Social Bots for Online Public Health Interventions

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, in the United States hundreds of thousands initiate smoking each year, and millions live with smoking-related dis- eases. Many tobacco users discuss their habits and preferences on social media. This work conceptualizes a framework for targeted health interventions to inform tobacco users about the consequences of tobacco use. We designed a Twitter bot named Notobot (short for No-Tobacco Bot) that leverages machine learning to identify users posting pro-tobacco tweets and select individualized interventions to address their interest in tobacco use. We searched the Twitter feed for tobacco-related keywords and phrases, and trained a convolutional neural network using over 4,000 tweets dichotomously manually labeled as either pro- tobacco or not pro-tobacco. This model achieves a 90% recall rate on the training set and 74% on test data. Users posting pro- tobacco tweets are matched with former smokers with similar interests who posted anti-tobacco tweets. Algorithmic matching, based on the power of peer influence, allows for the systematic delivery of personalized interventions based on real anti-tobacco tweets from former smokers. Experimental evaluation suggests that our system would perform well if deployed. This research offers opportunities for public health researchers to increase health awareness at scale. Future work entails deploying the fully operational Notobot system in a controlled experiment within a public health campaign

Tackling food marketing to children in a digital world: trans-disciplinary perspectives. Children’s rights, evidence of impact, methodological challenges, regulatory options and policy implications for the WHO European Region

There is unequivocal evidence that childhood obesity is influenced by marketing of foods and non-alcoholic beverages high in saturated fat, salt and/or free sugars (HFSS), and a core recommendation of the WHO Commission on Ending Childhood Obesity is to reduce children’s exposure to all such marketing. As a result, WHO has called on Member States to introduce restrictions on marketing of HFSS foods to children, covering all media, including digital, and to close any regulatory loopholes. This publication provides up-to-date information on the marketing of foods and non-alcoholic beverages to children and the changes that have occurred in recent years, focusing in particular on the major shift to digital marketing. It examines trends in media use among children, marketing methods in the new digital media landscape and children’s engagement with such marketing. It also considers the impact on children and their ability to counter marketing as well as the implications for children’s rights and digital privacy. Finally the report discusses the policy implications and some of the recent policy action by WHO European Member States

Pioneers of Influence Propagation in Social Networks

With the growing importance of corporate viral marketing campaigns on online social networks, the interest in studies of influence propagation through networks is higher than ever. In a viral marketing campaign, a firm initially targets a small set of pioneers and hopes that they would influence a sizeable fraction of the population by diffusion of influence through the network. In general, any marketing campaign might fail to go viral in the first try. As such, it would be useful to have some guide to evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign and judge whether it is worthy of further resources, and in case the campaign has potential, how to hit upon a good pioneer who can make the campaign go viral. In this paper, we present a diffusion model developed by enriching the generalized random graph (a.k.a. configuration model) to provide insight into these questions. We offer the intuition behind the results on this model, rigorously proved in Blaszczyszyn & Gaurav(2013), and illustrate them here by taking examples of random networks having prototypical degree distributions - Poisson degree distribution, which is commonly used as a kind of benchmark, and Power Law degree distribution, which is normally used to approximate the real-world networks. On these networks, the members are assumed to have varying attitudes towards propagating the information. We analyze three cases, in particular - (1) Bernoulli transmissions, when a member influences each of its friend with probability p; (2) Node percolation, when a member influences all its friends with probability p and none with probability 1-p; (3) Coupon-collector transmissions, when a member randomly selects one of his friends K times with replacement. We assume that the configuration model is the closest approximation of a large online social network, when the information available about the network is very limited. The key insight offered by this study from a firm's perspective is regarding how to evaluate the effectiveness of a marketing campaign and do cost-benefit analysis by collecting relevant statistical data from the pioneers it selects. The campaign evaluation criterion is informed by the observation that if the parameters of the underlying network and the campaign effectiveness are such that the campaign can indeed reach a significant fraction of the population, then the set of good pioneers also forms a significant fraction of the population. Therefore, in such a case, the firms can even adopt the naive strategy of repeatedly picking and targeting some number of pioneers at random from the population. With this strategy, the probability of them picking a good pioneer will increase geometrically fast with the number of tries

Literature Overview - Privacy in Online Social Networks

In recent years, Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become an important\ud part of daily life for many. Users build explicit networks to represent their\ud social relationships, either existing or new. Users also often upload and share a plethora of information related to their personal lives. The potential privacy risks of such behavior are often underestimated or ignored. For example, users often disclose personal information to a larger audience than intended. Users may even post information about others without their consent. A lack of experience and awareness in users, as well as proper tools and design of the OSNs, perpetuate the situation. This paper aims to provide insight into such privacy issues and looks at OSNs, their associated privacy risks, and existing research into solutions. The final goal is to help identify the research directions for the Kindred Spirits project