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Snurb — Wednesday 25 May 2016 23:46

Patterns in Social Networking on Facebook amongst Migrants

Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | WebSci '16 |

The final speaker in this Web Science 2016 session is Amaç Herdagdelen, whose interest is in the experience of immigrants using social networks. On Facebook, for instance, information about one's migrant status can be included in one's profile information; by identifying users with a difference between their stated home country and country of residence, the present study identified some 93 home countries with more than 10,000 immigrants on Facebook, for migrants in the U.S.

Additionally, it computed the exposure of users to friends with a migrant background, and calculated the relative exposure to various countries of origin; the …

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Snurb — Wednesday 25 May 2016 23:46

The Use of Open and Restricted VKontakte Groups by Russian Apartment Residents

Social Media | WebSci '16 |

The next speaker at Web Science 2016 is Ilya Musabirov, whose focus is on place-based communities online. The focus here is especially on VKontakte, the most popular social media platform in Russia, and on how residents in apartment buildings in St. Petersburg are using this platform. The main tool here are restricted-access groups, which require formal vetting by the group owner before access is granted (and during that process aspects like the applicant's apartment number may be checked).

Such groups are much more active than open groups, in terms of the number of posts and active participants. Users are …

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Snurb — Wednesday 25 May 2016 23:45

What Twitter Can Tell Us about Attitudes towards Privacy in Qatar

Social Media | Twitter | WebSci '16 |

Next in this Web Science 2016 session is Yelena Mejova, whose work examines how privacy is being discussed on social media in Qatar. Privacy has a number of definitions: the right to be left alone, right to intimacy, etc. But privacy is also defined differently in different regions of the world; the dominant western definitions of privacy may not align with definitions that are prevalent elsewhere, such as for example in the Gulf region.

Culture in the Gulf region is relationship-based and collectivist, and loyalty and honour are exceptionally important values. This is also a rapidly developing region, with substantial …

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Snurb — Wednesday 25 May 2016 17:44

Social Media from the Anthropologist's Perspective

Internet Technologies | Social Media | WebSci '16 |

The final day of Web Science 2016 starts with a keynote by Daniel Miller, who contributes an anthropologist's perspective to the conference. He notes that especially when it comes to the popular discussion of Web technologies such as social media, there are many spurious claims about how they change social interactions – and anthropologists are called upon to make sense of these claims. Anthropology, he notes, is in fact the study of people as social networks: we are all of us embedded in our social relations with others, and it is these relations that anthropology examines and analyses.

This enables …

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Snurb — Wednesday 25 May 2016 02:24

How Facebook Uses Computational Processes to Police Its Ads

'Big Data' | Social Media | WebSci '16 |

The final Web Science 2016 keynote for today is by Daniel Olmedilla, whose work at Facebook is to police the ads being posted on the site. Ads are the only part of Facebook where inherently unsolicited content is pushed to users, so the quality of those ads is crucial – users will want relevant and engaging content, while advertisers need to see a return on investment. Facebook itself must ensure that its business remains scalable and sustainable.

Key problem categories are legally prohibited content (e.g. ads for illegal drugs); shocking and scary content; sexually suggestive material; violent and confronting content …

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Snurb — Wednesday 25 May 2016 01:23

Simulating Heterogeneous-Intent Cascades

Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | WebSci '16 |

The next speaker at Web Science 2016 is Onur Varol, who points out the wide variety of purposes for which people use social media, and notes that we change our online persona and usage styles according to different communicative contexts. Can we match language style and user intent, then?

The project's experiments found that messages written using logical arguments are perceived as more authoritative, while an absence of logical content makes the sender appear more likeable; the communication style also varies across different fields of interest (products, health, politics).

URL cascades tend to be more likely to involve relatively similar …

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Snurb — Wednesday 25 May 2016 00:47

Predicting Twitter-Based Information Cascades

'Big Data' | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | WebSci '16 |

The next session at Web Science 2016 starts with a paper by Jure Leskovec on information cascades. Such cascades emerge as users of social media platforms (re)share content through their networks, and the prediction of such processes is traditionally very difficult.

One question in such predictions is whether a given cascade will reach the median size observed in historical cascades; because of how the median is defined, even a blind guess on this question will have a 50% success rate.

But cascades on a platform like Twitter can consist of multiple cascade trees sharing the same information, as pieces of …

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Snurb — Tuesday 24 May 2016 23:50

Networks of Caucasian User Groups on VKontakte

Politics | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | WebSci '16 |

The final speaker in this Web Science 2016 session is Daniel Alexandrov, whose interest is in the use of social networking platforms in politics across the Caucasus region. This is a diverse and politically tense region, with several intractable political conflicts.

The project focussed on Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgian, and pan-Caucasian groups on the social media platforms VKontakte – the "virtual Caucasus" space –, which is dominated by relatively young users and subdivides into a number of groups. These groups have overlapping memberships and distribute across a number of clusters; Caucasian and Georgian groups tend to have the highest betweenness centrality …

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Snurb — Tuesday 24 May 2016 23:49

A First Look at the Political Uses of Quote Retweets

Politics | Social Media | Twitter | WebSci '16 |

Next up at Web Science 2016 is Yelena Mejova, who presents a paper on the new 'quote retweet' feature that Twitter introduced in April 2015. This form of retweeting includes the retweeted tweet as a URL in the retweet, and can be used for somewhat different purposes from other forms of retweeting: while button retweets may imply an endorsement of the original message, the substantial space for including the retweeter's views in a quote retweet might be used for more critical engagement with the quoted material, for instance.

This study builds on the dataset of 192 US political accounts maintained …

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Snurb — Tuesday 24 May 2016 19:39

Patterns of Engagement with Journalists' Tweets in Ireland

Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Twitter | WebSci '16 |

Next up at Web Science 2016 is Claudia Orellana-Rodriguez, whose interest is in how journalists spread the news on Twitter. Journalists now regularly engage on social media platforms, but there still is only a very limited understanding of how platforms like Twitter can be used most effectively.

Optimal activities and user engagement may also differ considerably across different news categories: different types of news will have different audiences, and audience members may engage very differently with such news; this may also be affected by the time of day or week.

This project focussed on 200 Irish journalists and captured …

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Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

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Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

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Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

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Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

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