Related papers: Predicting Zip Code-Level Vaccine Hesitancy in US …
Despite ample supply of COVID-19 vaccines, the proportion of fully vaccinated individuals remains suboptimal across much of the US. Rapid vaccination of additional people will prevent new infections among both the unvaccinated and the…
Social media analysis has become a common approach to assess public opinion on various topics, including those about health, in near real-time. The growing volume of social media posts has led to an increased usage of modern machine…
Motivated by massive outbreaks of COVID-19 that occurred even in populations with high vaccine uptake, we propose a novel multi-population temporal network model for the spread of recurrent epidemic diseases. We study the effect of human…
Developing an understanding of the public discourse on COVID-19 vaccination on social media is important not only for addressing the current COVID-19 pandemic, but also for future pathogen outbreaks. We examine a Twitter dataset containing…
The COVID-19 pandemic brought upon a massive wave of disinformation, exacerbating polarization in the increasingly divided landscape of online discourse. In this context, popular social media users play a major role, as they have the…
Vaccination is widely recognized as the most effective way of immunization against many infectious diseases. However, unfounded claims about supposed side effects of some vaccines have contributed to spread concern and fear among people,…
Information spread in social media depends on a number of factors, including how the site displays information, how users navigate it to find items of interest, users' tastes, and the `virality' of information, i.e., its propensity to be…
The potential waning of the vaccination immunity to COVID-19 could pose threats to public health, as it is tenable that the timing of such waning would synchronize with the near-complete restoration of normalcy. Should also testing be…
We demonstrate the Misinformation Concierge, a proof-of-concept that provides actionable intelligence on misinformation prevalent in social media. Specifically, it uses language processing and machine learning tools to identify subtopics of…
The debate around vaccines has been going on for decades, but the COVID-19 pandemic showed how crucial it is to understand and mitigate anti-vaccine sentiments. While the pandemic may be over, it is still important to understand how the…
Background. After a year and half and over 4 million deaths, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to be widespread, and its related topics continue to dominate the global media. Although COVID-19 diagnoses have been well monitored, neither the…
Knowledge about the daily number of new infections of Covid-19 is important because it is the basis for political decisions resulting in lockdowns and urgent health care measures. We use Germany as an example to illustrate shortcomings of…
An analysis drawing on Signal Detection Theory suggests that people may fall for misinformation because they are unable to discern true from false information (truth insensitivity) or because they tend to accept information with a…
This paper leverages large-language models (LLMs) to experimentally determine optimal strategies for scaling up social media content annotation for stance detection on HPV vaccine-related tweets. We examine both conventional fine-tuning and…
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…
We present CoNTACT: a Dutch language model adapted to the domain of COVID-19 tweets. The model was developed by continuing the pre-training phase of RobBERT (Delobelle, 2020) by using 2.8M Dutch COVID-19 related tweets posted in 2021. In…
Traditional quantitative content analysis approach (human coding method) has weaknesses, such as assuming all human coders are equally accurate once the intercoder reliability for training reaches a threshold score. We applied the…
Understanding how misinformation affects the spread of disease is crucial for public health, especially given recent research indicating that misinformation can increase vaccine hesitancy and discourage vaccine uptake. However, it is…
Social media is a rich source of user behavior and opinions. Twitter senses nearly 500 million tweets per day from 328 million users.An appropriate machine learning pipeline over this information enables up-to-date and cost-effective data…
Social media is an appropriate source for analyzing public attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccine and various brands. Nevertheless, there are few relevant studies. In the research, we collected tweet posts by the UK and US residents from…