Talking to children about their HIV diagnosis: a discussion rooted in different global perspectives

An online meeting was arranged with four professionals representing four countries to debate current practices and future steps in naming HIV to children (disclosing HIV status). This article considers the evidence and reports on the commentary and debate from the meeting. Naming HIV to children remains a challenge. Although studies identify some of the facilitators and barriers to informing children of their HIV diagnosis, further review of practice is required. This article presents a global perspective of naming practices from different settings. The article comprises commentary and a report of the online debate, along with supporting evidence. The four participating authors concluded that health professionals must work in collaboration with families to support early naming of HIV to children or having an open discussion about HIV in clinics. Naming when a child is younger reduces self-stigma and empowers children and young people to adhere to their medication, make informed decisions and share their own diagnosis appropriately. The authors concluded that health professionals play a key role in educating colleagues and the public to reduce stigma and discrimination. Professionals working with children and families living with HIV require support and resources to instil confidence in naming and facilitate naming of HIV status to a child.

Discourse and Disinformation on COVID-19 Vaccination in Spain and Brazil

This chapter addresses the creation of political conflict on Twitter in a comparative study between Brazil and Spain. Based on an analysis of the political debate on dealing with two countries' health crises, it analyses the most retweeted messages published during the first week of vaccination in Europe and the Americas. Firstly, it analysed the general characteristics of the online debate on the immunisation of COVID-19. Secondly, it carried out an analysis of information disorder in each country. Although governmental positions in both countries are opposed, the results allow establishing common patterns of polarized profiles in both countries that question the management of the pandemic. It can be seen how political polarization is shaped as a characteristic of disinformation in both countries. That reveals that, after the health crisis, there is a crisis of democratic institutions that impact public health actions, but specifically to combat COVID-19.

What Does “¡Quédate en casa!” (‘Stay at Home!') Mean for a Poor Woman?

The purpose of this chapter is the discursive analysis of the online debate carried out in April 2020, in the middle of the confinement period of the COVID-19 pandemic, by a feminist group from Ecuador. The topic was to discuss the impact on poor women in the country of the consequences of the government order to be confined to the home: “¡Quédate en casa!” (‘Stay at home!'). From a constructivist perspective, the most relevant discursive-argumentative resources of the debate are analyzed, with the aim of revealing the participants' “framework of interpretation” or “narrative construction” based on their reflection of what was supposed to be an order issued by all governments, at the behest of the WHO (World Health Organization), but whose concrete materialization could not be realized in a similar way in all social contexts.

Argumentation Reasoning with Graph Neural Networks for Reddit Conversation Analysis

The automated analysis of different trends in online debating forums is an interesting tool for sampling the agreement between citizens in different topics. In these online debating forums, users post different comments and answers to previous comments of other users. In previous work, we have defined computational models to measure different values in these online debating forums. A main ingredient in these models has been the identification of the set of winning posts trough an argumentation problem that characterizes this winning set trough a particular argumentation acceptance semantics. In the argumentation problem we first associate the online debate to analyze as a debate tree. Then, comments are divided in two groups, the ones that agree with the root comment of the debate, and the ones that disagree with it, and we extract a bipartite graph where the unique edges are the disagree edges between comments of the two different groups. Once we compute the set of winning posts, we compute the different measures we are interested to get from the debate, as functions defined over the bipartite graph and the set of winning posts. In this work, we propose to explore the use of graph neural networks to solve the problem of computing these measures, using as input the debate tree, instead of our previous argumentation reasoning system that works with the bipartite graph. We focus on the particular online debate forum Reddit, and on the computation of a measure of the polarization in the debate. Our results over a set of Reddit debates, show that graph neural networks can be used with them to compute the polarization measure with an acceptable error, even if the number of layers of the network is bounded by a constant.

All Hail, the Baklang Kanal!: Subversive frivolity in two Filipino influencers

In November 2020, in a now-deleted tweet, twelve queer Filipino influencers on Twitter were branded as “baklang kanal,” for their noted expressions of dissent against the Rodrigo Duterte regime. Soon after, an online debate ensued: among these twelve influencers, who are the most rightful to be considered as baklang kanal ? While the term as commonly used now in Twitter is understood to refer to “gay individuals who are unapologetically outspoken about their views” (Vilog, 2020a), this paper intuits baklang kanal as a means to symbolically negotiate with the audience, toward construction of a seeming authenticity that is crucial for the establishment, maintenance, and expansion of their influencer status—what can be nominated as subversive frivolity, or the “generative power…arising from (populist) discursive framing as marginal, inconsequential, and unproductive” (Abidin, 2016, p. 2). We explore such harnessing of baklang kanal as generative power through a case study of two social media influencers, namely Pipay (@pipaykipayy) and Sassa Gurl (@Itssassagurl), exemplary not only for their large followings, but as well as their inclusion in the inaugural Bardy’s, a parodic people’s choice award facilitated over Twitter, for the Cannes’al (i.e., “kanal”) category.

Quantifying Systemic Coupling and Syndrome Using Multivariate Statistical Methods: An SFL Corpus Example

One of the fundamental underpinnings of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is that the relationship between language-as-system and language-as-text is modelled probabilistically in relation to the cline of instantiation. This offers a spectrum of new ways to approach several SFL concepts quantitatively. This paper falls within that spectrum as it proposes that the relatively recent concepts of coupling and syndrome can be redefined quantitatively in relation to instantiation through two statistical methods – namely log-linear analysis and multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) The application of these two methods is illustrated through an analysis of a corpus of twelve online voting-based online debate texts (ODTs) The results and discussion sections of this paper show that the methods can identify and quantify significant couplings and syndromes from both probabilistic and statistical perspectives. Both methods illustratively highlight eleven couplings and four syndromes associated with the more persuasive and less persuasive ODTs writers.

Students’ Voices Towards Online Debate Through WhatsApp as Alternative Media to Enhance Critical Thinking Skills During Covid-19 Pandemic

This study aims to find out students’ voices towards online debate through WhatsApp as alternative media to enhance critical thinking skills during Covid-19 pandemic. Sixteen undergraduate students participated in online debate for ten sessions throughout one whole semester. At the end of the research, eight students volunteered to participate in semi-structured interviews. The interviews were conducted to find out the participants’ voices about the online debate. The research findings reveal the participants believe that critical thinking skills are important to be mastered. Furthermore, the respondents believe that the online debate is good learning media to help them improve their critical thinking skills during this Covid-19 pandemic. The activity provides flexibility in terms of time and place. Other advantages, as claimed by the participants, include reducing students’ anxiety, improving teamwork skills, and improving persuasion skills. However, some barriers were also found based on the participants’ responses. The participants are concerned with the issue of being distracted, tendency to copy and paste, unstable network, and limited time.

State-aligned misogynistic disinformation on Arabic Twitter: The attempted silencing of an Al Jazeera journalist

A product of the global rise of right-wing populism has been a seeming normalisation of gendered public disinformation, which portrays female public figures as unintelligent, untrustworthy, irrational, and libidinous. Social media has also allowed gendered disinformation to be used in targeted harassment campaigns that seek to intimidate and shame women, reducing their public visibility through psychological violence. Despite this, very few studies on social media involving the Arabic language have explored in detail this phenomenon in the Persian Gulf, despite numerous examples of harassment against women public figures. Since 2017, women journalists critical of regional governments have been subjected to increased attacks online, but none as intense as the attack on Al Jazeera anchor Ghada Oueiss in June 2020. Through keyword analysis, network analysis, and open-source intelligence techniques (OSINT), this paper highlights the intensity and scale of one such attack, identifying the increasing role of malinformation and disinformation in attempting to silence journalists. Such documentation can be useful in demonstrating the volume, velocity, and discursive nature of the attacks threatening women’s visibility online. This research also accounts for a potential mechanism of such attacks, which follow a playbook of: 1) leaking information through anonymous accounts, 2) co-opted or loyalist influencers amplifying the attacks, and 3) uncritical local media jumping on the attacks (breakout). From a transformative perspective, it is increasingly important that such attacks are documented, exposed, and analysed to provide evidentiary claims of such abuse. It also highlights the issues of such abuse in authoritarian regimes, who clamp down on online debate, except appear not to do so when the messaging reflects state propaganda.