scholarly journals “It’s Not Like It’s Life or Death or Whatever”: Young People’s Understandings of Social Media Data

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 205630511878780 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luci Pangrazio ◽  
Neil Selwyn

Young people’s engagements with social media now generate large quantities of personal data, with “big social data” becoming an increasingly important “currency” in the digital economy. While using social media platforms is ostensibly “free,” users nevertheless “pay” for these services through their personal data—enabling advertisers, content developers, and other third parties to profile, predict, and position individuals. Such developments have prompted calls for social media users to adopt more informed and critical stances toward how and why their data are being used—that is, to build “critical data literacies.” This article reports on research that explores young social media users’ understandings of their personal data and its attendant issues. Drawing on research with groups of young people (aged 13–17 years), the article investigates the consequences of making third party (re)uses of personal data openly available for social media users to interpret and make critical sense of. The findings provide valuable insights into young people’s understandings of the technical, social, and cultural issues that underpin their ability to engage with, and make sense of, social media data. The article concludes by considering how research into critical data literacies might connect in more meaningful and effective ways with everyday lived experiences of social media use.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hansi Hettiarachchi ◽  
Mariam Adedoyin-Olowe ◽  
Jagdev Bhogal ◽  
Mohamed Medhat Gaber

AbstractSocial media is becoming a primary medium to discuss what is happening around the world. Therefore, the data generated by social media platforms contain rich information which describes the ongoing events. Further, the timeliness associated with these data is capable of facilitating immediate insights. However, considering the dynamic nature and high volume of data production in social media data streams, it is impractical to filter the events manually and therefore, automated event detection mechanisms are invaluable to the community. Apart from a few notable exceptions, most previous research on automated event detection have focused only on statistical and syntactical features in data and lacked the involvement of underlying semantics which are important for effective information retrieval from text since they represent the connections between words and their meanings. In this paper, we propose a novel method termed Embed2Detect for event detection in social media by combining the characteristics in word embeddings and hierarchical agglomerative clustering. The adoption of word embeddings gives Embed2Detect the capability to incorporate powerful semantical features into event detection and overcome a major limitation inherent in previous approaches. We experimented our method on two recent real social media data sets which represent the sports and political domain and also compared the results to several state-of-the-art methods. The obtained results show that Embed2Detect is capable of effective and efficient event detection and it outperforms the recent event detection methods. For the sports data set, Embed2Detect achieved 27% higher F-measure than the best-performed baseline and for the political data set, it was an increase of 29%.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 402-416
Author(s):  
Amirhossein Teimouri

Abstract Social media platforms have been increasingly reinvigorating extreme movements, especially rightist movements. Utilizing unique Google Plus data, the author shows the rise and fall of the 2015 rightist anti-Nuclear Deal movement in Iran. He argues that the Google Plus platform in 2015 provided the new generation of revolutionary Islamist rightist activists with a contentious space of mobilization, enabling them to develop a new revolutionary rightist identity. This revolutionary identity and its corresponding language and discourse did not fully unfold in Iranian mainstream rightist media, even though rightist groups, compared to liberal groups, are not censored and repressed. The new generation of rightist activists perceived the Nuclear Deal as an existential threat to revolutionary principles of the country, and thus played out their outrage and identity anxieties on Google Plus. The author contends that this online outrage, due to the activists’ identity bond with the regime and the 1979 Iranian Revolution, however, did not translate into any massive offline mobilization against the Nuclear Deal. He also discusses the methodological implications of using social media data, especially the discontinuation of Google Plus.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4.38) ◽  
pp. 939
Author(s):  
Nur Atiqah Sia Abdullah ◽  
Hamizah Binti Anuar

Facebook and Twitter are the most popular social media platforms among netizen. People are now more aggressive to express their opinions, perceptions, and emotions through social media platforms. These massive data provide great value for the data analyst to understand patterns and emotions related to a certain issue. Mining the data needs techniques and time, therefore data visualization becomes trending in representing these types of information. This paper aims to review data visualization studies that involved data from social media postings. Past literature used node-link diagram, node-link tree, directed graph, line graph, heatmap, and stream graph to represent the data collected from the social media platforms. An analysis by comparing the social media data types, representation, and data visualization techniques is carried out based on the previous studies. This paper critically discussed the comparison and provides a suggestion for the suitability of data visualization based on the type of social media data in hand.      


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 57-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vikas Kumar ◽  
Pooja Nanda

With the amplification of social media platforms, the importance of social media analytics has exponentially increased for many brands and organizations across the world. Tracking and analyzing the social media data has been contributing as a success parameter for such organizations, however, the data is being poorly harnessed. Therefore, the ethical implications of social media analytics need to be identified and explored for both the organizations and targeted users of social media data. The present work is an exploratory study to identify the various techno-ethical concerns of social media engagement, as well as social media analytics. The impact of these concerns on the individuals, organizations, and society as a whole are discussed. Ethical engagement for the most common social media platforms has been outlined with a number of specific examples to understand the prominent techno-ethical concerns. Both the individual and organizational perspectives have been taken into account to identify the implications of social media analytics.


2021 ◽  
pp. 227797522110118
Author(s):  
Amit K. Srivastava ◽  
Rajhans Mishra

Social media platforms have become very popular these days among individuals and organizations. On the one hand, organizations use social media as a potential tool to create awareness of their products among consumers, and on the other hand, social media data is useful to predict the national crisis, election polls, stock prediction, etc. However, nowadays, a debate is going on about the quality of data generated on social media platforms, whether it is relevant for prediction and generalization. The article discusses the relevance and quality of data obtained from social media in the context of research and development. Social media data quality issues may impact the generalizability and reproducibility of the results of the study. The paper explores possible reasons for quality issues in the data generated over social media platforms along with the suggestive measures to minimize them using the proposed social media data quality framework.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Dubois ◽  
Anatoliy Gruzd ◽  
Jenna Jacobson

Journalists increasingly use social media data to infer and report public opinion by quoting social media posts, identifying trending topics, and reporting general sentiment. In contrast to traditional approaches of inferring public opinion, citizens are often unaware of how their publicly available social media data is being used and how public opinion is constructed using social media analytics. In this exploratory study based on a census-weighted online survey of Canadian adults (N=1,500), we examine citizens’ perceptions of journalistic use of social media data. We demonstrate that: (1) people find it more appropriate for journalists to use aggregate social media data rather than personally identifiable data; (2) people who use more social media are more likely to positively perceive journalistic use of social media data to infer public opinion; and (3) the frequency of political posting is positively related to acceptance of this emerging journalistic practice, which suggests some citizens want to be heard publicly on social media while others do not. We provide recommendations for journalists on the ethical use of social media data and social media platforms on opt-in functionality.


10.2196/24889 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. e24889
Author(s):  
Shi Chen ◽  
Lina Zhou ◽  
Yunya Song ◽  
Qian Xu ◽  
Ping Wang ◽  
...  

Background Social media plays a critical role in health communications, especially during global health emergencies such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. However, there is a lack of a universal analytical framework to extract, quantify, and compare content features in public discourse of emerging health issues on different social media platforms across a broad sociocultural spectrum. Objective We aimed to develop a novel and universal content feature extraction and analytical framework and contrast how content features differ with sociocultural background in discussions of the emerging COVID-19 global health crisis on major social media platforms. Methods We sampled the 1000 most shared viral Twitter and Sina Weibo posts regarding COVID-19, developed a comprehensive coding scheme to identify 77 potential features across six major categories (eg, clinical and epidemiological, countermeasures, politics and policy, responses), quantified feature values (0 or 1, indicating whether or not the content feature is mentioned in the post) in each viral post across social media platforms, and performed subsequent comparative analyses. Machine learning dimension reduction and clustering analysis were then applied to harness the power of social media data and provide more unbiased characterization of web-based health communications. Results There were substantially different distributions, prevalence, and associations of content features in public discourse about the COVID-19 pandemic on the two social media platforms. Weibo users were more likely to focus on the disease itself and health aspects, while Twitter users engaged more about policy, politics, and other societal issues. Conclusions We extracted a rich set of content features from social media data to accurately characterize public discourse related to COVID-19 in different sociocultural backgrounds. In addition, this universal framework can be adopted to analyze social media discussions of other emerging health issues beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.


2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abhishek Bhati ◽  
Diarmuid McDonnell

Social media platforms offer nonprofits considerable potential for crafting, supporting, and executing successful fundraising campaigns. How impactful are attempts by these organizations to utilize social media to support fundraising activities associated with online Giving Days? We address this question by testing a number of hypotheses of the effectiveness of using Facebook for fundraising purposes by all 704 nonprofits participating in Omaha Gives 2015. Using linked administrative and social media data, we find that fundraising success—as measured by the number of donors and value of donations—is positively associated with a nonprofit’s Facebook network size (number of likes), activity (number of posts), and audience engagement (number of shares), as well as net effects of organizational factors including budget size, age, and program service area. These results provide important new empirical insights into the relationship between social media utilization and fundraising success of nonprofits.


Author(s):  
Shalin Hai-Jew

There has been little work done on American emigration abroad and even less done on the formal renunciation of American citizenship. This chapter provides an overview of both phenomena in the research literature and then provides some methods for using the extraction of social media data and their visualization as a way of tapping into the public mindsets about these social phenomena. The software tools used include the following: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel (NodeXL Basic), NVivo, and Maltego Carbon; the social media platforms used include the following: Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, and Flickr.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jinyan Chen ◽  
Susanne Becken ◽  
Bela Stantic

Purpose This paper aims to examine key parameters of scholarly context and geographic focus and provide an assessment of theoretical underpinnings of studies in the field of social media and visitor mobility. This review also summarised the characteristics of social media data, including how data are collected from different social media platforms and their advantages and limitations. The stocktake of research in this field was completed by examining technologies and applied methods that supported different research questions. Design/methodology/approach This literature review applied a mix of methods to conduct a literature review. This review analysed 82 journal articles on using social media to track visitors’ movements between 2014 and November 2020. The literature compared the different social media, discussed current applied theories, available technologies, analysed the current trend and provided advice for future directions. Findings This review provides a state-of-the-art assessment of the research to date on tourist mobility analysed using social media data. The diversity of scales (with a dominant focus on the city-scale), platforms and methods highlight that this field is emerging, but it also reflects the complexity of the tourism phenomenon. This review identified a lack of theory in this field, and it points to ongoing challenges in ensuring appropriate use of data (e.g. differentiating travellers from residents) and the ethics surrounding them. Originality/value The findings guide researchers, especially those with no computer science background, on the different types of approaches, data sources and methods available for tracking tourist mobility by harnessing social media. Depending on the particular research interest, different tools for processing and visualization are available.


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