The Role of Suspended Accounts in Political Discussion on Social Media: Analysis of the 2017 French, UK and German Elections

Content moderation on social media is at the center of public and academic debate. In this study, we advance our understanding on which type of election-related content gets suspended by social media platforms. For this, we assess the behavior and content shared by suspended accounts during the most important elections in Europe in 2017 (in France, the United Kingdom, and Germany). We identify significant differences when we compare the behavior and content shared by Twitter suspended accounts with all other active accounts, including a focus on amplifying divisive issues like immigration and religion and systematic activities increasing the visibility of specific political figures (often but not always on the right). Our analysis suggests that suspended accounts were overwhelmingly human operated and no more likely than other accounts to share “fake news.” This study sheds light on the moderation policies of social media platforms, which have increasingly raised contentious debates, and equally importantly on the integrity and dynamics of political discussion on social media during major political events.

MAKING THE UNSEEN VISIBLE: EXPLORING CROSSCUTTING SOCIAL MEDIA PUBLICS AND THEIR SOCIOPOLITICAL TRAITS

This paper proposes an approach for studying the sociopolitical traits of multiple publics on Facebook that emerge in the network of interactions between users and public pages. The study is based on a survey of 1697 Danish citizens whose responses are coupled with their public Facebook activity.This is used to make predictions about a selection of sociopolitical features for a random sample of 50.000 Facebook users across more than 20.000 public pages. The interactions of the 50.000 users are modeled as a network and a clustering algorithm is used to find groups that arise naturally within said network. This allows for the study of how certain sociopolitical features cut across different congregations of the public in a way that retains a lot of the complexity of the digital trace data. Results show that voting intention overlaps most strongly with the clusters in the network, followed by gender and geo-location. Additionally they show that the so-called political echo-chambers consist only of smaller subsections of the entire network with many users' interactions mainly being identified by interests that can be attributed to gender, geo-location or other. Although, results also show that the political alt. right are very dominant on hot button political issues such as immigration and religion. It is proposed that by eliciting sociopolitical trends while considering the full network of interactions might lead researchers to overlook and overestimate fewer features when studying the formation of social media publics.

Explaining Fertility Changes since the 1930s

The post-Second World War period saw major fluctuations in fertility in both Scotland and England and Wales, but the oscillations decreasingly moved in tandem, though, as elsewhere in western Europe, the general tendency of family sizes was downward from the 1980s. This was accompanied by major changes in the ages at which women were most likely to bear a child and, in Scotland, significant alterations in the spatial distribution of the highest and lowest fertility areas. Many possible explanations have been offered for these changes and some specifically Scottish features which may have affected the scale and timing of changes north of the border are briefly reviewed, including access to efficient contraception; immigration and religion; council housing and house purchase patterns; living standards, expectations and insecurity; women’s education, employment and household division of labour; and wider value changes.

Arab American Cognitive Aging: Opportunities for Advancing Research on Alzheimer’s Disease Disparities

Background and Objectives This article highlights the dearth of and need for research on Arab American cognitive aging. We propose that studying cognitive health issues among older Arab Americans provides an innovative opportunity to advance knowledge about causes and consequences of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) disparities and refine understanding of factors linked to immigrant health in the United States. Research Design and Methods Demographic information is provided on Arab Americans, who are on the cusp of being recognized by the U.S. government as a distinct ethnic group separate from whites. In the tradition of minority aging, we present a broad review of specific issues in the contemporary case of Arab Americans. Results We detail how including Arab Americans provides unique information on the importance of: (i) extending racial/ethnic group comparisons; (ii) linking social experiences to late-life cognitive health; and (iii) incorporating ethnic factors related to immigration and religion in the study of AD disparities. Discussion and Implications Studying Arab American cognitive aging provides an innovative opportunity to more fully delineate factors that create and sustain health disparities, with special insights into both causes and consequences.