Related papers: Characterizing Sociolinguistic Variation in the Co…
Miss-information is usually adjusted to fit distinct narratives and can propagate rapidly through communities of interest, which work as echo chambers, cause reinforcement and foster confirmation bias. False beliefs, once adopted, are…
Misinformation promotes distrust in science, undermines public health, and may drive civil unrest. Vaccine misinformation, in particular, has stalled efforts to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic, prompting social media platforms' attempts to…
The most surprising observation reported by the study in (arXiv:2208.13523), involving stance detection of COVID-19 vaccine related tweets during the first year of pandemic, is the presence of a significant number of users (~2 million) who…
Inspired by contagion models of social belief formation, we develop an epistemically-informed modeling framework, SIS-Vo, in which vaccine-related information propagates on a signed opinion network. Our model allows for heterogeneous…
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccines have been an important topic in public discourse. The discussions around vaccines are polarized as some see them as an important measure to end the pandemic, and others are hesitant or find…
The success of a vaccination program is crucially dependent on its adoption by a critical fraction of the population, as the resulting herd immunity prevents future outbreaks of an epidemic. However, the effectiveness of a campaign can…
Our usage of language is not solely reliant on cognition but is arguably determined by myriad external factors leading to a global variability of linguistic patterns. This issue, which lies at the core of sociolinguistics and is backed by…
Language is a fundamental aspect of human societies, continuously evolving in response to various stimuli, including societal changes and intercultural interactions. Technological advancements have profoundly transformed communication, with…
Background: Social media public health campaigns have the advantage of tailored messaging at low cost and large reach, but little is known about what would determine their feasibility as tools for inducing attitude and behavior change.…
We developed a system to automatically classify stance towards vaccination in Twitter messages, with a focus on messages with a negative stance. Such a system makes it possible to monitor the ongoing stream of messages on social media,…
Language change is a complex social phenomenon, revealing pathways of communication and sociocultural influence. But, while language change has long been a topic of study in sociolinguistics, traditional linguistic research methods rely on…
This work examines the influence of misinformation and the role of AI agents, called bots, on social network platforms. To quantify the impact of misinformation, it proposes two new metrics based on attributes of tweet engagement and user…
The global spread of COVID-19 has caused pandemics to be widely discussed. This is evident in the large number of scientific articles and the amount of user-generated content on social media. This paper aims to compare academic…
Despite the increasing limitations for unvaccinated people, in many European countries there is still a non-negligible fraction of individuals who refuse to get vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, undermining governmental efforts to eradicate…
Vaccinations play a critical role in mitigating the impact of COVID-19 and other diseases. This study explores COVID-19 vaccine misinformation circulating on Twitter during 2021, when vaccines were being released to the public in an effort…
The spread of coronavirus and anti-vaccine conspiracies online hindered public health responses to the pandemic. We examined the content of external articles shared on Twitter from February to June 2020 to understand how conspiracy theories…
In 2019, outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases reached the highest number in the US since 1992. Medical misinformation, such as antivaccine content propagating through social media, is associated with increases in vaccine delay and…
Objective: The aims of the study were to examine the association between social media sentiments surrounding COVID-19 vaccination and the effects on vaccination rates in the United States (US), as well as other contributing factors to the…
Viral campaigns are crucial methods for word-of-mouth marketing in social communities. The goal of these campaigns is to encourage people for activity. The problem of incentivised and non-incentivised campaigns is studied in the paper.…
The interaction between fringe subcultures and mainstream online communities poses significant challenges for understanding discourse on social media. In this work, we investigate whether users active in conspiracy-focused communities…