Characterization of cross-posting activity for professional users across Facebook, Twitter and Google+

Professional players in social media (e.g., big companies, politician, athletes, celebrities, etc) are intensively using Online Social Networks (OSNs) in order to interact with a huge amount of regular OSN users with different purposes (marketing campaigns, customer feedback, public reputation improvement, etc). Hence, due to the large catalog of existing OSNs, professional players usually count with OSN accounts in different systems. In this context, an interesting question is whether professional users publish the same information across their OSN accounts, or actually they use different OSNs in a different manner. We define as cross-posting activity the action of publishing the same information in two or more OSNs. This paper aims at characterizing the cross-posting activity of professional users across three major OSNs, Facebook, Twitter and Google+. To this end, we perform a large-scale measurement-based analysis across more than 2M posts collected from 616 professional users with active accounts in the three referred OSNs. Then we characterize the phenomenon of cross-posting and analyse the behavioural patterns based on the identified characteristics.This work is partially supported by the European Celtic-Plus project CONVINcE and ITEA3 CAP. as well as the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad of SPAIN through the project BigDatAAM (FIS2013-47532-C3-3-P) and Horizon 2020 Programme (H2020-DS-2014-1) under Grant Agreement number 653449. We would like thank Reza Motamedi, Reza Rejaie, Roberto Gonzlez and Ruben Cuevas for providing Twitter and Google+ dataset to be used in this study

Social media mining under the COVID-19 context: Progress, challenges, and opportunities

Social media platforms allow users worldwide to create and share information, forging vast sensing networks that allow information on certain topics to be collected, stored, mined, and analyzed in a rapid manner. During the COVID-19 pandemic, extensive social media mining efforts have been undertaken to tackle COVID-19 challenges from various perspectives. This review summarizes the progress of social media data mining studies in the COVID-19 contexts and categorizes them into six major domains, including early warning and detection, human mobility monitoring, communication and information conveying, public attitudes and emotions, infodemic and misinformation, and hatred and violence. We further document essential features of publicly available COVID-19 related social media data archives that will benefit research communities in conducting replicable and repro�ducible studies. In addition, we discuss seven challenges in social media analytics associated with their potential impacts on derived COVID-19 findings, followed by our visions for the possible paths forward in regard to social media-based COVID-19 investigations. This review serves as a valuable reference that recaps social media mining efforts in COVID-19 related studies and provides future directions along which the information harnessed from social media can be used to address public health emergencies

An Analysis of Black Undergraduate Students\u27 Social Activism through Social Media Usage

Social media has become a tool for college students to engage in social activism. Black undergraduate students is one population that actively utilize social media\u27s impact as illustrated through recent activist movements and demonstrations within university communities. This study sought to explore and analyze the ways that Black undergraduate students utilize social media platforms in general and for activism. The researcher conducted one-on-one interviews with three Black undergraduate students and analyzed their posts on each of their frequently used social media platforms in order to study how their personal narratives were connected to their social media use. Results showed that participants frequently utilize social media to engage in social activism through information acquisition and dispersal, discourse with peers, or mainstream media critique, but do not frequently participate in large-scale physical acts of activism such as demonstrations or protesting

The Role of Suspended Accounts in Political Discussion on Social Media: Analysis of the 2017 French, UK and German Elections

Content moderation on social media is at the center of public and academic debate. In this study, we advance our understanding on which type of election-related content gets suspended by social media platforms. For this, we assess the behavior and content shared by suspended accounts during the most important elections in Europe in 2017 (in France, the United Kingdom, and Germany). We identify significant differences when we compare the behavior and content shared by Twitter suspended accounts with all other active accounts, including a focus on amplifying divisive issues like immigration and religion and systematic activities increasing the visibility of specific political figures (often but not always on the right). Our analysis suggests that suspended accounts were overwhelmingly human operated and no more likely than other accounts to share “fake news.” This study sheds light on the moderation policies of social media platforms, which have increasingly raised contentious debates, and equally importantly on the integrity and dynamics of political discussion on social media during major political events

Starter Ecologies Introduction to the Special Issue on Social Software

At the time of publication C. Spinuzzi was at The University of Texas at Austin.Writin