scholarly journals Impact of Unreliable Content on Social Media Users during COVID-19 and Stance Detection System

Electronics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Mudasir Ahmad Wani ◽  
Nancy Agarwal ◽  
Patrick Bours
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Deep Learning ◽  
Detection System ◽  
Online Social Network ◽  
Negative Attitude ◽  
Health Crisis ◽  
Online Groups ◽  
Detection Model ◽  
Twitter Users ◽  
The Impact

The abundant dissemination of misinformation regarding coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) presents another unprecedented issue to the world, along with the health crisis. Online social network (OSN) platforms intensify this problem by allowing their users to easily distort and fabricate the information and disseminate it farther and rapidly. In this paper, we study the impact of misinformation associated with a religious inflection on the psychology and behavior of the OSN users. The article presents a detailed study to understand the reaction of social media users when exposed to unverified content related to the Islamic community during the COVID-19 lockdown period in India. The analysis was carried out on Twitter users where the data were collected using three scraping packages, Tweepy, Selenium, and Beautiful Soup, to cover more users affected by this misinformation. A labeled dataset is prepared where each tweet is assigned one of the four reaction polarities, namely, E (endorse), D (deny), Q (question), and N (neutral). Analysis of collected data was carried out in five phases where we investigate the engagement of E, D, Q, and N users, tone of the tweets, and the consequence upon repeated exposure of such information. The evidence demonstrates that the circulation of such content during the pandemic and lockdown phase had made people more vulnerable in perceiving the unreliable tweets as fact. It was also observed that people absorbed the negativity of the online content, which induced a feeling of hatred, anger, distress, and fear among them. People with similar mindset form online groups and express their negative attitude to other groups based on their opinions, indicating the strong signals of social unrest and public tensions in society. The paper also presents a deep learning-based stance detection model as one of the automated mechanisms for tracking the news on Twitter as being potentially false. Stance classifier aims to predict the attitude of a tweet towards a news headline and thereby assists in determining the veracity of news by monitoring the distribution of different reactions of the users towards it. The proposed model, employing deep learning (convolutional neural network(CNN)) and sentence embedding (bidirectional encoder representations from transformers(BERT)) techniques, outperforms the existing systems. The performance is evaluated on the benchmark SemEval stance dataset. Furthermore, a newly annotated dataset is prepared and released with this study to help the research of this domain.

scholarly journals Investigating the impact of pre-processing techniques and pre-trained word embeddings in detecting Arabic health information on social media

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yahya Albalawi ◽  
Jim Buckley ◽  
Nikola S. Nikolov
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Deep Learning ◽  
Comprehensive Evaluation ◽  
Classification Problem ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Word Embeddings ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Lower Accuracy ◽  
Health Related ◽  
The Impact

AbstractThis paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of data pre-processing and word embedding techniques in the context of Arabic document classification in the domain of health-related communication on social media. We evaluate 26 text pre-processings applied to Arabic tweets within the process of training a classifier to identify health-related tweets. For this task we use the (traditional) machine learning classifiers KNN, SVM, Multinomial NB and Logistic Regression. Furthermore, we report experimental results with the deep learning architectures BLSTM and CNN for the same text classification problem. Since word embeddings are more typically used as the input layer in deep networks, in the deep learning experiments we evaluate several state-of-the-art pre-trained word embeddings with the same text pre-processing applied. To achieve these goals, we use two data sets: one for both training and testing, and another for testing the generality of our models only. Our results point to the conclusion that only four out of the 26 pre-processings improve the classification accuracy significantly. For the first data set of Arabic tweets, we found that Mazajak CBOW pre-trained word embeddings as the input to a BLSTM deep network led to the most accurate classifier with F1 score of 89.7%. For the second data set, Mazajak Skip-Gram pre-trained word embeddings as the input to BLSTM led to the most accurate model with F1 score of 75.2% and accuracy of 90.7% compared to F1 score of 90.8% achieved by Mazajak CBOW for the same architecture but with lower accuracy of 70.89%. Our results also show that the performance of the best of the traditional classifier we trained is comparable to the deep learning methods on the first dataset, but significantly worse on the second dataset.

scholarly journals COVID-19 as an “Infodemic” in Public Health: Critical Role of the Social Media

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debanjan Banerjee ◽  
K. S. Meena
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Global Public Health ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Health Crisis ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
The Impact

The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has emerged as a significant and global public health crisis. Besides the rising number of cases and fatalities, the outbreak has also affected economies, employment and policies alike. As billions are being isolated at their homes to contain the infection, the uncertainty gives rise to mass hysteria and panic. Amidst this, there has been a hidden epidemic of “information” that makes COVID-19 stand out as a “digital infodemic” from the earlier outbreaks. Repeated and detailed content about the virus, geographical statistics, and multiple sources of information can all lead to chronic stress and confusion at times of crisis. Added to this is the plethora of misinformation, rumor and conspiracy theories circulating every day. With increased digitalization, media penetration has increased with a more significant number of people aiding in the “information pollution.” In this article, we glance at the unique evolution of COVID-19 as an “infodemic” in the hands of social media and the impact it had on its spread and public reaction. We then look at the ways forward in which the role of social media (as well as other digital platforms) can be integrated into social and public health, for a better symbiosis, “digital balance” and pandemic preparedness for the ongoing crisis and the future.

scholarly journals Twitter, Telepractice, and the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Social Media Content Analysis

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Kristen Weidner ◽  
Joneen Lowman ◽  
Anne Fleischer ◽  
Kyle Kosik ◽  
Peyton Goodbread ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Technology Implementation ◽  
Scale Up ◽  
Media Content Analysis ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Implementation Framework ◽  
Health Crisis ◽  
Wide Scale ◽  
Twitter Users

Purpose Telepractice was extensively utilized during the COVID-19 pandemic. Little is known about issues experienced during the wide-scale rollout of a service delivery model that was novel to many. Social media research is a way to unobtrusively analyze public communication, including during a health crisis. We investigated the characteristics of tweets about telepractice through the lens of an established health technology implementation framework. Results can help guide efforts to support and sustain telehealth beyond the pandemic context. Method We retrieved a historical Twitter data set containing tweets about telepractice from the early months of the pandemic. Tweets were analyzed using a concurrent mixed-methods content analysis design informed by the nonadoption, abandonment, scale-up, spread, and sustainability (NASSS) framework. Results Approximately 2,200 Twitter posts were retrieved, and 820 original tweets were analyzed qualitatively. Volume of tweets about telepractice increased in the early months of the pandemic. The largest group of Twitter users tweeting about telepractice was a group of clinical professionals. Tweet content reflected many, but not all, domains of the NASSS framework. Conclusions Twitter posting about telepractice increased during the pandemic. Although many tweets represented topics expected in technology implementation, some represented phenomena were potentially unique to speech-language pathology. Certain technology implementation topics, notably sustainability, were not found in the data. Implications for future telepractice implementation and further research are discussed.

scholarly journals Detecting sentiment dynamics and clusters of Twitter users for trending topics in COVID-19 pandemic

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (8) ◽  
pp. e0253300
Author(s):  
Md Shoaib Ahmed ◽  
Tanjim Taharat Aurpa ◽  
Md Musfique Anwar
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Perceptions ◽  
Intervention Strategies ◽  
User Generated Content ◽  
Time Intervals ◽  
Health Crisis ◽  
Public Health Crisis ◽  
Significant Public Health ◽  
Trending Topics ◽  
Twitter Users

COVID-19 caused a significant public health crisis worldwide and triggered some other issues such as economic crisis, job cuts, mental anxiety, etc. This pandemic plies across the world and involves many people not only through the infection but also agitation, stress, fret, fear, repugnance, and poignancy. During this time, social media involvement and interaction increase dynamically and share one’s viewpoint and aspects under those mentioned health crises. From user-generated content on social media, we can analyze the public’s thoughts and sentiments on health status, concerns, panic, and awareness related to COVID-19, which can ultimately assist in developing health intervention strategies and design effective campaigns based on public perceptions. In this work, we scrutinize the users’ sentiment in different time intervals to assist in trending topics in Twitter on the COVID-19 tweets dataset. We also find out the sentimental clusters from the sentiment categories. With the help of comprehensive sentiment dynamics, we investigate different experimental results that exhibit different multifariousness in social media engagement and communication in the pandemic period.

scholarly journals InterSpot: Interactive Spammer Detection in Social Media

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaize Ding ◽  
Jundong Li ◽  
Shivam Dhar ◽  
Shreyash Devan ◽  
Huan Liu
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Learning Process ◽  
Interactive Learning ◽  
Detection System ◽  
Feedback Information ◽  
Detection Model ◽  
Empirical Success ◽  
Detection Strategy ◽  
Current Detection ◽  
Over Time

Spammer detection in social media has recently received increasing attention due to the rocketing growth of user-generated data. Despite the empirical success of existing systems, spammers may continuously evolve over time to impersonate normal users while new types of spammers may also emerge to combat with the current detection system, leading to the fact that a built system will gradually lose its efficacy in spotting spammers. To address this issue, grounded on the contextual bandit model, we present a novel system for conducting interactive spammer detection. We demonstrate our system by showcasing the interactive learning process, which allows the detection model to keep optimizing its detection strategy through incorporating the feedback information from human experts.

scholarly journals To Enhance the Impact of Deep Learning-Based Algorithms in Determining the Behavior of an Individual based on Communication on Social Media

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (12) ◽  
pp. 4433-4435
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Deep Learning ◽  
Sentiment Analysis ◽  
Social Networking Sites ◽  
Opinion Mining ◽  
Learning Algorithms ◽  
Machine Learning Algorithms ◽  
Support Vector ◽  
Social Media Text ◽  
The Impact

In this digitized world, the Internet has become a prominent source to glean various kinds of information. In today’s scenario, people prefer virtual reality instead of one to one communication. The Majority of the population prefers social networking sites to voice themselves through posts, blogs, comments, likes, dislikes. Their sentiments can be found/traced using opinion mining or Sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis of social media text is a useful technique for identifying peoples’ positive, negative or neutral emotions/sentiments/opinions. Sentiment analysis has gained special attention by researchers from last few years. Traditionally many machine learning algorithms were used to implement it like navie bays, Support Vector Machine and many more. But to overcome the drawbacks of ML in terms of complex classification algorithms different deep learning-based algorithms are introduced like CNN, RNN, and HNN. In this paper, we have studied different deep learning algorithms and intended to propose a deep learning-based model to analyze the behavior of an individual using social media text. Results given by the proposed model can utilize in a range of different fields like business, education, industry, politics, psychology, security, etc.

scholarly journals An Autoencoder-Based Network Intrusion Detection System for the SCADA System

2021 ◽  
pp. 210-216
Author(s):  
Mustafa Altaha ◽  
◽  
Jae-Myeong Lee ◽  
Muhammad Aslam ◽  
Sugwon Hong
Keyword(s):  
Deep Learning ◽  
Intrusion Detection ◽  
Intrusion Detection System ◽  
Communication Protocol ◽  
Detection System ◽  
Main Tool ◽  
Detection Model ◽  
Scada System ◽  
Network Intrusion ◽  
Power Substation

The intrusion detection system (IDS) is the main tool to do security monitoring that is one of the security strategies for the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system. In this paper, we develop an IDS based on the autoencoder deep learning model (AE-IDS) for the SCADA system. The target SCADA communication protocol of the detection model is the Distributed Network Protocol 3 (DNP3), which is currently the most commonly utilized communication protocol in the power substation. Cyberattacks that we consider are data injection or modification attacks, which are the most critical attacks in the SCADA systems. In this paper, we extracted 17 data features from DNP3 communication, and use them to train the autoencoder network. We measure accuracy and loss of detection and compare them with different supervised deep learning algorithms. The unsupervised AE-IDS model shows better performance than the other deep learning IDS models.

scholarly journals Evolution of corporate reputation during an evolving controversy

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siyoung Chung ◽  
Mark Chong ◽  
Jie Sheng Chua ◽  
Jin Cheon Na
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Sentiment Analysis ◽  
Corporate Reputation ◽  
Supervised Machine Learning ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Twitter Users ◽  
Corporate Crisis ◽  
The Impact

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the evolution of online sentiments toward a company (i.e. Chipotle) during a crisis, and the effects of corporate apology on those sentiments.Design/methodology/approachUsing a very large data set of tweets (i.e. over 2.6m) about Company A’s food poisoning case (2015–2016). This case was selected because it is widely known, drew attention from various stakeholders and had many dynamics (e.g. multiple outbreaks, and across different locations). This study employed a supervised machine learning approach. Its sentiment polarity classification and relevance classification consisted of five steps: sampling, labeling, tokenization, augmentation of semantic representation, and the training of supervised classifiers for relevance and sentiment prediction.FindingsThe findings show that: the overall sentiment of tweets specific to the crisis was neutral; promotions and marketing communication may not be effective in converting negative sentiments to positive sentiments; a corporate crisis drew public attention and sparked public discussion on social media; while corporate apologies had a positive effect on sentiments, the effect did not last long, as the apologies did not remove public concerns about food safety; and some Twitter users exerted a significant influence on online sentiments through their popular tweets, which were heavily retweeted among Twitter users.Research limitations/implicationsEven with multiple training sessions and the use of a voting procedure (i.e. when there was a discrepancy in the coding of a tweet), there were some tweets that could not be accurately coded for sentiment. Aspect-based sentiment analysis and deep learning algorithms can be used to address this limitation in future research. This analysis of the impact of Chipotle’s apologies on sentiment did not test for a direct relationship. Future research could use manual coding to include only specific responses to the corporate apology. There was a delay between the time social media users received the news and the time they responded to it. Time delay poses a challenge to the sentiment analysis of Twitter data, as it is difficult to interpret which peak corresponds with which incident/s. This study focused solely on Twitter, which is just one of several social media sites that had content about the crisis.Practical implicationsFirst, companies should use social media as official corporate news channels and frequently update them with any developments about the crisis, and use them proactively. Second, companies in crisis should refrain from marketing efforts. Instead, they should focus on resolving the issue at hand and not attempt to regain a favorable relationship with stakeholders right away. Third, companies can leverage video, images and humor, as well as individuals with large online social networks to increase the reach and diffusion of their messages.Originality/valueThis study is among the first to empirically investigate the dynamics of corporate reputation as it evolves during a crisis as well as the effects of corporate apology on online sentiments. It is also one of the few studies that employs sentiment analysis using a supervised machine learning method in the area of corporate reputation and communication management. In addition, it offers valuable insights to both researchers and practitioners who wish to utilize big data to understand the online perceptions and behaviors of stakeholders during a corporate crisis.

Adapting for Informal Language in Arabic Twitter Improves ‎Monitoring of COVID-19 Pandemic and Influenza Epidemic‎ (Preprint)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lama Alsudias ◽  
Paul Rayson
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Deep Learning ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Detection Algorithm ◽  
Entity Recognition ◽  
Disease Spread ◽  
Learning Methods ◽  
Infected People ◽  
Standard Terminology ◽  
The Impact

BACKGROUND Twitter is a real time messaging platform widely used by people and organisations to share ‎information on many topics. It could potentially be useful to analyse tweets for infectious ‎disease monitoring purposes ‎ in order to reduce reporting lag time, and to provide an ‎independent complementary source of data, compared to traditional approaches. ‎However, such analysis is currently not possible in the Arabic speaking world due to lack of ‎basic building blocks for research.‎ OBJECTIVE We collect around 4,000 Arabic tweets related to COVID-19 and Influenza. We clean and ‎label the tweets relative to the Arabic Infectious Diseases Ontology which includes non-‎standard terminology and 11 core concepts and 21 relations. The aim of this study is to ‎analyse Arabic tweets to estimate their usefulness for health surveillance, understand the ‎impact of the informal terms in the analysis, show the effect of the deep learning methods ‎in the classification process, and identify the locations where the infection is spreading.‎ METHODS We apply multi-label classification techniques: Binary Relevance, Classifier Chains, Label ‎Powerset, Adapted Algorithm (MLKNN), NBSVM, BERT, and AraBERT to identify infected ‎people. We also use Named Entity Recognition to predict the locations affected. ‎ RESULTS We achieve an F1-score up to 88% in the Influenza case study and 94% in the COVID-19 one. ‎ ‎ Adapting for non-standard terminology and informal language helps to improve ‎accuracy by as ‎much as 15% with an average improvement of 8%.‎ Deep learning methods ‎achieve around 5% on hamming loss during the classifying process. Our geo-location ‎detection algorithm can predict on average 54% accuracy for the location of the users using ‎tweet content.‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ CONCLUSIONS This study identifies two Arabic social media datasets for monitoring tweets related to ‎Influenza and COVID-19‎. It demonstrates the importance of including informal terms, which ‎is regularly used by social media users, in the analysis. It also proves that BERT achieves good ‎results when used with new terms in COVID-19 tweets. Finally, the tweet content may ‎contain useful information to determine the location of the disease spread.

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