The refugee/migrant crisis dichotomy on twitter: A network and sentiment perspective

Media reports, political statements, and social media debates on the refugee/migrant crisis shape the ways in which people and societies respond to those displaced people arriving at their borders world wide. These current events are framed and experienced as a crisis, entering the media, capturing worldwide political attention, and producing diverse and contradictory discourses and responses. The labels “migrant” and “refugee” are frequently distinguished and conflated in traditional as well as social media when describing the same groups of people. In this paper, we focus on the simultaneous struggle over meaning, legitimization, and power in representations of the refugee crisis, through the specific lens of Twitter. The 369,485 tweets analyzed in this paper cover two days after a picture of Alan Kurdi - a three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea while trying to reach Europe with his family - made global headlines and sparked wide media engagement. More specifically, we investigate the existence of the dichotomy between the “deserving” refugee versus the “undeserving” migrant, as well as the relationship between sentiment expressed in tweets, their influence, and the popularity of Twitter users involved in this dichotomous characterization of the crisis. Our results show that the Twitter debate was predominantly focused on refugee related hashtags and that those tweets containing such hashtags were more positive in tone. Furthermore, we find that popular Twitter users as well as popular tweets are characterized by less emotional intensity and slightly less positivity in the debate, contrary to prior expectations. Co-occurrence networks expose the structure underlying hashtag usage and reveal a refugee-centric core of meaning, yet divergent goals of some prominent users. As social media become increasingly prominent venues for debate over a crisis, how and why people express their opinions offer valuable insights into the nature and direction of these debates

Gamifying with badges: A big data natural experiment on Stack Exchange

Badges are a common gamification mechanism used by many crowd-sourced online systems. This study provides evidence to their effectiveness and measures their effect size using a big data natural experiment in three large Stack Exchange online Q&A sites. We analyze the introduction of 22 different badge-launch events and the resulting changes in user behavior. Consistent with earlier studies, we report that most badge introductions have the desired effect. Going beyond traditional findings on the individual level, this study measures overall badge effect size on the service

When Interaction is Valuable: Feedback, Churn and Survival on Community Question and Answer Sites: The case of Stack Exchange

Does feedback contribute to collaboration? As in most open participation and contribution platforms, churn is an issue. The highest churn and dropout rates follow the initial posting of a single answer. According to feedback theories, contributors are sensitive to feedback. Votes and comments are common feedback mechanisms in such platforms. Prior studies on the effect of these mechanisms in different platforms have produced conflicting results. This study reports a longitudinal analysis of the feedback effect on newcomer answer provider retention in five Stack Exchange communities, including over a million users and their answers. We find that feedback in the form of votes and comments provided to the first answer is strongly correlated with newcomer retention. Thus, interaction is valuable. The findings have implications for the design of Q&A websites and for testing the theory of feedback arrangements\u27 impact on persistence