A Threat Assessment Model for Posts in The Online Sphere

Author(s):  
Selina E. M. Kerr ◽  
Mary Ann O'Grady

Since it has been suggested that social media offers an unprecedented view into the mindset of “persons of concern” with regards to mass shooters, this research study focuses on the comments about “school shootings” expressed on the social media and video sharing website YouTube. As a form of targeted violence that tends to be planned well in advance of the attack, there are opportunities to intervene and assess a school shooting threat before it transpires. Since previous studies have purported that the majority of school shooters had communicated their intention to carry out their attack in advance of it occurring—something which has become known by the term “leakage”—the authors have chosen to develop the foundation for a threat assessment model that is based upon the internet postings that relate to school shootings. The proposed model entitled “online threat assessment of school shooters” (OTASS) could be a tentative starting point for carrying out assessments of threats into online postings.

Author(s):  
Randy Borum ◽  
Mary Rowe

Bystanders—those who observe or come to know about potential wrongdoing—are often the best source of preattack intelligence, including indicators of intent and “warning” behaviors. They are the reason that some planned attacks are foiled before they occur. Numerous studies of targeted violence (e.g., mass shootings and school shootings) have demonstrated that peers and bystanders often have knowledge of an attacker’s intentions, concerning communication, and troubling behavior before the attack occurs. This chapter describes—with empirical support—why threat assessment professionals should consider bystanders; outlines a model for understanding bystander decision-making; reviews common barriers to bystander reporting; and suggests ways to mitigate those barriers, to engage bystanders at an individual level, and to improve reporting. The principal aim of threat assessment is to prevent (primarily) intentional acts of harm. When tragic incidents of planned violence occur, however, it is almost always uncovered “that someone knew something” about the attack before it happened. This happens because, as attack plans unfold, people in several different roles may know, or come to know, something about what is happening before harm occurs. The perpetrators know, and so might others, including targets, family members, friends, coworkers, or even casual observers.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carsten Schwemmer ◽  
Sandra Ziewiecki

Since its foundation in 2005, YouTube, which is considered to be the largest video sharing site, has undergone substantial changes. Over the last decade, the platform developed into a leading marketing tool used for product promotion by social media influencers. Past research indicates that these influencers are regarded as opinion leaders and cooperate with brands to market products on YouTube through electronic-word-of-mouth mechanisms. However, surprisingly little is known about the magnitude of this phenomenon. In our article, we make a first attempt to quantify product promotion and use an original dataset of 139,475 videos created by German YouTube channels between 2009 and 2017. Applying methods for automated content analysis, we find that YouTube users indeed are confronted with an ever-growing share of product promotion, particularly in the beauty and fashion sector. Our findings fuel concerns regarding the social and economic impact of influencers, especially on younger target groups.


2022 ◽  
pp. 316-336

If social media is about the social brag and the pose, academic social media has dedicated platforms that enable such shares: learning content sharing platforms (educational channels on social video sharing sites and social image sharing sites, learning object referatories, digital libraries, slideshow sharing sites), research sharing sites, publications and review metrics platforms, social learning sites (MOOCs, LMSes), and others. The academic social brag does not have to be negative or offending; it can be designed and harnessed to improve competition and performance among peer academics (in their social sharing), given the reliance on learner/user numbers to justify the original creation and sharing. This work explores academic social bragging across various academic social sharing platforms, dimensions for how these are judged (positively or negatively), and ways to turn academic social brags into something constructive for social-shared teaching and learning.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yong Deng

Threat evaluation is extremely important to decision makers in many situations, such as military application and physical protection systems. In this paper, a new threat assessment model based on interval number to deal with the intrinsic uncertainty and imprecision in combat environment is proposed. Both objective and subjective factors are taken into consideration in the proposed model. For the objective factors, the genetic algorithm (GA) is used to search out an optimal interval number representing all the attribute values of each object. In addition, for the subjective factors, the interval Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is adopted to determine each object’s threat weight according to the experience of commanders/experts. Then a discounting method is proposed to integrate the objective and subjective factors. At last, the ideal of Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) is applied to obtain the threat ranking of all the objects. A real application is used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 205630511878672 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carsten Schwemmer ◽  
Sandra Ziewiecki

Since its foundation in 2005, YouTube, which is considered to be the largest video sharing site, has undergone substantial changes. Over the last decade, the platform developed into a leading marketing tool used for product promotion by social media influencers. Past research indicates that these influencers are regarded as opinion leaders and cooperate with brands to market products on YouTube through electronic-word-of-mouth mechanisms. However, surprisingly little is known about the magnitude of this phenomenon. In our article, we make a first attempt to quantify product promotion and use an original dataset of 139,475 videos created by German YouTube channels between 2009 and 2017. Applying methods for automated content analysis, we find that YouTube users indeed are confronted with an ever-growing share of product promotion, particularly in the beauty and fashion sector. Our findings fuel concerns regarding the social and economic impact of influencers, especially on younger target groups.


Author(s):  
Lina Alathari ◽  
Ashley Blair ◽  
Catherine Camilletti ◽  
Steven Driscoll ◽  
Diana Drysdale ◽  
...  

The U.S. Secret Service has a long-standing tradition of conducting threat assessments as part of its mandate to protect the President of the United States and other elected officials. Building on this experience, the Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) is dedicated to expanding the field of violence prevention by closely examining the targeted violence that affects communities across the United States, including targeted school violence. This chapter outlines NTAC’s recommendations for implementing behavioral threat assessment teams in K–12 schools, as outlined in Enhancing School Safety Using a Threat Assessment Model: An Operational Guide for Preventing Targeted School Violence (2018).


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 4906 ◽  
Author(s):  
Odukorede Odunaiya ◽  
Mary Agoyi ◽  
Oseyenbhin Sunday Osemeahon

With little known about how social TV (STV) strategies can be harnessed by the broadcasting industry in order to increase and sustain their viewers, this study brings new insight to the social TV phenomenon by investigating the effect of game uncertainty and social media use (SMU) on social TV engagement in generating network loyalty (NL). The study also analyzed the mediating effect of severity between game uncertainty and social media use with social TV engagement. SmartPLS 3 was used to analyze the survey data of 364 participants for the proposed model, and the findings from the study revealed that game uncertainty and social media use have a positive effect on social TV engagement, which positively influences network loyalty. In addition, it was seen that severity mediates the relationship between game uncertainty and social media use with social TV engagement.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (7) ◽  
pp. 1193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hao Lu ◽  
Yifan Zhu ◽  
Kaize Shi ◽  
Yisheng Lv ◽  
Pengfei Shi ◽  
...  

Traffic situation awareness and alerting assisted by adverse weather conditions contributes to improve traffic safety, disaster coping mechanisms, and route planning for government agencies, business sectors, and individual travelers. However, at the city level, the physical sensor-generated data are partly held by different transportation and meteorological departments, which causes problems of “isolated information” for data fusion. Furthermore, it makes traffic situation awareness and estimation challenging and ineffective. In this paper, we leverage the power of crowdsourcing knowledge in social media and propose a novel way to forecast and generate alerts for city-level traffic incidents based on a social approach rather than traditional physical approaches. Specifically, we first collect adverse weather topics and reports of traffic incidents from social media. Then, we extract temporal, spatial, and meteorological features as well as labeled traffic reaction values corresponding to the social media “heat” for each city. Afterwards, the regression and alerting model is proposed to estimate the city-level traffic situation and give the suggestion of warning levels. The experiments show that the proposed model equipped with gcForest achieves the best root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) score on the social traffic incidents test dataset. Moreover, we consider the news report as an objective measurement to flexibly validate the feasibility of proposed model from social cyberspace to physical space. Finally, a prototype system was deployed and applied to government agencies to provide an intuitive visualization solution as well as decision support assistance.


2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
Veronica Ioana Ilieș

In the society we live today the concept of ‘sharing’ is at a common use, in multiple situations. People share houses, food, information, services, smiles, stories, photos, cars, pets, expertise and many other goods, services or emotions. Children at the very beginning of their lives are taught to share toys and experience; they grow up with the lesson of sharing learned. Sharing becomes, thus, a way of healthy communication between future adults. Today, companies start businesses that involve ’sharing’ in different economic contexts. It is now virtually impossible to talk about ‚’sharing’ without involving the social media and the intense activity that people carry out assisted by the new technologies of the digital age. Theabovementioned elements are practically the starting point of the impressive work by Nicholas A. John in his book The Age of Sharing.


Author(s):  
Jamshed Butt ◽  
Mohammad Awang

The issue “Exploring Social Media, Ethnicity, and Religiosity Role on Intention for Voting in Pakistan“ is a huge study embracing more issues. The politics of Pakistan is basically the politics of semantic groups. Pakistan is a multilingual state more than six languages. There are 245 religious parties in Pakistan, as elaborated by the Daily Times research. The use of social media sites in Pakistan peaked to its maximum after announcement of election schedule by the Election Commission of Pakistan in March 22, 2013. Most of the political parties used it for the recent elections in Pakistan to promote their agenda and attract country's 80 million registered electors. The theories interact with the research topic are theory of reasoned action (TRA), theory of planned behaviour (TBP), Social Cognitive Theory (SCT), and Social Ecological Model (SEM. The variables introduced in this research are Social Media, Ethnicity, Religiosity, and Intention for Voting. The proposed model have four dependent variables. A survey constructed from 24 questions were used to capture the respondents’ opinions regarding eight variables in a 7-likert scale. A sample of 1336 Pakistani citizen were collected. Data was collected within three months’ period, from 1 March 2015 until 31 May 2015. Distribution of the survey took place in four major cities; Karachi, Lahore, Faisalabad, and Rawalpindi/Islamabad. Data obtained from the survey is analysed by utilizing the software Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). The proposed research model have three hypothesis that demonstrate the relations. From the three hypotheses, two hypothesis are significant while one hypothesis are rejected. Results highlight on the importance of social media in politics aspects, therefore further research is recommended.


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