Keynote at the Second International Symposium on Spatiotemporal Computing (ISSC 2017), August 7th – 9th, 2017 at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
§ Gruzd, A., Jacobson, J., Dubois, E. (2017). You’re Hired: Examining Acceptance of Social Media Screening of Job Applicants. In Proceedings of the 23rd Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), August 10-12, 2017, Boston, MA, USA.
Available at http://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2017/DataScience/Presentations/28/
Abstract:
The paper examines attitudes towards employers using social media to screen job applicants. In an online survey of 454 participants, we compare the comfort level with this practice in relation to different types of information that can be gathered from publicly accessible social media. The results revealed a nuanced nature of people’s information privacy expectations in the context of hiring practices. People’s perceptions of employers using social media to screen job applicants depends on (1) whether or not they are currently seeking employment (or plan to), (2) the type of information that is being accessed by a prospective em-ployer (if there are on the job market), and (3) their cultural background, but not gender. The findings emphasize the need for employers and recruiters who are relying on social media to screen job applicants to be aware of the types of information that may be perceived to be more sensitive by applicants, such as social network-related information.
Keynote address by Anatoliy Gruzd at the 2017 Altmetrics Conference in Toronto, Canada (Sep 27, 2017)
Abstract
Arguably, even the most innovative ideas take time to catch on. Ideas that seem obvious today, at one point were obscure oddities known only to a select few. Washing your hands, airbags in cars, the internet - none of these ideas were accepted immediately. New ideas need time to incubate, the process of switching from old ideas to new is not seamless nor is it linear. In today’s social media-connected world, even though ideas can spread quickly and more efficiently than ever before, they are now competing for attention with a multitude of other ideas, memes, tweets, snaps, YouTube videos and news (fake and real). Conceptually, if social media is a network of highways on which ideas and people travel, altmetrics are the billboard or traffic signs on these highways that can help interested parties to discover new ideas or re-discover ideas left on the side of the road. While often neglected, the above metaphor is meant to illuminate the important role of altmetrics for researchers, innovators and funders seeking to track the impacts of new ideas, as well as for the many idea consumers looking for emerging and novel insights.
This talk will outline the current state of altmetrics research and how altmetrics are being commonly calculated and used by different stakeholders. It will also explore the social network properties of ideas and how these properties might be used to customize altmetrics for different audiences and uses. The keynote will conclude by calling for the development of training strategies to provide learning opportunities for researchers and administrators from various fields to acquire necessary digital literacy skills so that they better understand how altmetrics are measured and how they can be interpreted for decision making. The keynote will also call on altmetrics developers and researchers to create algorithms and data collection strategies that are less prone to manipulation by the rapid rise of social bots.
Abstract:
Social media data is a rich source of behavioural data that can reveal how we connect and interact with each other online in real-time and over time, and what that might mean for our society as we continue to speed towards an increasingly computer-mediated future. And as more and more Canadians are joining and contributing to various social media websites, their automatically recorded data are rapidly becoming available to third parties to mine for both commercial and academic purposes. As a result, questions around why and how data consumers’ use social media data are becoming pertinent. This talk will review different approaches to Social Media Data Stewardship (the collection, storage, use, reuse, analysis, and preservation of social media data) and discuss some ethical implications of working with such data.
With the rise of new media and social media, a new era of big data has emerged, which has brought about various methodological and theoretical challenges for conducting social research. With over a billion daily active users, Facebook is widely recognized as the leading social media platform in the world. Beyond the use of Facebook to connect people from around the world, Facebook affords various opportunities for academics to conduct research. In this presentation, we will discuss our approach to integrate Facebook data as part of an online survey to study people’s privacy concerns, with a particular focus on methodological challenges associated with sampling and recruiting participants on Facebook.
Sampling: Considering, there is no easy searchable directory of Facebook Groups or Pages, how do researchers identify and sample Facebook Groups or Pages? Problematically, it is difficult to systematically sample across Facebook to get a “representative” sample of Facebook users. Facebook Group Directory, algorithmically-filtered search, and custom-curated directories can be used to sample; however, each approach introduces biases and challenges.
Recruitment: After the selection of the Group/Page of study, how can researchers invite people to participate in the study? Facebook’s Terms of Service does not allow contacting users directly unless you have conducted “business” with them. We outline the various options for recruitment, including buying an ad, posting directly to the group/page, and contacting the moderator.
Ethics: As more Canadians are joining and contributing to Facebook, their automatically recorded data are rapidly becoming available to third parties to mine for both commercial and academic purposes. Ethical questions need to be considered throughout the entire research process. This is particularly true of social media research, which presents unique ethical and personal considerations. In this part of the presentation, we will outline the Social API Terms of Service online guide created by the Social Media Lab at Ryerson University that Internet researchers can use to learn what they can or cannot do with social media collected from sites like Facebook.
The presentation will conclude with the discussion of our plans to develop a unique Facebook app that will allow any Facebook user to review their publicly available social media data and participate in our survey on Social Media Privacy Concerns.
Shareworthiness and Motivated Reasoning in Hyper-Partisan News Sharing Behavi...Axel Bruns
Paper by Magdalena Wischnewski, Axel Bruns, and Tobias Keller, presented at the 2021 International Communication Association conference, 27-31 May 2021.
Who’s in the Gang? Revealing Coordinating Communities in Social MediaDerek Weber
Political astroturfing and organised trolling are online malicious behaviours with significant real-world effects. Common approaches examining these phenomena focus on broad campaigns rather than the small groups responsible. To reveal networks of cooperating accounts, we propose a novel temporal window approach that relies on account interactions and metadata alone. It detects groups of accounts engaging in behaviours that, in concert, execute different goal-based strategies, which we describe. Our approach is validated against two relevant datasets with ground truth data. See https://github.com/weberdc/find_hccs for code and data.
Presented at ASONAM'20 (2020 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining).
Co-authored with Frank Neumann (University of Adelaide)
§ Gruzd, A., Jacobson, J., Dubois, E. (2017). You’re Hired: Examining Acceptance of Social Media Screening of Job Applicants. In Proceedings of the 23rd Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), August 10-12, 2017, Boston, MA, USA.
Available at http://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2017/DataScience/Presentations/28/
Abstract:
The paper examines attitudes towards employers using social media to screen job applicants. In an online survey of 454 participants, we compare the comfort level with this practice in relation to different types of information that can be gathered from publicly accessible social media. The results revealed a nuanced nature of people’s information privacy expectations in the context of hiring practices. People’s perceptions of employers using social media to screen job applicants depends on (1) whether or not they are currently seeking employment (or plan to), (2) the type of information that is being accessed by a prospective em-ployer (if there are on the job market), and (3) their cultural background, but not gender. The findings emphasize the need for employers and recruiters who are relying on social media to screen job applicants to be aware of the types of information that may be perceived to be more sensitive by applicants, such as social network-related information.
Keynote address by Anatoliy Gruzd at the 2017 Altmetrics Conference in Toronto, Canada (Sep 27, 2017)
Abstract
Arguably, even the most innovative ideas take time to catch on. Ideas that seem obvious today, at one point were obscure oddities known only to a select few. Washing your hands, airbags in cars, the internet - none of these ideas were accepted immediately. New ideas need time to incubate, the process of switching from old ideas to new is not seamless nor is it linear. In today’s social media-connected world, even though ideas can spread quickly and more efficiently than ever before, they are now competing for attention with a multitude of other ideas, memes, tweets, snaps, YouTube videos and news (fake and real). Conceptually, if social media is a network of highways on which ideas and people travel, altmetrics are the billboard or traffic signs on these highways that can help interested parties to discover new ideas or re-discover ideas left on the side of the road. While often neglected, the above metaphor is meant to illuminate the important role of altmetrics for researchers, innovators and funders seeking to track the impacts of new ideas, as well as for the many idea consumers looking for emerging and novel insights.
This talk will outline the current state of altmetrics research and how altmetrics are being commonly calculated and used by different stakeholders. It will also explore the social network properties of ideas and how these properties might be used to customize altmetrics for different audiences and uses. The keynote will conclude by calling for the development of training strategies to provide learning opportunities for researchers and administrators from various fields to acquire necessary digital literacy skills so that they better understand how altmetrics are measured and how they can be interpreted for decision making. The keynote will also call on altmetrics developers and researchers to create algorithms and data collection strategies that are less prone to manipulation by the rapid rise of social bots.
Abstract:
Social media data is a rich source of behavioural data that can reveal how we connect and interact with each other online in real-time and over time, and what that might mean for our society as we continue to speed towards an increasingly computer-mediated future. And as more and more Canadians are joining and contributing to various social media websites, their automatically recorded data are rapidly becoming available to third parties to mine for both commercial and academic purposes. As a result, questions around why and how data consumers’ use social media data are becoming pertinent. This talk will review different approaches to Social Media Data Stewardship (the collection, storage, use, reuse, analysis, and preservation of social media data) and discuss some ethical implications of working with such data.
With the rise of new media and social media, a new era of big data has emerged, which has brought about various methodological and theoretical challenges for conducting social research. With over a billion daily active users, Facebook is widely recognized as the leading social media platform in the world. Beyond the use of Facebook to connect people from around the world, Facebook affords various opportunities for academics to conduct research. In this presentation, we will discuss our approach to integrate Facebook data as part of an online survey to study people’s privacy concerns, with a particular focus on methodological challenges associated with sampling and recruiting participants on Facebook.
Sampling: Considering, there is no easy searchable directory of Facebook Groups or Pages, how do researchers identify and sample Facebook Groups or Pages? Problematically, it is difficult to systematically sample across Facebook to get a “representative” sample of Facebook users. Facebook Group Directory, algorithmically-filtered search, and custom-curated directories can be used to sample; however, each approach introduces biases and challenges.
Recruitment: After the selection of the Group/Page of study, how can researchers invite people to participate in the study? Facebook’s Terms of Service does not allow contacting users directly unless you have conducted “business” with them. We outline the various options for recruitment, including buying an ad, posting directly to the group/page, and contacting the moderator.
Ethics: As more Canadians are joining and contributing to Facebook, their automatically recorded data are rapidly becoming available to third parties to mine for both commercial and academic purposes. Ethical questions need to be considered throughout the entire research process. This is particularly true of social media research, which presents unique ethical and personal considerations. In this part of the presentation, we will outline the Social API Terms of Service online guide created by the Social Media Lab at Ryerson University that Internet researchers can use to learn what they can or cannot do with social media collected from sites like Facebook.
The presentation will conclude with the discussion of our plans to develop a unique Facebook app that will allow any Facebook user to review their publicly available social media data and participate in our survey on Social Media Privacy Concerns.
Shareworthiness and Motivated Reasoning in Hyper-Partisan News Sharing Behavi...Axel Bruns
Paper by Magdalena Wischnewski, Axel Bruns, and Tobias Keller, presented at the 2021 International Communication Association conference, 27-31 May 2021.
Who’s in the Gang? Revealing Coordinating Communities in Social MediaDerek Weber
Political astroturfing and organised trolling are online malicious behaviours with significant real-world effects. Common approaches examining these phenomena focus on broad campaigns rather than the small groups responsible. To reveal networks of cooperating accounts, we propose a novel temporal window approach that relies on account interactions and metadata alone. It detects groups of accounts engaging in behaviours that, in concert, execute different goal-based strategies, which we describe. Our approach is validated against two relevant datasets with ground truth data. See https://github.com/weberdc/find_hccs for code and data.
Presented at ASONAM'20 (2020 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining).
Co-authored with Frank Neumann (University of Adelaide)
A glimpse into what social media is all about and how the researchers in the world are using social media. Social media is not a mere hype and not a platform to leverage word-of-the-mouth practices as is the common perception of it in Pakistan: it is much more than that and this is what this talk presented.
Invited talk at Session on Semantic Knowledge for Commodity Computing, at Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2011, July 19-20, 2011, Redmond, WA. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/events/fs2011/default.aspx
Associated video at: https://youtu.be/HKqpuLiMXRs
"Hashtags as Spectacle: #bostonstrong and The Materiality of Metadata" (EGSA ...jkmcgrath
Presentation given at Northeastern University's English Graduate Student Association Conference in March 2014. This is a rough set of slides in search of an idea for an article: more thinking out loud about stuff than something well-formed. Topics include Twitter, hashtags, and specific content like #bostonstrong. Slides are hyperlinked and cited. Questions / comments can be directed to mcgrath.ja@husky.neu.edu
Social Media Mining - Chapter 10 (Behavior Analytics)SocialMediaMining
R. Zafarani, M. A. Abbasi, and H. Liu, Social Media Mining: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Free book and slides at http://socialmediamining.info/
A method to evaluate the reliability of social media data for social network ...Derek Weber
In order to study the effects of Online Social Network (OSN) activity on real-world offline events, researchers need access to OSN data, the reliability of which has particular implications for social network analysis. This relates not only to the completeness of any collected dataset, but also to constructing meaningful social and information networks from them. In this multidisciplinary study, we consider the question of constructing traditional social networks from OSN data and then present a measurement case study showing how the reliability of OSN data affects social network analyses. To this end we developed a systematic comparison methodology, which we applied to two parallel datasets we collected from Twitter. We found considerable differences in datasets collected with different tools and that these variations significantly alter the results of subsequent analyses. Our results lead to a set of guidelines for researchers planning to collect online data streams to infer social networks.
Presented at ASONAM'20 (2020 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining)
Co-authors: Mehwish Nasim (Data61 / CSIRO), Lewis Mitchell (University of Adelaide), Lucia Falzon (University of Melbourne / DST Group)
Abstract:
This article examines how online groups are formed and sustained during crisis periods, especially when political polarization in society is at its highest level. We focus on the use of Vkontakte (VK), a popular social networking site in Ukraine, to understand how it was used by Pro- and Anti-Maidan groups during the 2013/2014 crisis in Ukraine. In particular, we ask whether and to what extent the ideology (or other factors) of a particular group shapes its network structure. We find some support that online social networks are likely to represent local and potentially preexisting social networks, likely due to the dominance of reciprocal (and often close) relationships on VK and opportunities for group members to meet face-to-face during offline protests. We also identify a number of group-level indicators, such as degree centralization, modularity index and average engagement level, that could help to classify groups based on their network properties. Community researchers can start applying these group-level indicators to online communities outside VK; they can also learn from this article how to identify networks of spam and marketing accounts.
Presentation at the Workshop on "Small Data and Big Data Controversies and Alternatives: Perspectives from The Sage Handbook of Social Media Research Methods" with Anabel Quan-Haase, Luke Sloan, Diane Rasmussen Pennington, et al.
LINK: http://sched.co/7G5N
A glimpse into what social media is all about and how the researchers in the world are using social media. Social media is not a mere hype and not a platform to leverage word-of-the-mouth practices as is the common perception of it in Pakistan: it is much more than that and this is what this talk presented.
Invited talk at Session on Semantic Knowledge for Commodity Computing, at Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2011, July 19-20, 2011, Redmond, WA. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/events/fs2011/default.aspx
Associated video at: https://youtu.be/HKqpuLiMXRs
"Hashtags as Spectacle: #bostonstrong and The Materiality of Metadata" (EGSA ...jkmcgrath
Presentation given at Northeastern University's English Graduate Student Association Conference in March 2014. This is a rough set of slides in search of an idea for an article: more thinking out loud about stuff than something well-formed. Topics include Twitter, hashtags, and specific content like #bostonstrong. Slides are hyperlinked and cited. Questions / comments can be directed to mcgrath.ja@husky.neu.edu
Social Media Mining - Chapter 10 (Behavior Analytics)SocialMediaMining
R. Zafarani, M. A. Abbasi, and H. Liu, Social Media Mining: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Free book and slides at http://socialmediamining.info/
A method to evaluate the reliability of social media data for social network ...Derek Weber
In order to study the effects of Online Social Network (OSN) activity on real-world offline events, researchers need access to OSN data, the reliability of which has particular implications for social network analysis. This relates not only to the completeness of any collected dataset, but also to constructing meaningful social and information networks from them. In this multidisciplinary study, we consider the question of constructing traditional social networks from OSN data and then present a measurement case study showing how the reliability of OSN data affects social network analyses. To this end we developed a systematic comparison methodology, which we applied to two parallel datasets we collected from Twitter. We found considerable differences in datasets collected with different tools and that these variations significantly alter the results of subsequent analyses. Our results lead to a set of guidelines for researchers planning to collect online data streams to infer social networks.
Presented at ASONAM'20 (2020 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining)
Co-authors: Mehwish Nasim (Data61 / CSIRO), Lewis Mitchell (University of Adelaide), Lucia Falzon (University of Melbourne / DST Group)
Abstract:
This article examines how online groups are formed and sustained during crisis periods, especially when political polarization in society is at its highest level. We focus on the use of Vkontakte (VK), a popular social networking site in Ukraine, to understand how it was used by Pro- and Anti-Maidan groups during the 2013/2014 crisis in Ukraine. In particular, we ask whether and to what extent the ideology (or other factors) of a particular group shapes its network structure. We find some support that online social networks are likely to represent local and potentially preexisting social networks, likely due to the dominance of reciprocal (and often close) relationships on VK and opportunities for group members to meet face-to-face during offline protests. We also identify a number of group-level indicators, such as degree centralization, modularity index and average engagement level, that could help to classify groups based on their network properties. Community researchers can start applying these group-level indicators to online communities outside VK; they can also learn from this article how to identify networks of spam and marketing accounts.
Presentation at the Workshop on "Small Data and Big Data Controversies and Alternatives: Perspectives from The Sage Handbook of Social Media Research Methods" with Anabel Quan-Haase, Luke Sloan, Diane Rasmussen Pennington, et al.
LINK: http://sched.co/7G5N
Social media data is a rich source of behavioural data that can reveal how we connect and interact with each other online in real time and over time, and what that might mean for our society as we continue to speed towards an increasingly computer-mediated future. However, much of the data being collected are being used in ways that are not always transparent to the users. Also once collected, the data can be combined with other types of data and analyzed by algorithms to reveal even more sensitive information about the users. As a result, questions around why and how data consumers’ use social media data are becoming pertinent, especially in the aftermath of the Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal. This talk will discuss privacy and ethical implications of working with social media data.
What Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and digital methods can do for data journalis...Liliana Bounegru
Slides from a talk I gave at the University of Ghent on 21 October 2014 about how Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and digital methods can be used to study and inform data journalism.
Anatoliy Gruzd and Philip Mai
Workshop presented at the TTRA Annual International Conference in Quebec City (June 20, 2017)
https://2017ttraannualinternationalconfe.sched.com/event/9yCg/social-listening-how-to-do-it-and-how-to-use-it-veille-sociale-comment-faire-et-comment-lutiliser?iframe=no&w=100%&sidebar=no&bg=no
Citizen Sensor Data Mining, Social Media Analytics and ApplicationsAmit Sheth
Opening talk at Singapore Symposium on Sentiment Analysis (S3A), February 6, 2015, Singapore. http://s3a.sentic.net/#s3a2015
Abstract
With the rapid rise in the popularity of social media, and near ubiquitous mobile access, the sharing of observations and opinions has become common-place. This has given us an unprecedented access to the pulse of a populace and the ability to perform analytics on social data to support a variety of socially intelligent applications -- be it for brand tracking and management, crisis coordination, organizing revolutions or promoting social development in underdeveloped and developing countries.
I will review: 1) understanding and analysis of informal text, esp. microblogs (e.g., issues of cultural entity extraction and role of semantic/background knowledge enhanced techniques), and 2) how we built Twitris, a comprehensive social media analytics (social intelligence) platform.
I will describe the analysis capabilities along three dimensions: spatio-temporal-thematic, people-content-network, and sentiment-emption-intent. I will couple technical insights with identification of computational techniques and real-world examples using live demos of Twitris (http://twitris2.knoesis.org).
This workshop will introduce some of the main principles and techniques of Social Network Analysis (SNA). We will use examples from organizational and social media-based networks to understand concepts such as network density, diameter, centrality measures, community detection algorithms, etc. The session will also introduce Gephi, a popular program for SNA. Gephi is a free and open-source tool that is available for both Mac and PC computers.
By the end of the session, you will develop a general understanding of what SNA is, what research questions it can help you answer, and how it can be applied to your own research. You will also learn how to use Gephi to visualize and examine networks using various layout and community detection algorithms.
Instructor’s Bio: Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd is a Canada Research Chair in Social Media Data Stewardship, Associate Professor at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University, and Director of Research at the Social Media Lab. Anatoliy is also a Member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists; a co-editor of a multidisciplinary journal on Big Data and Society; and a founding co-chair of the International Conference on Social Media and Society. His research initiatives explore how social media platforms are changing the ways in which people and organizations communicate, collaborate and disseminate information and how these changes impact the norms and structures of modern society.
Doing Social and Political Research in a Digital Age: An Introduction to Digi...Liliana Bounegru
Lecture given at the National Center of Competence in Research: Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century, 5 November 2015, Zürich University, Zürich, Switzerland
Panel presented as part of the 2017 Data Power Conference (Ottawa, ON, June 23, 2017)
Anatoliy Gruzd (@gruzd), Jenna Jacobson (@jacobsonjenna), Priya Kumar (@link_priya), Philip Mai (@phmai)
Pendekatan untuk riset big data di bidang sosial dan politik:
1. Data governance dan privacy
2. Media Analysis
3. Social Network Analysis
4. Complex System Analysis
Abstract: Ukraine has long been a target for the Kremlin's disinformation campaigns. Since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia has employed a variety of ‘information operation’ tactics to undermine the Ukrainian government and destabilize Ukrainian society. For example, Russia deployed a network of paid internet trolls via the Internet Research Agency to spread disinformation in and about Ukraine. The use of these tactics have only intensified during Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The presentation will introduce the ConflictMisinfo.org Dashboard, developed by the Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University, to monitor online dis- and misinformation about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The dashboard captures and visualizes debunked claims from 100s of trusted fact-checkers from around the world. Since the start of the invasion, the dashboard has recorded over 1000 false, misleading and unproven claims related to the Russia-Ukraine war. The second part of the presentation will highlight the results of a new report to be released by the Lab in early July on the Reach of Russian Propaganda and Disinformation in Canada. The presentation will conclude with a number of practical steps to help social media users to detect and limit the spread of dis- and misinformation on this and other topics.
Ideas that seem obvious today, at one point were obscure facts known only to a select few. The health benefits of washing hands, wearing a seatbelt while in a car - none of these ideas and practices were accepted immediately. In addition to needing time to incubate, new ideas also need to be accessible so that they can be tested, debated, and built upon. This presentation, which is based on my previous research and personal experiences, will highlight the importance and connection between open access publishing and the role of social media in promotion and dissemination of scholarly research.
Video presentation at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGTCMzLAbn8
-------------------------------
The goal of this exploratory study was to better understand the online dynamics of violence on Twitter against candidates running for political offices. Online violence on online platforms is a pressing problem. This study will provide research-based evidence for policymakers, governing stakeholders, researchers, and social media intermediaries working to address current knowledge gaps and challenges associated with toxic interactions on platforms like Twitter. It will also help examine the capabilities and overall effectiveness of Twitter’s platform-based guardianship (i.e., automated and human-led content moderation).
Abstract:
On May 25, 2018, the European Union (EU) implemented the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to protect individuals’ privacy and data. This regulation has far-reaching implications as it applies to any organization that deals with data of EU residents. By studying the discussion about this regulation on Twitter, our goal is to examine public opinions and organizational public relations (PR) strategies about GDPR. The results show that the regulation is being actively discussed by a variety of stakeholders, but especially by cybersecurity and IT-related firms and consultants. At the same time, some of the stakeholders that were expected to have a more active role were less involved, including companies that store or process personal data, government and regulatory bodies, mainstream media, and academics. The results also show that the stakeholders mostly have one-way rather than two-way communication with their audiences, thus fulfilling the rhetorical than relational function of PR.
Full paper at http://hdl.handle.net/10125/64061
Molding public opinion is as old as politics. In recent years, as more and more Canadians are spending their time online, the process and methods used to influence public opinions have undergone some major changes. Most recently, these include the emergence of social bots and troll armies designed to shape public discourse. Their impact was felt in 2016 during the U.S. presidential election and the UK Brexit referendum. In both cases, social media platforms have emerged as an important avenue for disinformation operations and misinformation campaigns. Enabled by bots, trolls, and algorithm-driven filter bubbles, the weaponization of social media is undermining and weakening public trust in government institutions across the globe and threatening the future of democracy.
Join us at the next TRSM Dean’s Speaker Series as we dive into the fascinating world of political bots and trolls in Canada with Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd, Director of Research at Ryerson University Social Media Lab at TRSM. Dr. Gruzd will show how his lab uses publicly available social media data to show how misinformation spreads through online social networks on sites like Twitter and Facebook and recent discoveries about how bots and trolls are being injected into the conversation during the 2019 campaign. The event will be moderated by Tom Clark, Chairman, Global Public Affairs.
Bios:
Anatoliy Gruzd, PhD is a Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University, and Director of Research at the Social Media Lab in Toronto, Canada. He is also a founding co-editor of a multidisciplinary journal on Big Data and Society. His work explores the inner workings of online communities, studying how people and organizations adapt to social media in various domains, and examining tensions between privacy and self-disclosure on social media networks.
Tom Clark joined Global after almost 45 years at the most senior levels of Canadian journalism. Tom left Global News on January 1, 2017, after serving as the network’s chief political correspondent and host of The West Block. He has interviewed every Canadian Prime Minister since Lester B. Pearson and has covered every federal election campaign since 1974. He has reported in eight active war zones and from over 33 countries. Tom was CTV’s China Bureau Chief and was also its Chief Washington Correspondent for five years. He has a deep understanding of Canada’s position in an increasingly complicated international dynamic. Tom is the recipient of Radio Television Digital News Association lifetime achievement award and has been named one of the most influential journalists in Ottawa.
The talk is given as part of the 2019 Worldviews conference at the panel on "Digital technology’s impact on how media and higher education communicate".
Citation: Kumar, P., & Gruzd, A. (2019). Social Media for Informal Learning: a Case of #Twitterstorians. In Proceedings of HICSS. Retrieved from http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/59691
Abstract:
Open, online environments like social media are now a mainstay of life-long informal learning. Social media like Twitter help people gather information, share resources, and discuss with other participant-learners with similar interests. This paper seeks to test and validate the ‘learning in the wild’ coding schema in the context of discussions on Twitter, an approach first developed for studying learning communities on Reddit. The schema considers how participant-learners are leveraging social media to facilitate self-directed informal learning practices, exploratory dialogue, and communicative exchanges. We apply the coding schema on a sample of tweets (n=594) from the History Twittersphere community (#Twitterstorians) to provide a more nuanced understanding of the different kinds of discursive practices, resource exchanges, and ideas being shared and communicated outside traditional classroom settings.
Roundtable at the 2018 AoIR conference.
Anatoliy Gruzd, Jenna Jacobson, Ryerson University, Canada
Jacquelyn Burkell, Western University
Joanne McNeish, Ryerson University
Anabel Quan-Haase, Western University
Abstract
The transnational flows of information across nations and borders make it difficult to introduce and implement privacy-preserving policies relating to social media data. Social media data are a rich source of behavioural data that can reveal how we connect and interact with each other online in real time. Furthermore, the materiality of new digital intermediaries (such as the Internet of Things, AI, and algorithms) raises additional anticipated and unanticipated privacy challenges that need to be addressed as we continue to speed towards an increasingly digitally-mediated future.
A by-product of the large-scale social media adoption is social media data mining; publicly available social media data is largely free and legally available to be mined, analyzed, and used (Kennedy 2016) for whatever purposes by third parties. Researchers have begun to suggest that ethics need to be considered even if the data is public (boyd & Crawford 2012).
In the wake of the EU's recent legislation of the General Data Protection Regulation and the Right to be Forgotten, as well as increasing critical attention around the world, the roundtable will discuss how to navigate the transnational and material, as well as the complex and competing, interests associated with using social media, including ethics, privacy, security, and intellectual property rights. By balancing people's individual rights to exercise autonomy over "their" data and the societal benefits of using and analyzing the data for insights, the roundtable aims to generate theoretically-rich discussion and debate with internet researchers about the ethics, privacy, and best practices of using social media data.
This poster presents a prototype Learning Analytics (LA) dashboard to help educators who use Twitter in their teaching. The system summarizes and visualizes information how online learners contribute to Twitter-based discussions by asking questions, sharing resources, and engaging with others.
Suggested citation:
Gruzd, A. & Conroy, N. (2018). Learning Analytics Dashboard for Twitter. Poster presented at the BayLan Learning Analytics Conference, February 24, 2018, San Francisco, CA, USA.
Abul-Fottouh, D., Song, M. Y., & Gruzd, A. (2020). Examining algorithmic biases in YouTube’s recommendations of vaccine videos. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 104175.
Read our follow-up study at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2020.104175
=================================
Song, M.Y. & Gruzd, A. (2017). Examining Sentiments and Popularity of Pro- and Anti-Vaccination Videos on YouTube. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Social Media & Society (#SMSociety17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 17, 8 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3097286.3097303
Social media is now the place where people are gathering en masse to discuss the news with their friends, neighbors and complete strangers. This change in news consumers’ behavior is proving to be a challenge for local news, but it is also an opportunity. Users and system generated data from social media can also be a boon for content creators. This presentation will feature a case study showing how publishers can use social media analytics to gain insights into their audience and how to use this information to foster a stronger sense of community around their brand of journalism. The case study will focus on how to use Netlytic, a cloud-based social media analytics tool, to mine the public Facebook interactions of the readers of BlogTO, a regional, Canadian-based media outlet, to find out what their readers are interested in and what engages them.
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Exploring The Dimensions and Dynamics of Felt Obligation: A Bibliometric Anal...AJHSSR Journal
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Studying Online & Offline Communities through the Prism of Social Media Data
1. STUDYING ONLINE & OFFLINE COMMUNITIES THROUGH
THE PRISM OF SOCIAL MEDIA DATA
ANATOLIYGRUZD (@GRUZD)
Canada Research Chair in Social Media Data Stewardship
Associate Professor, Ted Rogers School of Management
Director of the Social Media Lab
Ryerson University
2. We are an interdisciplinary academic research laboratory
3. #OccupyGezi Supporters in Victoria, BC
From this…
Photo credit: Anatoliy Gruzd
In the Social Media Lab,
we study how social
media ….
Anatoliy Gruzd
How social media
can support
online communities,
social activism &
political engagement?
4. Photo credit: Karl Schönswetter
… to this
#OccupyGezi: Gezi Parki Protest, Turkey (2013)
5
In the Social Media Lab,
we study how social
media ….
How social media
can support
online communities,
social activism &
political engagement?
6. Decision Making
in domains such as Politics, Health Care and Education
@gruzd Anatoliy Gruzd 7
+ More Ways to Access Social Media Data
Public
APIs
Data
Resellers
Self-
collected
/reported
7. Data -> Visualizations -> Understanding
How to Make Sense of Social Media Data?
Data and Visual Analytics
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8. How to Make Sense of Social Media Data?
Spatiotemporal Computing
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9. How to Make Sense of Social Media Data?
Spatiotemporal Computing
Geography of
Twitter Networks
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10. How to Make Sense of Social Media Data?
Spatiotemporal Computing & Text Mining
@gruzd Anatoliy Gruzd 14
11. How to Make Sense of Social Media Data?
Spatiotemporal Computing & Text Mining
Source: http://www.fenuxe.com/tag/geo-coded
Tracking Hate Speech on Twitter
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12. Key Points
1. Social Media Data is a good proxy to study online and offline social
interactions
2. Social Network Analysis is an effective method to analyze social
media data
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13. Outline
• Background – Social Media & Social Network Analysis
• Social Media Use during the 2014 EuroMaidan Revolution
• Case of VKontakte
• Case of Twitter
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14. 1) Represent data as a network
Nodes = People
Edges /Ties = Relations (ex. Who is a friend with whom,
Who replies to whom, etc.)
•2) Apply Social Network Analysis (SNA)
Examining Social Media Data from a Network Perspective
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15. Studying Online Social Networks
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc
Forum networks
Blog networks
Friends’ networks (Facebook,
Twitter, Google+, etc…)
Networks of like-minded people
(YouTube, Flickr, etc…)
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16. Advantages of Using Social Network Analysis (SNA)
Once the network is discovered,
we can find out:
• How do people interact with each other,
• Who are the most/least active members of a group,
• Who is influential in a group,
• Who is susceptible to being influenced, etc…
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17. Outline
• Background
• Social Media Use during the 2014 EuroMaidan Revolution
• Case of VKontakte
• Case of Twitter
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18. Background:
2014 EuroMaidan Revolution | Revolution of Dignity
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"2014-02-21 11-04 Euromaidan in Kiev" by Amakuha. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia
November 21, 2013 - Ukraine gov. suspended
the trade & association agreement with EU
19. February 18-19, 2014: Protests in Kyiv (capital) Turned Deadly
@gruzd Anatoliy Gruzd 29
source: http://liveuamap.com
RUSSIA
UKRAINE
20. February 18-19, 2014: Protests in Kyiv Turned Deadly
@gruzd Anatoliy Gruzd 30
"Barricade line separating interior troops and protesters. Clashes in Kyiv, Ukraine. Events of February 18, 2014-2" by Mstyslav Chernov/Unframe/http://www.unframe.com/ - Licensed under CC
BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
21. February 18-19, 2014: Protests in Kyiv Turned Deadly
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"Euromaidan in Kiev 2014-02-19 12-06" by Amakuha. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
23. February-April 2014:Awave of Anti-Maidan protests in South-East
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Photo credit: Andriy Makukha. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
24. March 2014: Annexation of Crimea by Russia
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source: http://liveuamap.com
26. Outline
• Background - SNA
• Social Media Use during the 2014 EuroMaidan Revolution
• Case of VKontakte
• Case of Twitter
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27. This part is based on
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Gruzd, A. & Tsyganova, K. (2015). Information Wars and Online Activism
During the 2013/2014 Crisis in Ukraine: Examining the Social Structures
of Pro- and Anti-Maidan Groups. Policy & Internet 7(2).
DOI: 10.1002/poi3.91
Gruzd, A. & O’Bright, B. (2017) Big Data and Political Science: The Case of
VKontakte and the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution in Ukraine. In Sloan, L.,
& Quan-Haase, A. (Eds.). The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research
Methods.
28. About Vkontakte – #1 Social Networking Website in Ukraine
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source: http://en.wikipedia.org
29. Example: VK Group User Interface – Posts, Likes, Comments…
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30. Example: VK Group User Interface – Discussion board, Links & Media Files…
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31. Data Collection
• Used VK Public API
• Communities – information about groups and group members
• Wall – posts and comments
• Likes – “likes” that members and visitors leave on posts
• Friends – group members’ friendship relations
• Data collection: 2 most popular public Pro-Maidan and Anti-Maidan groups
• Period: February 18 – May 25, 2015
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PRO1 PRO2 ANTI1 ANTI2
Num. of Nodes 141,542 96,402 60,506 69,029
Num. of Connections 338,344 221,452 280,678 192,273
32. Method
• Social Network Analysis
• SNA measures (e.g., centrality, density, network diameter)
• Exponential Random Graph Modeling (ERGM) – test association tendencies
• Walktrap Community Detection algorithm - identify and describe highly connected
subgroups
• Network Visualization using LGL (Large Graph Layout)
• Manual Content Analysis of
• Group pages and posts
• Sample of public user profiles
• Research software
• Package R (libraries statnet and igraph)
• Tableau for visual analytics
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33. Different Friends’ Networks: What can we learn from them?
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Anti-Maidan groupPro-Maidan group
34. • Formed in early April 2014 to support
Maidan and Antiterrorist Operation
(ATO)
Yellow – users from Ukraine; Red – from Russia; Green – other countries;
The layout algorithm is LGL (Large Graph Layout). Isolated nodes are not visible.
VK Group Example – Pro Maidan #1 (Pro-Western)
Friends’Network (>140k members)
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35. • Formed in early April 2014 to support
Maidan and Antiterrorist Operation
(ATO)
VK Group Example – Pro Maidan #1 (Pro-Western)
Friends’Network (>140k members)
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Crimean
Tatars
Spam
(Marketing)
“Walktrap” Community Detection
36. Subgroup 1
64% from
Donetsk
VK Group Example –Anti Maidan #1
“Walktrap” Community Detection
58@gruzd 2014 EuroMaidan Revolution
• The group’s focus to support Anti-
Maidan activism & the two self-
proclaimed republics – Donetsk and
Lugansk People's Republics.
37. VKontakte Conclusions - Geography Matters!
• Although all four groups included
people from both Ukraine and
Russia, the statistical models
confirmed the tendency of group
members to friend others in the
same country.
• Furthermore, we also observed
homophily among users from
the same city for the top-10 cities
with the most number of VK users
in all groups
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Online social networks likely represent local and potentially
pre-existing social networks
"Euromaidan Protests" by Lvivske, NickK - Sources for particular cities are given at w:uk:Євромайдан
у регіонах України. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
38. Research Questions based on
Country-to-Country Friendship Connections
1. Does international political rhetoric between states reflected in online
networks, groups, and interaction?
2. What impact does temporary migration patterns, including international
students, have on the demographic characteristics of online groups,?
3. Do expatriate communities in destination states have a demonstrable impact
on the message content, user demographics, or other observable
characteristics in online groups?
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40. Outline
• Background
• Social Media Use during the 2014 EuroMaidan Revolution
• Case of VKontakte
• Case of Twitter
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41. This part is based on…
@gruzd Anatoliy Gruzd 67
§ Gruzd, A., Mai P., and Kampen, A. (2017). A how-to for using
Netlytic to collect and analyze social media data: A case study of
the use of Twitter during the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution in
Ukraine.
In Sloan, L., & Quan-Haase, A. (Eds.). The SAGE Handbook of Social
Media Research Methods.
42. Source: Twitter Search API
Request Rate: Hourly, up to 1000 tweets
Time frame: Feb 18, 2014 – March 14, 2014
Tweeting about Ukraine in 3 languages
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Україна Украина Ukraine
Presumed
Language
Ukrainian Russian English
# Tweets 200,956 527,112 591,394
# Unique Users 46,641 141,541 246,113
44. @John
@Peter
@Paul • Nodes = People
• Ties = “Who retweeted/
replied/mentioned whom”
• Tie strength = The number of
retweets, replies or mentions
Communication Networks on Twitter
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46. Twitter Communication Network
Top 10
Mentioned
Users
(activists,
news,
politicians)
Jared Leto
expressed support
of Ukrainian people
in his Oscars award
acceptance speech
Jared Leto
expressed support
of Ukrainian people
in his Oscars award
acceptance speech
56. Takeaways
• A combination of SNA, visualization and community
detection algorithm, coupled with a manual content
analysis of a sample of group messages and user profiles is
an effective approach to study the underlying social
structures of online groups and campaign.
• Need to perform a multi-platform analysis
• Need to know who and what types of networks we are
analyzing: Friendship vs Communication networks
• Geography Matters (even online)!
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57. Image credit: Geralt
Moving Forward
• Social media data as a
proxy to study online &
offline communities
• Combination of Social
Network Analysis (SNA)
and Spatiotemporal
Analysis
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58. STUDYING ONLINE & OFFLINE COMMUNITIES THROUGH
THE PRISM OF SOCIAL MEDIA DATA
ANATOLIYGRUZD (@GRUZD)
Canada Research Chair in Social Media Data Stewardship
Associate Professor, Ted Rogers School of Management
Director of the Social Media Lab
Ryerson University