Beyond the culture effect on credibility perception on microblogs

We investigated the credibility perception of tweet readers from the USA and by readers from eight Arabic countries; our aim was to understand if credibility was affected by country and/or by culture. Results from a crowd-sourcing experiment, showed a wide variety of factors affected credibility perception, including a tweet author's gender, profile image, username style, location, and social network overlap with the reader. We found that culture determines readers' credibility perception, but country has no effect. We discuss the implications of our findings for user interface design and social media systems

Computational fact checking from knowledge networks

Traditional fact checking by expert journalists cannot keep up with the enormous volume of information that is now generated online. Computational fact checking may significantly enhance our ability to evaluate the veracity of dubious information. Here we show that the complexities of human fact checking can be approximated quite well by finding the shortest path between concept nodes under properly defined semantic proximity metrics on knowledge graphs. Framed as a network problem this approach is feasible with efficient computational techniques. We evaluate this approach by examining tens of thousands of claims related to history, entertainment, geography, and biographical information using a public knowledge graph extracted from Wikipedia. Statements independently known to be true consistently receive higher support via our method than do false ones. These findings represent a significant step toward scalable computational fact-checking methods that may one day mitigate the spread of harmful misinformation

Development of Trust in an Online Breast Cancer Forum: A Qualitative Study

Background: Online health forums provide peer support for a range of medical conditions, including life-threatening and terminal illnesses. Trust is an important component of peer-to-peer support, although relatively little is known about how trust forms within online health forums. Objective: The aim of this paper is to examine how trust develops and influences sharing among users of an online breast cancer forum. Methods: An interpretive qualitative approach was adopted. Data were collected from forum posts from 135 threads on nine boards on the UK charity, Breast Cancer Care (BCC). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 BCC forum users. Both datasets were analysed thematically using Braun and Clarke’s [2006] approach and combined to triangulate analysis. Results: Trust operates in three dimensions, structural, relational and temporal, which intersect with each other and do not operate in isolation. The structural dimension relates to how the affordances and formal rules of the site affected trust. The relational dimension refers to how trust was necessarily experienced in interactions with other forum users: it emerged within relationships and was a social phenomenon. The temporal dimension relates to how trust changed over time and was influenced by the length of time users spent on the forum. Conclusions: Trust is a process that changes over time, and which is influenced by structural features of the forum and informal but collectively understood relational interactions among forum users. The study provides a better understanding of how the intersecting structural, relational and temporal aspects that support the development of trust facilitate sharing in online environments. These findings will help organisations developing online health forums

Social Media, Professional Media, and Mobilization in Contemporary Britain:Explaining the Strengths and Weaknesses of the Citizens’ Movement 38 Degrees

This article was published in the journal Political Studies [SAGE © The Author(s)] and the definitive version is available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321716631350Digital media continue to reshape political activism in unexpected ways. Within a period of a few years, the internet-enabled UK citizens’ movement 38 Degrees has amassed a membership of 3 million and now sits alongside similar entities such as America’s MoveOn, Australia’s GetUp! and the transnational movement Avaaz. In this article, we contribute to current thinking about digital media and mobilisation by addressing some of the limitations of existing research on these movements and on digital activism more generally. We show how 38 Degrees’ digital network repertoires coexist interdependently with its strategy of gaining professional news media coverage. We explain how the oscillations between choreographic leadership and member influence and between digital media horizontalism and elite media-centric work constitute the space of interdependencies in which 38 Degrees acts. These delicately balanced relations can quickly dissolve and be replaced by simpler relations of dependence on professional media. Yet despite its fragility, we theorise about how 38 Degrees may boost individuals’ political efficacy, irrespective of the outcome of individual campaigns. Our conceptual framework can be used to guide research on similar movements

A Conceptual Quality Framework for Volunteered Geographic Information

The assessment of the quality of volunteered geographic information (VGI) is cornerstone to understand the fitness for purpose of datasets in many application domains. While most analyses focus on geometric and positional quality, only sporadic attention has been devoted to the interpretation of the data, i.e., the communication process through which consumers try to reconstruct the meaning of information intended by its producers. Interpretability is a notoriously ephemeral, culturally rooted, and context-dependent property of the data that concerns the conceptual quality of the vocabularies, schemas, ontologies, and documentation used to describe and annotate the geographic features of interest. To operationalize conceptual quality in VGI, we propose a multi-faceted framework that includes accuracy, granularity, completeness, consistency, compliance, and richness, proposing proxy measures for each dimension. The application of the framework is illustrated in a case study on a European sample of OpenStreetMap, focused specifically on conceptual compliance

The use of bibliometrics for assessing research : possibilities, limitations and adverse effects

Researchers are used to being evaluated: publications, hiring, tenure and funding decisions are all based on the evaluation of research. Traditionally, this evaluation relied on judgement of peers but, in the light of limited resources and increased bureaucratization of science, peer review is getting more and more replaced or complemented with bibliometric methods. Central to the introduction of bibliometrics in research evaluation was the creation of the Science Citation Index (SCI)in the 1960s, a citation database initially developed for the retrieval of scientific information. Embedded in this database was the Impact Factor, first used as a tool for the selection of journals to cover in the SCI, which then became a synonym for journal quality and academic prestige. Over the last 10 years, this indicator became powerful enough to influence researchers’ publication patterns in so far as it became one of the most important criteria to select a publication venue. Regardless of its many flaws as a journal metric and its inadequacy as a predictor of citations on the paper level, it became the go-to indicator of research quality and was used and misused by authors, editors, publishers and research policy makers alike. The h-index, introduced as an indicator of both output and impact combined in one simple number, has experienced a similar fate, mainly due to simplicity and availability. Despite their massive use, these measures are too simple to capture the complexity and multiple dimensions of research output and impact. This chapter provides an overview of bibliometric methods, from the development of citation indexing as a tool for information retrieval to its application in research evaluation, and discusses their misuse and effects on researchers’ scholarly communication behavior

Social media self-efficacy and information evaluation online

This study introduces the concept of social media self-efficacy, or a person's perceived ability to reach desired outcomes in the social media environment, and examines the relationship between social media self-efficacy and how people evaluate information found online. Results of a survey of a representative sample of adult Internet users in the United States (N = 3568) indicate that users with higher social media self-efficacy find information shared via social media to be more trustworthy than do those lower in social media self-efficacy. These self-efficacious social media users also rely more both on the opinions of others and on social media specifically when evaluating or verifying the information they find online, suggesting that they may be more prone to seek out and be influenced by input from others. Practical and theoretical implications of these findings are explored. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Social media self-efficacy and information evaluation online

This study introduces the concept of social media self-efficacy, or a person's perceived ability to reach desired outcomes in the social media environment, and examines the relationship between social media self-efficacy and how people evaluate information found online. Results of a survey of a representative sample of adult Internet users in the United States (N = 3568) indicate that users with higher social media self-efficacy find information shared via social media to be more trustworthy than do those lower in social media self-efficacy. These self-efficacious social media users also rely more both on the opinions of others and on social media specifically when evaluating or verifying the information they find online, suggesting that they may be more prone to seek out and be influenced by input from others. Practical and theoretical implications of these findings are explored. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Source effects in the micro-mobilization of collective action via social media

Research has shown that micro-mobilization efforts that invoke social media rely heavily on the influence of personal networks to motivate collective action participation. This study examines whether this trend applies (a) to networks of different levels of personalness, (b) to causes and organizations which people are either unaware of or not affiliated with, and (c) how personal networks affect people's willingness to participate in online versus offline forms of collective action, when personal dispositional factors (activism- and issue involvement, perceived self-, technological-, and group efficacies) are considered. An experiment (N = 315) tested whether calls-to-action by different sources via social media (close personal networks v. distant social networks v. organization officials) influence individuals’ willingness to publicly express support online through social media-based collective activities (e.g. commenting, hyperlinking, ‘Liking’, etc.) and offline activities (e.g. demonstrations, donning campaign materials, etc.). Findings are leveraged to provide practical insight and to inform theoretical development in these domains