1,845 research outputs found
Emoticon-based Ambivalent Expression: A Hidden Indicator for Unusual Behaviors in Weibo
Recent decades have witnessed online social media being a big-data window for
quantificationally testifying conventional social theories and exploring much
detailed human behavioral patterns. In this paper, by tracing the emoticon use
in Weibo, a group of hidden "ambivalent users" are disclosed for frequently
posting ambivalent tweets containing both positive and negative emotions.
Further investigation reveals that this ambivalent expression could be a novel
indicator of many unusual social behaviors. For instance, ambivalent users with
the female as the majority like to make a sound in midnights or at weekends.
They mention their close friends frequently in ambivalent tweets, which attract
more replies and thus serve as a more private communication way. Ambivalent
users also respond differently to public affairs from others and demonstrate
more interests in entertainment and sports events. Moreover, the sentiment
shift of words adopted in ambivalent tweets is more evident than usual and
exhibits a clear "negative to positive" pattern. The above observations, though
being promiscuous seemingly, actually point to the self regulation of negative
mood in Weibo, which could find its base from the emotion management theories
in sociology but makes an interesting extension to the online environment.
Finally, as an interesting corollary, ambivalent users are found connected with
compulsive buyers and turn out to be perfect targets for online marketing.Comment: Data sets can be downloaded freely from www.datatang.com/data/47207
or http://pan.baidu.com/s/1mg67cbm. Any issues feel free to contact
[email protected]
Hate is not Binary: Studying Abusive Behavior of #GamerGate on Twitter
Over the past few years, online bullying and aggression have become
increasingly prominent, and manifested in many different forms on social media.
However, there is little work analyzing the characteristics of abusive users
and what distinguishes them from typical social media users. In this paper, we
start addressing this gap by analyzing tweets containing a great large amount
of abusiveness. We focus on a Twitter dataset revolving around the Gamergate
controversy, which led to many incidents of cyberbullying and cyberaggression
on various gaming and social media platforms. We study the properties of the
users tweeting about Gamergate, the content they post, and the differences in
their behavior compared to typical Twitter users.
We find that while their tweets are often seemingly about aggressive and
hateful subjects, "Gamergaters" do not exhibit common expressions of online
anger, and in fact primarily differ from typical users in that their tweets are
less joyful. They are also more engaged than typical Twitter users, which is an
indication as to how and why this controversy is still ongoing. Surprisingly,
we find that Gamergaters are less likely to be suspended by Twitter, thus we
analyze their properties to identify differences from typical users and what
may have led to their suspension. We perform an unsupervised machine learning
analysis to detect clusters of users who, though currently active, could be
considered for suspension since they exhibit similar behaviors with suspended
users. Finally, we confirm the usefulness of our analyzed features by emulating
the Twitter suspension mechanism with a supervised learning method, achieving
very good precision and recall.Comment: In 28th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (ACM HyperText
2017
Examining the Impact of Emojis on Disaster Communication: A Perspective from the Uncertainty Reduction Theory
Communication is a purposeful process, especially during disasters, when emergency management officials and citizen journalists attempt to disseminate relevant information to as many affected people as possible. X (previously Twitter), a popular computer-mediated communication (CMC) platform, has become an essential resource for disaster information given its ability to facilitate real-time communication. Past studies on disasters have mainly concentrated on the verbal-linguistic conventions of words and hashtags as the means to convey disaster-related information. Little attention has been given to non-verbal linguistic cues, such as emojis. In this study, we investigate the use of emojis in disaster communication on X by using uncertainty reduction theory as the theoretical framework. We measured information uncertainty in individual tweets and assessed whether information conveyed in external URLs mitigated such uncertainty. We also examined how emojis affect information uncertainty and information dissemination. The statistical results from analyzing tweets related to the 2018 California Camp Fire disaster show that information uncertainty has a negative impact on information dissemination, and the negative impact was amplified when emojis depicted items and objects instead of facial expressions. Conversely, external URLs reduced the negative impact. This study sheds light on the influence of emojis on the dissemination of disaster information on X and provides insights for both academia and emergency management practitioners in using CMC platforms
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