Archive
Teens, Social Media, and Privacy
Teens, Social Media, and Privacy
Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project
Teens are sharing more information about themselves on social media sites than they have in the past, but they are also taking a variety of technical and non-technical steps to manage the privacy of that information. Despite taking these privacy-protective actions, teen social media users do not express a high level of concern about third-parties (such as businesses or advertisers) accessing their data; just 9% say they are “very” concerned.
Design for Forgetting: Disposing of Digital Possessions After a Breakup
Design for Forgetting: Disposing of Digital Possessions After a Breakup (PDF)
Source: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
People are increasingly acquiring huge collections of digital possessions. Despite some pleas for ‘forgetting’, most theorists argue for retaining all these possessions to enhance ‘total recall’ of our everyday lives. However, there has been little exploration of the negative role of digital possessions when people want to forget aspects of their lives. We report on interviews with 24 people about their possessions after a romantic breakup. We found that digital possessions were often evocative and upsetting in this context, leading to distinct disposal strategies with different outcomes. We advance theory by finding strong evidence for the value of intentional forgetting and provide new data about complex practices associated with the disposal of digital possessions. Our findings led to a number of design implications to help people better manage this process, including automatic harvesting of digital possessions, tools for self- ontrol, artifact crafting as sense-making, and digital spaces for shared possessions.
Unified Entity Search in Social Media Community
Unified Entity Search in Social Media Community
Source: Microsoft Research
The search for entities is the most common search behavior on the Web, especially in social media communities where entities (such as images, videos, people, locations, and tags) are highly heterogeneous and correlated. While previous research usually deals with these social media entities separately, we are investigating in this paper a unified, multilevel, and correlative entity graph to represent the unstructured social media data, through which various applications (e.g., friend suggestion, personalized image search, image tagging, etc.) can be realized more effectively in one single framework. We regard the social media objects equally as “entities” and all of these applications as “entity search” problem which searches for entities with different types. We first construct a multi-level graph which organizes the heterogeneous entities into multiple levels, with one type of entities as vertices in each level. The edges between graphs pairwisely connect the entities weighted by intra-relations in the same level and inter-links across two different levels distilled from the social behaviors (e.g., tagging, commenting, and joining communities). To infer the strength of intrarelations, we propose a circular propagation scheme, which reinforces the mutual exchange of information across different entity types in a cyclic manner. Based on the constructed unified graph, we explicitly formulate entity search as a global optimization problem in a unified Bayesian framework, in which various applications are efficiently realized. Empirically, we validate the effectiveness of our unified entity graph for various social media applications on millionscale real-world dataset.
A Longitudinal Study of Follow Predictors on Twitter
A Longitudinal Study of Follow Predictors on Twitter (PDF)
Source: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Follower count is important to Twitter users: it can indicate popularity and prestige. Yet, holistically, little is understood about what factors – like social behavior, message content, and network structure – lead to more followers. Such information could help technologists design and build tools that help users grow their audiences. In this paper, we study 507 Twitter users and a half-million of their tweets over 15 months. Marrying a longitudinal approach with a negative binomial auto-regression model, we find that variables for message content, social behavior, and network structure should be given equal consideration when predicting link formations on Twitter. To our knowledge, this is the first longitudinal study of follow predictors, and the first to show that the relative contributions of social behavior and message content are just as impactful as factors related to social network structure for predicting growth of online social networks. We conclude with practical and theoretical implications for designing social media technologies.
See: How to get more followers on Twitter (EurekAlert!)
Happiness and the Patterns of Life: A Study of Geolocated Tweets
Happiness and the Patterns of Life: A Study of Geolocated Tweets
Source: arXiv.org
The patterns of life exhibited by large populations have been described and modeled both as a basic science exercise and for a range of applied goals such as reducing automotive congestion, improving disaster response, and even predicting the location of individuals. However, these studies previously had limited access to conversation content, rendering changes in expression as a function of movement invisible. In addition, they typically use the communication between a mobile phone and its nearest antenna tower to infer position, limiting the spatial resolution of the data to the geographical region serviced by each cellphone tower. We use a collection of 37 million geolocated tweets to characterize the movement patterns of 180,000 individuals, taking advantage of several orders of magnitude of increased spatial accuracy relative to previous work. Employing the recently developed sentiment analysis instrument known as the \textit{hedonometer}, we characterize changes in word usage as a function of movement, and find that expressed happiness increases logarithmically with distance from an individual’s average location.
Professors’ Facebook Content Affects Students’ Perceptions and Expectations
Professors’ Facebook Content Affects Students’ Perceptions and Expectations
Source: Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking
Facebook users must make choices about level of self-disclosure, and this self-disclosure can influence perceptions of the profile’s author. We examined whether the specific type of self-disclosure on a professor’s profile would affect students’ perceptions of the professor and expectations of his classroom. We created six Facebook profiles for a fictitious male professor, each with a specific emphasis: politically conservative, politically liberal, religious, family oriented, socially oriented, or professional. Undergraduate students randomly viewed one profile and responded to questions that assessed their perceptions and expectations. The social professor was perceived as less skilled but more popular, while his profile was perceived as inappropriate and entertaining. Students reacted more strongly and negatively to the politically focused profiles in comparison to the religious, family, and professional profiles. Students reported being most interested in professional information on a professor’s Facebook profile, yet they reported being least influenced by the professional profile. In general, students expressed neutrality about their interest in finding and friending professors on Facebook. These findings suggest that students have the potential to form perceptions about the classroom environment and about their professors based on the specific details disclosed in professors’ Facebook profiles.
Assessing the Online Social Environment for Surveillance of Obesity Prevalence
Assessing the Online Social Environment for Surveillance of Obesity Prevalence
Source: PLoS ONE
Background
Understanding the social environmental around obesity has been limited by available data. One promising approach used to bridge similar gaps elsewhere is to use passively generated digital data.
Purpose
This article explores the relationship between online social environment via web-based social networks and population obesity prevalence.
Methods
We performed a cross-sectional study using linear regression and cross validation to measure the relationship and predictive performance of user interests on the online social network Facebook to obesity prevalence in metros across the United States of America (USA) and neighborhoods within New York City (NYC). The outcomes, proportion of obese and/or overweight population in USA metros and NYC neighborhoods, were obtained via the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance and NYC EpiQuery systems. Predictors were geographically specific proportion of users with activity-related and sedentary-related interests on Facebook.
Results
Higher proportion of the population with activity-related interests on Facebook was associated with a significant 12.0% (95% Confidence Interval (CI) 11.9 to 12.1) lower predicted prevalence of obese and/or overweight people across USA metros and 7.2% (95% CI: 6.8 to 7.7) across NYC neighborhoods. Conversely, greater proportion of the population with interest in television was associated with higher prevalence of obese and/or overweight people of 3.9% (95% CI: 3.7 to 4.0) (USA) and 27.5% (95% CI: 27.1 to 27.9, significant) (NYC). For activity-interests and national obesity outcomes, the average root mean square prediction error from 10-fold cross validation was comparable to the average root mean square error of a model developed using the entire data set.
Conclusions
Activity-related interests across the USA and sedentary-related interests across NYC were significantly associated with obesity prevalence. Further research is needed to understand how the online social environment relates to health outcomes and how it can be used to identify or target interventions.
Self-Censorship on Facebook
Self-Censorship on Facebook (PDF)
Source: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
We report results from an exploratory analysis examining “last-minute” self-censorship, or content that is filtered after being written, on Facebook. We collected data from 3.9 million users over 17 days and associate self-censorship behavior with features describing users, their social graph, and the interactions between them. Our results indicate that 71% of users exhibited some level of last-minute self-censorship in the time period, and provide specific evidence supporting the theory that a user’s “perceived audience” lies at the heart of the issue: posts are censored more frequently than comments, with status updates and posts directed at groups censored most frequently of all sharing use cases investigated. Furthermore, we find that: people with more boundaries to regulate censor more; males censor more posts than females and censor even more posts with mostly male friends than do females , but censor no more comments than females; people who exercise more control over their audience censor more content; and, users with more politically and age diverse friends censor less, in general.
Big Data: Growing pressure on global storage by data created on Social Networking Sites
Big Data: Growing pressure on global storage by data created on Social Networking Sites (PDF)
Source: International Journal of Computer Science and Management Research
World-wide business organizations irrespective of t heir sizes, non-profit organizations and government agencies are witnessing Tsunami of data. Data creation is rewriting its record every day. In 2010; total data generated by the world was recorded over 1ZB. Studies estimate that this figure would reach up to 7ZB by the end of year 2014. Generation of such a huge volume of data may be attributed to a remarkable increase of installations and use of network including embedded sensor to monitor load, temperatures, locations, traffic patterns, etc. coupled with growing use of smartphones, and tablet computers. The amount of data being created, transferred and accumulated every second is a cause of concern as it is constantly putting on pressure on the infrastructure. This study is an attempt to highlight the growing amount of data being created for the sake of fun and entertainment. Similarly, it lays emphasis on explaining the additional burden on infrastructure being caused by fake and fabricated data created on social networking sites and online dating sites. The burden such data is a dding to the cost of maintenance and analysis is the core issue of this study. This study is completely based on secondary data.
Word usage mirrors community structure in the online social network Twitter
Word usage mirrors community structure in the online social network Twitter
Source: EPJ Data Science
Background
Language has functions that transcend the transmission of information and varies with social context. To find out how language and social network structure interlink, we studied communication on Twitter, a broadly-used online messaging service.
Results
We show that the network emerging from user communication can be structured into a hierarchy of communities, and that the frequencies of words used within those communities closely replicate this pattern. Consequently, communities can be characterised by their most significantly used words. The words used by an individual user, in turn, can be used to predict the community of which that user is a member.
Conclusions
This indicates a relationship between human language and social networks, and suggests that the study of online communication offers vast potential for understanding the fabric of human society. Our approach can be used for enriching community detection with word analysis, which provides the ability to automate the classification of communities in social networks and identify emerging social groups.
The Dynamics of Health Behavior Sentiments on a Large Online Social Network
The Dynamics of Health Behavior Sentiments on a Large Online Social Network
Source: EPJ Data Science
Modifiable health behaviors, a leading cause of illness and death in many countries, are often driven by individual beliefs and sentiments about health and disease. Individual behaviors affecting health outcomes are increasingly modulated by social networks, for example through the associations of like-minded individuals – homophily – or through peer influence effects. Using a statistical approach to measure the individual temporal effects of a large number of variables pertaining to social network statistics, we investigate the spread of a health sentiment towards a new vaccine on Twitter, a large online social network. We find that the effects of neighborhood size and exposure intensity are qualitatively very different depending on the type of sentiment. Generally, we find that larger numbers of opinionated neighbors inhibit the expression of sentiments. We also find that exposure to negative sentiment is contagious – by which we merely mean predictive of future negative sentiment expression – while exposure to positive sentiments is generally not. In fact, exposure to positive sentiments can even predict increased negative sentiment expression. Our results suggest that the effects of peer influence and social contagion on the dynamics of behavioral spread on social networks are strongly content-dependent.
SEC Says Social Media OK for Company Announcements if Investors Are Alerted
SEC Says Social Media OK for Company Announcements if Investors Are Alerted
Source: Securities and Exchange Commission
The Securities and Exchange Commission today issued a report that makes clear that companies can use social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter to announce key information in compliance with Regulation Fair Disclosure (Regulation FD) so long as investors have been alerted about which social media will be used to disseminate such information.
The SEC’s report of investigation confirms that Regulation FD applies to social media and other emerging means of communication used by public companies the same way it applies to company websites. The SEC issued guidance in 2008 clarifying that websites can serve as an effective means for disseminating information to investors if they’ve been made aware that’s where to look for it. Today’s report clarifies that company communications made through social media channels could constitute selective disclosures and, therefore, require careful Regulation FD analysis.
Whom Should I Follow? Identifying Relevant Users During Crises
Whom Should I Follow? Identifying Relevant Users During Crises
Source: 24th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (via Arizona State University)
Social media is gaining popularity as a medium of communication before, during, and after crises. In several recent disasters, it has become evident that social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are an important source of information, and in cases they have even assisted in relief e orts. We propose a novel approach to identify a subset of active users during a crisis who can be tracked for fast access to information. Using a Twitter dataset that consists of 12.9 million tweets from 5 countries that are part of the "Arab Spring" movement, we show how instant information access can be achieved by user identification along two dimensions: user’s location and the user’s affi nity towards topics of discussion. Through evaluations, we demonstrate that users selected by our approach generate more information and the quality of the information is better than that of users identified using state-of-the-art techniques.
Hat tip: ResearchBuzz
Silent Listeners: The Evolution of Privacy and Disclosure on Facebook
Silent Listeners: The Evolution of Privacy and Disclosure on Facebook
Source: Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality
Over the past decade, social network sites have experienced dramatic growth in popularity, reaching most demographics and providing new opportunities for interaction and socialization. Through this growth, users have been challenged to manage novel privacy concerns and balance nuanced trade-offs between disclosing and withholding personal information. To date, however, no study has documented how privacy and disclosure evolved on social network sites over an extended period of time. In this manuscript we use profile data from a longitudinal panel of 5,076 Facebook users to understand how their privacy and disclosure behavior changed between 2005—the early days of the network—and 2011. Our analysis highlights three contrasting trends. First, over time Facebook users in our dataset exhibited increasingly privacy-seeking behavior, progressively decreasing the amount of personal data shared publicly with unconnected profiles in the same network. However, and second, changes implemented by Facebook near the end of the period of time under our observation arrested or in some cases inverted that trend. Third, the amount and scope of personal information that Facebook users revealed privately to other connected profiles actually increased over time—and because of that, so did disclosures to “silent listeners” on the network: Facebook itself, third-party apps, and (indirectly) advertisers. These findings highlight the tension between privacy choices as expressions of individual subjective preferences, and the role of the environment in shaping those choices.
Hat tip: PW
Incitement to Riot in the Age of Flash Mobs
Incitement to Riot in the Age of Flash Mobs
Source: University of Cincinnati Law Review
As people increasingly use social media to organize both protests and robberies, government will try to regulate these calls to action. With an eye to this intensifying dynamic, this Article reviews First Amendment jurisprudence on incitement and applies it to existing statutes on incitement to riot at a common law, state, and federal level. The article suggests that First Amendment jurisprudence has a particularly tortuous relationship with regulating speech directed to crowds. It examines current crowd psychology to suggest which crowd behavior, if any, should as a matter of policy be subject to regulation. It concludes that many existing incitement-to-riot statutes are both bad policy and unconstitutional under Brandenburg v. Ohio.[1] The article consequently suggests that courts should be careful in the application of these statutes, and states should be hesitant to build upon existing incitement-to-riot statutes to regulate new media.
Twitter as a Reporting Tool for Breaking News
Twitter as a Reporting Tool for Breaking News
Source: Digital Journalism
This study focuses on journalists Paul Lewis (The Guardian) and Ravi Somaiya (The New York Times), the most frequently mentioned national and international journalists on Twitter during the 2011 UK summer riots. Both actively tweeted throughout the four-day riot period and this article highlights how they used Twitter as a reporting tool. It discusses a series of Twitter conventions in detail, including the use of links, the taking and sharing of images, the sharing of mainstream media content and the use of hashtags. The article offers an in-depth overview of methods for studying Twitter, reflecting critically on commonly used data collection strategies, offering possible alternatives as well as highlighting the possibilities for combining different methodological approaches. Finally, the article makes a series of suggestions for further research into the use of Twitter by professional journalists.
Hat tip: Journalist’s Resource
Social Media and the Arab Spring: Politics Comes First
Social Media and the Arab Spring: Politics Comes First
Source: International Journal of Press/Politics
The goal of this article is to place the role that social media plays in collective action within a more general theoretical structure, using the events of the Arab Spring as a case study. The article presents two broad theoretical principles. The first is that one cannot understand the role of social media in collective action without first taking into account the political environment in which they operate. The second principle states that a significant increase in the use of the new media is much more likely to follow a significant amount of protest activity than to precede it. The study examines these two principles using political, media, and protest data from twenty Arab countries and the Palestinian Authority. The findings provide strong support for the validity of the claims.
Hat tip: Journalist’s Resource
Social capital: the benefit of Facebook ‘friends’
Social capital: the benefit of Facebook ‘friends’
Source: Behaviour & Information Technology
This research investigated the role Facebook use plays in the creation or maintenance of social capital among university students in South Africa. Data were collected using questionnaires completed by over 800 students from 7 universities. The questionnaire was obtained from a study conducted in Michigan State University (Ellison N.B., Steinfield, C., and Lampe, C., 2007. The benefits of Facebook “Friends”: social capital and college students’ use of online social network sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(4), 1143–1168.). Empirical research has linked social capital to many positives in society, such as improved mental and physical health, economic well-being, etc. Thus, social capital is important for the success of civil society. This research examined the relationships between Facebook use and the formation and maintenance of social capital amongst university students. The study also examined factors specific to the South African context and drew comparisons to the results of the original study. Analysis of the results suggests a strong association between the intensity of Facebook use and perceived bridging, bonding and maintained social capital. This paper broadens the understanding of Facebook usage by introducing the dimensions of race and age. Facebook usage was found to interact with measures of psychological well-being, suggesting that it might be beneficial to students experiencing low self-esteem and low life satisfaction.
What Happens to Our Facebook Accounts When We Die?: Probate Versus Policy and the Fate of Social-Media Assets Postmortem
Source: Pepperdine Law Review
More than 580,000 Facebook users in the U.S. will die this year, raising numerous legal questions as to the disposition of their Facebook pages and similar “digital assets” left in a state of legal limbo.
While access to and ownership of decedents’ email accounts has been philosophized for nearly a decade, this Comment focuses on the additional legal uncertainties posed by “digital death” in the more amorphous realm of “social media.” Part II explores the implications of digital death by conceptualizing digital assets and surveying the underlying legal principles of contractual policies, probate, property, and privacy concerns. Part III surveys current law surrounding digital death, emphasizing a 2010 Oklahoma statute granting executors and administrators power over decedents’ “social networking” accounts. Parts III and IV consider what the current state of the law means for individuals facing death (i.e. everyone) as social media interacts with both (1) probate law and (2) social-media services’ policies as reflected in their terms of service. Part V explores how the law and proposed solutions may address the salient policy goals of honoring decedents’ postmortem wishes while meanwhile respecting privacy; preserving digital assets; and minimizing probate, litigation and other paperwork-type hassles. Ultimately this Comment suggests while state or even federal legislation may call attention to the importance of digital estate planning, a better solution likely lies between the two extremes of the probate-versus-policy power struggle, and that social-media services themselves may be in the better position to quell the perfect storm of legal uncertainty that looms.
Hat tip: Journalist’s Resource
The Demographics of Social Media Users — 2012
The Demographics of Social Media Users — 2012
Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project
A late 2012 survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project shows that young adults are more likely than others to use major social media. At the same time, other groups are interested in different sites and services.
Internet users under 50 are particularly likely to use a social networking site of any kind, and those 18-29 are the most likely of any demographic cohort to do so (83%). Women are more likely than men to be on these sites. Those living in urban settings are also significantly more likely than rural internet users to use social networking.
