National security and social media monitoring: a presentation of the emotive and related systems

Today social media streams, such as Twitter, represent vast amounts of 'real-time' daily streaming data. Topics on these streams cover every range of human communication, ranging from banal banter, to serious reactions to events and information sharing regarding any imaginable product, item or entity. It has now become the norm for publicly visible events to break news over social media streams first, and only then followed by main stream media picking up on the news. It has been suggested in literature that social-media are a valid, valuable and effective real-time tool for gauging public subjective reactions to events and entities. Due to the vast big-data that is generated on a daily basis on social media streams, monitoring and gauging public reactions has to be automated and most of all scalable - i.e. human, expert monitoring is generally unfeasible. In this paper the EMOTIVE system, a project funded jointly by the DSTL (Defence Science and Technology Laboratory) and EPSRC, which focuses on monitoring fine-grained emotional responses relating to events of national security importance, will be presented. Similar systems for monitoring national security events are also presented and the primary traits of such national security social media monitoring systems are introduced and discussed

Can social media networks like Facebook and Twitter influence the agenda-setting of traditional media? Two case studies from Egypt.

This research aims to examine if social media content that is widely shared or commented on can influence the agenda of traditional media on women issues namely the sexual harassment and undocumented marriages, to what extent and whether or not the same framing applies when the discussion moves from traditional media to social media. The topics chosen were related to sexual harassment and undocumented marriages which are two crucial, sensitive topics for Egyptian women. Three traditional media outlets were purposefully selected for this study channels. Interviews with the producers of the primetime TV showswere also conducted to assess how and to what extent they rely on social media to set their daily and weekly agenda of topics. These shows are “Sabaya Al Kheir” on Nahar TV, “Al Ashera Masaan” on Dream TV and “Hona Al Assema” on CBC Channel. An online analysis tool was used to measure the volume of online conversations and determine their sentiment. The results showed that social media trending topics such as sexual harassment and undocumented marriages do make it to traditional media especially if they are related to bigger societal issues like undocumented marriage and sexual harassment. Viral content also are more likely to reach traditional media, which follow the framing of online sentiment