183 research outputs found
Characterizing Attention Cascades in WhatsApp Groups
An important political and social phenomena discussed in several countries,
like India and Brazil, is the use of WhatsApp to spread false or misleading
content. However, little is known about the information dissemination process
in WhatsApp groups. Attention affects the dissemination of information in
WhatsApp groups, determining what topics or subjects are more attractive to
participants of a group. In this paper, we characterize and analyze how
attention propagates among the participants of a WhatsApp group. An attention
cascade begins when a user asserts a topic in a message to the group, which
could include written text, photos, or links to articles online. Others then
propagate the information by responding to it. We analyzed attention cascades
in more than 1.7 million messages posted in 120 groups over one year. Our
analysis focused on the structural and temporal evolution of attention cascades
as well as on the behavior of users that participate in them. We found specific
characteristics in cascades associated with groups that discuss political
subjects and false information. For instance, we observe that cascades with
false information tend to be deeper, reach more users, and last longer in
political groups than in non-political groups.Comment: Accepted as a full paper at the 11th International ACM Web Science
Conference (WebSci 2019). Please cite the WebSci versio
Can high school students check the veracity of information about COVID-19? A case study on critical media literacy in Brazilian ESL classes
In a globalized world, critical media literacy is imperative when selecting the content we consume amid countless offers. Therefore, the purpose of this case study is to analyze which resources 3rd year high school students (16-17 years old) from an English as a Second Language class in Brazil use in the construction of authorial journalistic articles demystifying fake news about COVID-19 and if the interventions conducted previous to the task were helpful in their process of developing critical media literacy. To this end, firstly students analyzed news about COVID-19 from international websites; secondly, they discussed aspects of a video that circulated widely in WhatsApp chat groups; and, finally, they produced journalistic articles demystifying popular fake news about COVID-19 in Brazil. The findings suggest a great capacity of students to justify their perceptions about what is fact and what is fake once they were provoked to do so, showing the development of critical media literacy and news literacy through the arguments presented in their articles
Information spreading during emergencies and anomalous events
The most critical time for information to spread is in the aftermath of a
serious emergency, crisis, or disaster. Individuals affected by such situations
can now turn to an array of communication channels, from mobile phone calls and
text messages to social media posts, when alerting social ties. These channels
drastically improve the speed of information in a time-sensitive event, and
provide extant records of human dynamics during and afterward the event.
Retrospective analysis of such anomalous events provides researchers with a
class of "found experiments" that may be used to better understand social
spreading. In this chapter, we study information spreading due to a number of
emergency events, including the Boston Marathon Bombing and a plane crash at a
western European airport. We also contrast the different information which may
be gleaned by social media data compared with mobile phone data and we estimate
the rate of anomalous events in a mobile phone dataset using a proposed anomaly
detection method.Comment: 19 pages, 11 figure
Students' perceptions of mobile-mediated corrective feedback and oral messaging in a WhatsApp chat group
Mà ster de LingüÃstica Aplicada i Adquisició de Llengües en Contextos Multilingües, Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya, Universitat de Barcelona. Curs: 2020-2021. Tutores: Elsa Tragant i Àngels Pinyana[eng] This study has been carried out in response to the scarcity of research dedicated to corrective feedback provision on mobile devices and the tendency for investigators and educators alike to overlook the multi-modal features of mobile instant messaging platforms, such as oral-based messages. The present study, attempts to bridge this gap by examining a class of 17 intermediate EFL learners and their perceptions towards receiving corrective feedback in a WhatsApp chat group (supplemented with a weekly feedback session on Zoom), which ran for the duration of 6 weeks. Screenshots of the chat were analysed to provide a comprehensive overview of interaction and participation with a special focus on oral messages. A semi-structured questionnaire was also administered to glean information regarding students' perceptions of the corrective feedback they received in the two modalities, in addition to their perceptions of oral-based messages. Findings revealed positive attitudes towards receiving corrective feedback in this manner, with a preference towards receiving more explicit corrective feedback. The production of oral messages was scarce, although students highly rated having the opportunity to use this feature
Modeling and Analyzing Collective Behavior Captured by Many-to-Many Networks
L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen
Predicting Information Pathways Across Online Communities
The problem of community-level information pathway prediction (CLIPP) aims at
predicting the transmission trajectory of content across online communities. A
successful solution to CLIPP holds significance as it facilitates the
distribution of valuable information to a larger audience and prevents the
proliferation of misinformation. Notably, solving CLIPP is non-trivial as
inter-community relationships and influence are unknown, information spread is
multi-modal, and new content and new communities appear over time. In this
work, we address CLIPP by collecting large-scale, multi-modal datasets to
examine the diffusion of online YouTube videos on Reddit. We analyze these
datasets to construct community influence graphs (CIGs) and develop a novel
dynamic graph framework, INPAC (Information Pathway Across Online Communities),
which incorporates CIGs to capture the temporal variability and multi-modal
nature of video propagation across communities. Experimental results in both
warm-start and cold-start scenarios show that INPAC outperforms seven baselines
in CLIPP.Comment: In Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge
Discovery and Data Mining (KDD'23
Organization of a Mobile Emergency Management Center
This article covers the problem issues of the organization of a mobile emergency management center of the Main Inspectorate of Emergency Situations of the Republic of Moldova. The key objectives assigned to the Situational Center have been determined, as well as the peculiarities of the developing organizational structure of the information interoperability of the Center’s employees, providing the composition of subsystems and the directions aimed at enhancing efficiency
- …