from a crowd-sourcing experiment, showed a wide variety of factors affected credibility perception, including a tweet author's gender, profile image, username style, location, and social network overlap with the reader. We found that culture determines readers' credibility perception, but country has no effect. We discuss the implications of our findings for user interface design and social media systems

Teaching with Twitter:reflections on practices, opportunities and problems

In recent times there has been an increasing wave of interest in the use of Social Media for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. In particular, the micro-blogging platform Twitter has been experimentally used in various Universities world-wide. There are relevant publications reporting on experimentations with Twitter for reaching diverse learning goals, including better engagement, informal learning or collaboration among students. Existing research papers on the use of Twitter however focus exclusively on the positive aspects of experimentations, on what went well in the use of Twitter. In our University we run a small project on the use of Twitter with goals that are similar to those of others: fostering participation and better learning processes. In this paper we report on our project and the strategies and best practices we adopted for using Twitter for teaching. We also reflect that in our experimentation however we encountered a number of practical problems connected for example with use of technology, with the class settings and with spam. In the conclusion we offer some recommendations for Teaching and Learning with Twitter based on our personal experience

Detecting and Tracking the Spread of Astroturf Memes in Microblog Streams

Online social media are complementing and in some cases replacing person-to-person social interaction and redefining the diffusion of information. In particular, microblogs have become crucial grounds on which public relations, marketing, and political battles are fought. We introduce an extensible framework that will enable the real-time analysis of meme diffusion in social media by mining, visualizing, mapping, classifying, and modeling massive streams of public microblogging events. We describe a Web service that leverages this framework to track political memes in Twitter and help detect astroturfing, smear campaigns, and other misinformation in the context of U.S. political elections. We present some cases of abusive behaviors uncovered by our service. Finally, we discuss promising preliminary results on the detection of suspicious memes via supervised learning based on features extracted from the topology of the diffusion networks, sentiment analysis, and crowdsourced annotations

Tweet, but Verify: Epistemic Study of Information Verification on Twitter

While Twitter provides an unprecedented opportunity to learn about breaking news and current events as they happen, it often produces skepticism among users as not all the information is accurate but also hoaxes are sometimes spread. While avoiding the diffusion of hoaxes is a major concern during fast-paced events such as natural disasters, the study of how users trust and verify information from tweets in these contexts has received little attention so far. We survey users on credibility perceptions regarding witness pictures posted on Twitter related to Hurricane Sandy. By examining credibility perceptions on features suggested for information verification in the field of Epistemology, we evaluate their accuracy in determining whether pictures were real or fake compared to professional evaluations performed by experts. Our study unveils insight about tweet presentation, as well as features that users should look at when assessing the veracity of tweets in the context of fast-paced events. Some of our main findings include that while author details not readily available on Twitter feeds should be emphasized in order to facilitate verification of tweets, showing multiple tweets corroborating a fact misleads users to trusting what actually is a hoax. We contrast some of the behavioral patterns found on tweets with literature in Psychology research.Comment: Pre-print of paper accepted to Social Network Analysis and Mining (Springer

On the optimal marketing aggressiveness level of C2C sellers in social media: evidence from China

Social media has become a widely used marketing tool for reaching potential customers. Because of its low cost, social media marketing is especially appealing to customer-to-customer (C2C) sellers. Customers can also benefit from social media marketing by learning about products and by interacting with sellers in real time. However, a seller's marketing microblogs may backfire on her for dominating the social space. Defining the marketing popularity as the average number of likes each seller receives per marketing-related microblog and defining the marketing aggressiveness level as the proportion of her marketing-related microblogs, this paper empirically quantifies the optimal level of marketing aggressiveness in social media to achieve the maximum popularity. We gather the data from China's largest microblogging platform, Sina Weibo, and the sellers in our sample are from China's largest C2C online shopping platform, Taobao. We find that the empirical relationship between the marketing aggressiveness level and the marketing popularity follows an inverted U-shape curve, where the optimal level is around 30%. In addition, we find a saturation effect of the number of followers on marketing popularity after it reaches around 100,000. Our findings imply that social media marketing should not overlook customers' social needs. Our measure of marketing aggressiveness provides a dynamic business metric for practitioners to monitor so as to improve their marketing and managerial decision making process

Persuasion in the digital age: a theoretical model of persuasion in terse text

This thesis explores how the increasingly prevalent terse text format of Social Media communication has affected the way we seek to persuade one another and whether it has impacted the applicability of existing models of persuasion, influence and attitude change. Over the past few decades, communication behaviour has evolved dramatically. As a society we increasingly consume information in the format of short messages, rather than lengthy text and verbose speech. Meanwhile our understanding of persuasion has hardly moved on from the 1980’s and continues to be spread across a variety of academic disciplines, such as Behavioural Science/Psychology, Philosophy/Rhetoric, and various sub-fields of linguistics. Existing models of persuasion are to date lacking interdisciplinarity and applicability to the terse text format found in Social Media. The data used in this research is in the format of Twitter microblogs gathered throughout a number of recent political campaigns, such as the 2016 UK Brexit referendum and the 2016 US General Election. The research purpose is fundamental, rather than applied, meaning that it seeks to expand knowledge by increasing the understanding of fundamental principles, rather than answering specific questions and offering a precise solution to a practical problem. The research philosophy that has been adopted for this project is interpretivism. The research approach is idiographic, and the methodology is predominantly qualitative, with occasional use of descriptive statistics. The research was conducted in several distinct phases, starting with the construction of the theoretical model, followed by two validation exercises and further experimental exploration by means of a recall test and computational linguistic analysis, culminating in a revised model of terse text persuasion. This research draws upon and collates existing knowledge from behavioural science, rhetoric, linguistics, and cognitive science and develops a comprehensive understanding of how we seek to persuade through terse text media, based on data collected around a number of recent political campaigns and topics of debate. The research demonstrates that existing models of persuasion, such as the Elaboration Likelihood Model (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986) and the Heuristic Systematic Model (Chaiken et al., 1989)cannot be applied to the terse text context without significant modification. A new theoretical model of persuasion in terse text is proposed and evaluated. The findings also show that there is a distinct preference for heuristic over systematic cues in terse text messages with persuasive intent, and – in terms of Aristotelian rhetorical appeals – a preference for appeals to credibility (ethos) and emotion (pathos) over appeals to reason (logos). Additionally, the research explores, by means of a recall test, the most memorable subcategories of terse text microblogs, as well as the examining message structure and features through computational linguistic tools. Although this research focusses on political persuasion in terse text Social Media, the findings have implications that reach far beyond the political sphere into activism, marketing, social engineering, strategic communication and (human centred) information warfare

The intersection of cultural dimensions, social media usage and consumer purchase intention

The role of social media in today’s life is almost imperative. Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram or Youtube are widely used all over the world. Above all, social media has become a global phenomenon, which has dramatically changed the concept of cross-cultural communication not only between individuals, but also brands and consumers. Varieties of social media platforms provide a new channel to acquire information through peer communication, thus influencing consumer purchase intention. Although diverse cultures have different cultural backgrounds, they affect the acceptance of social media usage. In order to broaden the understanding of this rapidly changing field, this paper provides a framework, based on Hofstede’s dimensions and Technology Acceptance model, for examining the intersection of cultural differences, social media usage and consumer behaviour to set the agenda for future research

Measuring Social Influence in Online Social Networks - Focus on Human Behavior Analytics

With the advent of online social networks (OSN) and their ever-expanding reach, researchers seek to determine a social media user’s social influence (SI) proficiency. Despite its exploding application across multiple domains, the research confronts unprecedented practical challenges due to a lack of systematic examination of human behavior characteristics that impart social influence. This work aims to give a methodical overview by conducting a targeted literature analysis to appraise the accuracy and usefulness of past publications. The finding suggests that first, it is necessary to incorporate behavior analytics into statistical measurement models. Second, there is a severe imbalance between the abundance of theoretical research and the scarcity of empirical work to underpin the collective psychological theories to macro-level predictions. Thirdly, it is crucial to incorporate human sentiments and emotions into any measure of SI, particularly as OSN has endowed everyone with the intrinsic ability to influence others. The paper also suggests the merits of three primary research horizons for future considerations

Tweeting for Learning: A Critical Analysis of Research on Microblogging in Education Published in 2008-2011

This study critically analyzed the current body of published research on microblogging in education (MIE) to build a deep and comprehensive understanding of this increasingly popular phenomenon. Twenty-one studies on MIE in 2008-2011 were selected based on the selection criteria and analyzed to answer the following questions: (a) What types of research have been published on MIE? (b) How was microblogging used for teaching and learning in these studies? (c) What educational benefits did microblogging have on teaching and learning? and (d) What suggestions and implications did the current research have for future MIE research and practices? The analysis suggested that microblogging has a potential to encourage participation, engagement, reflective thinking as well as collaborative learning under different learning settings. The quality of research, however, varies greatly, suggesting a need for rigorous research on MIE. The analysis has implications for MIE practices as well as research and development efforts