False News On Social Media: A Data-Driven Survey

In the past few years, the research community has dedicated growing interest to the issue of false news circulating on social networks. The widespread attention on detecting and characterizing false news has been motivated by considerable backlashes of this threat against the real world. As a matter of fact, social media platforms exhibit peculiar characteristics, with respect to traditional news outlets, which have been particularly favorable to the proliferation of deceptive information. They also present unique challenges for all kind of potential interventions on the subject. As this issue becomes of global concern, it is also gaining more attention in academia. The aim of this survey is to offer a comprehensive study on the recent advances in terms of detection, characterization and mitigation of false news that propagate on social media, as well as the challenges and the open questions that await future research on the field. We use a data-driven approach, focusing on a classification of the features that are used in each study to characterize false information and on the datasets used for instructing classification methods. At the end of the survey, we highlight emerging approaches that look most promising for addressing false news

The paradigm-shift of social spambots: Evidence, theories, and tools for the arms race

Recent studies in social media spam and automation provide anecdotal argumentation of the rise of a new generation of spambots, so-called social spambots. Here, for the first time, we extensively study this novel phenomenon on Twitter and we provide quantitative evidence that a paradigm-shift exists in spambot design. First, we measure current Twitter's capabilities of detecting the new social spambots. Later, we assess the human performance in discriminating between genuine accounts, social spambots, and traditional spambots. Then, we benchmark several state-of-the-art techniques proposed by the academic literature. Results show that neither Twitter, nor humans, nor cutting-edge applications are currently capable of accurately detecting the new social spambots. Our results call for new approaches capable of turning the tide in the fight against this raising phenomenon. We conclude by reviewing the latest literature on spambots detection and we highlight an emerging common research trend based on the analysis of collective behaviors. Insights derived from both our extensive experimental campaign and survey shed light on the most promising directions of research and lay the foundations for the arms race against the novel social spambots. Finally, to foster research on this novel phenomenon, we make publicly available to the scientific community all the datasets used in this study.Comment: To appear in Proc. 26th WWW, 2017, Companion Volume (Web Science Track, Perth, Australia, 3-7 April, 2017

Community Assessment on Colorectal Cancer Screening Knowledge, Attitudes, Behavior, and Health Literacy in American Samoa: Methods and Results

urpose/Background: “Weaving” Indigenous and Western knowledges are understood to advance health equity for the Indigenous community whose own knowledge and values are often subsumed. Partnerships that support Indigenous leadership and bring Indigenous knowledge to greater parity with Western knowledge are imperative. Indigenous people living in Small Island Developing States like the U.S. territories experience health disparities. The WHO has declared non- communicable diseases as a global health epidemic, including cancer disparities. In American Samoa (AS) less than 7% of age-eligible adults participated in colorectal cancer (CRC) screening, while the Healthy People 2020 target is 70% screened. CRC may be prevented through screening and early detection. The relationship between CRC screening with knowledge, attitudes, beliefs (KAB), and health literacy has never been locally assessed in AS. AS based community researchers partnered with regional academic researchers in local research training, instrument development, data collection, and data analysis. Community relevant approaches guided assessment of CRC screening rates, CRC screening KAB, and health literacy. Objective: This abstract describes the community engaged approaches and results through the National Institute of Minority Health Disparities funded INdigenous Samoan Partnership to Initiate Research Excellence (INSPIRE), introduced at the 2015 CTR-IN annual meeting. Materials & Methods: INSPIRE principal Investigators are based in AS, operated through the American Samoa Community Coalition, a community-based organization, partnering with academic co-investigators in Hawaii and California. To assess CRC KAB and health literacy, two validated assessment instruments were adapted: The KAB survey, from self-developed and population-based instruments, and Short Test for Functional Health Literacy in Adults (S-TOFHLA). Community partners translated then back translated both surveys with three focus groups. Twenty cognitive interviews were conducted to test translation cogency. Seven AS INSPIRE research trainees participating in year-long workshops were trained on Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS). Initial participants (seeds) were recruited by social characteristics. Upon survey completion participants received coupons to each recruit three eligible participants. 713 community respondents participated in three months. An INSPIRE researcher (epidemiologist) analyzed data, with technical assistance from an academic biostatistician in Hawaii when needed fostering research capacity training. Bivariate and multivariate statistics analyzed CRC knowledge, attitudes, health literacy as correlates and predictors of self-reported screening. Results: About 65 percent of respondents finished high school; 68.9% had no insurance. Only 2 respondents completed CRC screening, but 63.3% and 82.3% of English vs Samoan survey respondents respectively would get colonoscopy. Among the 11 knowledge questions, 5 items were “don’t know” while 2 items were incorrect responses on English and Samoan surveys respectively. Almost twice as many Samoan compared to English survey respondents (81% vs. 44%) scored “inadequate” in the S-TOFHLA. Correlates and predictors of CRC screening behavior and differences in results between the respondents who took English vs Samoan surveys will be reported. Discussion/Conclusion: Almost all participants have not received CRC screening, lower than other reported AS nationwide figures. This first ever study, led by and for American Samoans obtained robust results on knowledge, attitudes, and health literacy of CRC screening to allow continued research and interventions to increase very low CRC screening rates

A survey on opinion summarization technique s for social media

The volume of data on the social media is huge and even keeps increasing. The need for efficient processing of this extensive information resulted in increasing research interest in knowledge engineering tasks such as Opinion Summarization. This survey shows the current opinion summarization challenges for social media, then the necessary pre-summarization steps like preprocessing, features extraction, noise elimination, and handling of synonym features. Next, it covers the various approaches used in opinion summarization like Visualization, Abstractive, Aspect based, Query-focused, Real Time, Update Summarization, and highlight other Opinion Summarization approaches such as Contrastive, Concept-based, Community Detection, Domain Specific, Bilingual, Social Bookmarking, and Social Media Sampling. It covers the different datasets used in opinion summarization and future work suggested in each technique. Finally, it provides different ways for evaluating opinion summarization