Subscribe to the gold package and get unlimited access to Shamra Academy
Register a new user(Mis)alignment Between Stance Expressed in Social Media Data and Public Opinion Surveys
231
0
0.0
(
0
)
Added by
Kenneth Joseph
Publication date
2021
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
Ask ChatGPT about the research
No Arabic abstract
Stance detection, which aims to determine whether an individual is for or against a target concept, promises to uncover public opinion from large streams of social media data. Yet even human annotation of social media content does not always capture stance as measured by public opinion polls. We demonstrate this by directly comparing an individuals self-reported stance to the stance inferred from their social media data. Leveraging a longitudinal public opinion survey with respondent Twitter handles, we conducted this comparison for 1,129 individuals across four salient targets. We find that recall is high for both Pro and Anti stance classifications but precision is variable in a number of cases. We identify three factors leading to the disconnect between text and author stance: temporal inconsistencies, differences in constructs, and measurement errors from both survey respondents and annotators. By presenting a framework for assessing the limitations of stance detection models, this work provides important insight into what stance detection truly measures.
rate research
Read More
The pervasive use of social media has grown to over two billion users to date, and is commonly utilized as a means to share information and shape world events. Evidence suggests that passive social media usage (i.e., viewing without taking action) has an impact on the users perspective. This empirical influence over perspective could have significant impact on social events. Therefore, it is important to understand how social media contributes to the formation of an individuals perspective. A set of experimental tasks were designed to investigate empirically derived thresholds for opinion formation as a result of passive interactions with different social media data types (i.e., videos, images, and messages). With a better understanding of how humans passively interact with social media information, a paradigm can be developed that allows the exploitation of this interaction and plays a significant role in future military plans and operations.
Physical media (like surveillance cameras) and social media (like Instagram and Twitter) may both be useful in attaining on-the-ground information during an emergency or disaster situation. However, the intersection and reliability of both surveillance cameras and social media during a natural disaster are not fully understood. To address this gap, we tested whether social media is of utility when physical surveillance cameras went off-line during Hurricane Irma in 2017. Specifically, we collected and compared geo-tagged Instagram and Twitter posts in the state of Florida during times and in areas where public surveillance cameras went off-line. We report social media content and frequency and content to determine the utility for emergency managers or first responders during a natural disaster.
Deceased public figures are often said to live on in collective memory. We quantify this phenomenon by tracking mentions of 2,362 public figures in English-language online news and social media (Twitter) one year before and after death. We measure the spike and decay of attention following death and model them as the interplay of communicative and cultural memory. Clustering reveals four patterns of post-mortem memory, and regression analysis shows that boosts in media attention are largest for pre-mortem popular anglophones of any gender who died a young, unnatural death; that long-term boosts are smallest for leaders and largest for artists; and that, while both the news and Twitter are triggered by young and unnatural deaths, the news additionally curates collective memory when old persons or leaders die. Overall, we illuminate the age-old question who is remembered by society, and the distinct roles of news and social media in collective memory formation.
We study a tractable opinion dynamics model that generates long-run disagreements and persistent opinion fluctuations. Our model involves an inhomogeneous stochastic gossip process of continuous opinion dynamics in a society consisting of two types of agents: regular agents, who update their beliefs according to information that they receive from their social neighbors; and stubborn agents, who never update their opinions. When the society contains stubborn agents with different opinions, the belief dynamics never lead to a consensus (among the regular agents). Instead, beliefs in the society fail to converge almost surely, the belief profile keeps on fluctuating in an ergodic fashion, and it converges in law to a non-degenerate random vector. The structure of the network and the location of the stubborn agents within it shape the opinion dynamics. The expected belief vector evolves according to an ordinary differential equation coinciding with the Kolmogorov backward equation of a continuous-time Markov chain with absorbing states corresponding to the stubborn agents and converges to a harmonic vector, with every regular agents value being the weighted average of its neighbors values, and boundary conditions corresponding to the stubborn agents. Expected cross-products of the agents beliefs allow for a similar characterization in terms of coupled Markov chains on the network. We prove that, in large-scale societies which are highly fluid, meaning that the product of the mixing time of the Markov chain on the graph describing the social network and the relative size of the linkages to stubborn agents vanishes as the population size grows large, a condition of emph{homogeneous influence} emerges, whereby the stationary beliefs marginal distributions of most of the regular agents have approximately equal first and second moments.
In this paper, we propose a new measure to estimate the similarity between brands via posts of brands followers on social network services (SNS). Our method was developed with the intention of exploring the brands that customers are likely to jointly purchase. Nowadays, brands use social media for targeted advertising because influencing users preferences can greatly affect the trends in sales. We assume that data on SNS allows us to make quantitative comparisons between brands. Our proposed algorithm analyzes the daily photos and hashtags posted by each brands followers. By clustering them and converting them to histograms, we can calculate the similarity between brands. We evaluated our proposed algorithm with purchase logs, credit card information, and answers to the questionnaires. The experimental results show that the purchase data maintained by a mall or a credit card company can predict the co-purchase very well, but not the customers willingness to buy products of new brands. On the other hand, our method can predict the users interest on brands with a correlation value over 0.53, which is pretty high considering that such interest to brands are high subjective and individual dependent.
Log in to be able to interact and post comments
comments
Fetching comments
Sign in to be able to follow your search criteria
