Related papers: Understanding Lexical Biases when Identifying Gang…

Gang violence is a severe issue in major cities across the U.S. and recent studies [Patton et al. 2017] have found evidence of social media communications that can be linked to such violence in communities with high rates of exposure to…

Gang-involved youth in cities such as Chicago have increasingly turned to social media to post about their experiences and intents online. In some situations, when they experience the loss of a loved one, their online expression of emotion…

The U.S. has the highest rate of firearm-related deaths when compared to other industrialized countries. Violence particularly affects low-income, urban neighborhoods in cities like Chicago, which saw a 40% increase in firearm violence from…

Even though the Internet and social media have increased the amount of news and information people can consume, most users are only exposed to content that reinforces their positions and isolates them from other ideological communities.…

Social media such as tweets are emerging as platforms contributing to situational awareness during disasters. Information shared on Twitter by both affected population (e.g., requesting assistance, warning) and those outside the impact zone…

Gang affiliates have joined the masses who use social media to share thoughts and actions publicly. Interestingly, they use this public medium to express recent illegal actions, to intimidate others, and to share outrageous images and…

Gang-involved youth in cities such as Chicago sometimes post on social media to express their aggression towards rival gangs and previous research has demonstrated that a deep learning approach can predict aggression and loss in posts. To…

Algorithms are widely applied to detect hate speech and abusive language in social media. We investigated whether the human-annotated data used to train these algorithms are biased. We utilized a publicly available annotated Twitter dataset…

Most street gang members use Twitter to intimidate others, to present outrageous images and statements to the world, and to share recent illegal activities. Their tweets may thus be useful to law enforcement agencies to discover clues about…

The role of social media, in particular microblogging platforms such as Twitter, as a conduit for actionable and tactical information during disasters is increasingly acknowledged. However, time-critical analysis of big crisis data on…

Technologies for abusive language detection are being developed and applied with little consideration of their potential biases. We examine racial bias in five different sets of Twitter data annotated for hate speech and abusive language.…

Recent ethnographic research reveals that gang dynamics in Chicago's Southside have evolved with decentralized micro-gang "set" factions and cross-gang interpersonal networks marking the contemporary landscape. However, standard police…

In the last decade, social media has evolved as one of the leading platform to create, share, or exchange information; it is commonly used as a way for individuals to maintain social connections. In this online digital world, people use to…

Harmful content detection models tend to have higher false positive rates for content from marginalized groups. In the context of marginal abuse modeling on Twitter, such disproportionate penalization poses the risk of reduced visibility,…

Linguistics has been instrumental in developing a deeper understanding of human nature. Words are indispensable to bequeath the thoughts, emotions, and purpose of any human interaction, and critically analyzing these words can elucidate the…

We present a study of the relationship between gender, linguistic style, and social networks, using a novel corpus of 14,000 Twitter users. Prior quantitative work on gender often treats this social variable as a female/male binary; we…

Public figures receive a disproportionate amount of abuse on social media, impacting their active participation in public life. Automated systems can identify abuse at scale but labelling training data is expensive, complex and potentially…

With the rise of social media, people can now form relationships and communities easily regardless of location, race, ethnicity, or gender. However, the power of social media simultaneously enables harmful online behavior such as harassment…

Cyberbullying is of extreme prevalence today. Online-hate comments, toxicity, cyberbullying amongst children and other vulnerable groups are only growing over online classes, and increased access to social platforms, especially post…

During the 2016 US elections Twitter experienced unprecedented levels of propaganda and fake news through the collaboration of bots and hired persons, the ramifications of which are still being debated. This work proposes an approach to…