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The United States leads the world in the number of mass shootings that occur each year, even as policy making on firearms remains polarized along party lines. In the face of increasing violence and public demand for policy action, we ask…
Following the 2016 US presidential election, there has been an increased focus on politically-motivated manipulation of mass-user behavior on social media platforms. Since a large volume of political discussion occurs on these platforms,…
Micro-blogging systems such as Twitter expose digital traces of social discourse with an unprecedented degree of resolution of individual behaviors. They offer an opportunity to investigate how a large-scale social system responds to…
Considering the raising socio-economic burden of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), timely and evidence-driven public policy decision making and communication of the latest guidelines pertaining to the treatment and management of the disorder…
Due to the outbreak of COVID-19, users are increasingly turning to online services. An increase in social media usage has also been observed, leading to the suspicion that this has also raised cyberbullying. In this initial work, we explore…
The year 2020 was a challenging year known mainly as the pandemic year. However, the notable event of George Floyd's killing broke many humans' hearts and made them protest on social media and the streets as well. In this research, we…
This article analyses public debate on Twitter via network representations of retweets and replies. We argue that tweets observable on Twitter have both a direct and mediated effect on the perception of public opinion. Through the interplay…
Online argumentative dialog is a rich source of information on popular beliefs and opinions that could be useful to companies as well as governmental or public policy agencies. Compact, easy to read, summaries of these dialogues would thus…
In recent years, digital technologies have grown in many ways. As a result, many school-aged children have been exposed to the digital world a lot. Children are using more digital technologies, so schools need to teach kids more about cyber…
In this paper, we collect and study Twitter communications to understand the societal impact of COVID-19 in the United States during the early days of the pandemic. With infections soaring rapidly, users took to Twitter asking people to…
Hurricane Sandy was one of the deadliest and costliest of hurricanes over the past few decades. Many states experienced significant power outage, however many people used social media to communicate while having limited or no access to…
This paper studies users' perception regarding a controversial product, namely self-driving (autonomous) cars. To find people's opinion regarding this new technology, we used an annotated Twitter dataset, and extracted the topics in…
After George Floyd's death in May 2020, the volume of discussion in social media increased dramatically. A series of protests followed this tragic event, called as the 2020 BlackLivesMatter movement. Eventually, many user accounts are…
This paper studies marijuana-related tweets in social network Twitter. We collected more than 300,000 marijuana related tweets during November 2016 in our study. Our text-mining based algorithms and data analysis unveil some interesting…
On 6 January 2021, a mob of right-wing conservatives stormed the USA Capitol Hill interrupting the session of congress certifying 2020 Presidential election results. Immediately after the start of the event, posts related to the riots…
We provide an NLP framework to uncover four linguistic dimensions of political polarization in social media: topic choice, framing, affect and illocutionary force. We quantify these aspects with existing lexical methods, and propose…
Toxic sentiment analysis on Twitter (X) often focuses on specific topics and events such as politics and elections. Datasets of toxic users in such research are typically gathered through lexicon-based techniques, providing only a…
We report the first, to the best of our knowledge, hand-in-hand collaboration between human rights activists and machine learners, leveraging crowd-sourcing to study online abuse against women on Twitter. On a technical front, we carefully…
The Web has become the main source for news acquisition. At the same time, news discussion has become more social: users can post comments on news articles or discuss news articles on other platforms like Reddit. These features empower and…
Web platforms have allowed political manifestation and debate for decades. Technology changes have brought new opportunities for expression, and the availability of longitudinal data of these debates entice new questions regarding who…