Introduction to the Minitrack on Data Analytics, Data Mining and Machine Learning for Social Media

Social media continues to influence the way we work, play, and interact with each other. We are on the other side of a U.S. presidential election with a sitting president who has clearly shown the power of utilizing social media to drive public discourse. Never before has a U.S. president communicated more directly with the public. Our online communities continue to struggle with the conflicting challenge of being free and open, allowing anyone to express their thoughts and ideas, while at the same time working to combat misinformation and deep fakes. We praise social media when it is used as a tool to rally “our side” or confirm our bias while condemning it when it is used by groups we believe are harmful to the public good. In the midst of all of this, social media scholars continue on various paths of sense-making to better understand the impact social media has on society. Finally, we note that this minitrack is broad and inclusive. We welcome papers on techniques and tools to transform unstructured data into information that can be used to better drive theory, while also accepting papers on the impact that social media has on our society