Related papers: Moral Values Underpinning COVID-19 Online Communic…
Effective response to pandemics requires coordinated adoption of mitigation measures, like masking and quarantines, to curb a virus's spread. However, as the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated, political divisions can hinder consensus on the…
The explosive growth of social media has not only revolutionized communication but also brought challenges such as political polarization, misinformation, hate speech, and echo chambers. This dissertation employs computational social…
Effective public health messaging benefits from understanding antecedents to unstable attitudes that are more likely to be influenced. This work investigates the relationship between moral and emotional bases for attitudes towards COVID-19…
The COVID-19 pandemic has upended daily life around the globe, posing a threat to public health. Intuitively, we expect that surging cases and deaths would lead to fear, distress and other negative emotions. However, using state-of-the-art…
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…
In this paper, we study the moral framing of political content on Twitter. Specifically, we examine differences in moral framing in two datasets: (i) tweets from US-based politicians annotated with political affiliation and (ii) COVID-19…
The outbreak of the novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) has greatly influenced people's daily lives across the globe. Emergent measures and policies (e.g., lockdown, social distancing) have been taken by governments to combat this highly…
The COVID-19 pandemic, with millions of Americans compelled to stay home and work remotely, presented an opportunity to explore the dynamics of social relationships in a predominantly remote world. Using the 1972-2022 General Social…
While false rumors pose a threat to the successful overcoming of the COVID-19 pandemic, an understanding of how rumors diffuse in online social networks is - even for non-crisis situations - still in its infancy. Here we analyze a large…
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused widespread devastation throughout the world. In addition to the health and economical impacts, there is an enormous emotional toll associated with the constant stress of daily life with the numerous…
The COVID-19 pandemic has been affecting the world dramatically ever since 2020. The minimum availability of physical interactions during the lockdown has caused more and more people to turn to online activities on social media platforms.…
Since December 2019, COVID-19 has been spreading rapidly across the world. Not surprisingly, conversation about COVID-19 is also increasing. This article is a first look at the amount of conversation taking place on social media,…
The COVID-19 pandemic has developed to be more than a bio-crisis as global news has reported a sharp rise in xenophobia and discrimination in both online and offline communities. Such toxic behaviors take a heavy toll on society, especially…
Morality plays an important role in social well-being, but people's moral perception is not stable and changes over time. Recent advances in natural language processing have shown that text is an effective medium for informing moral change,…
During the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, social networks become the preeminent medium for communication, social discussion, and entertainment. Social network users are regularly expressing their opinions about the impacts of the…
The proliferation of online misinformation has emerged as one of the biggest threats to society. Considerable efforts have focused on building misinformation detection models, still the perils of misinformation remain abound. Mitigating…
The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced new opportunities for health communication, including an increase in the public use of online outlets for health-related emotions. People have turned to social media networks to share sentiments related…
Background: Social media chatter in 2020 has been largely dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Existing research shows that COVID-19 discourse is highly politicized, with political preferences linked to beliefs and disbeliefs about the…
Purpose: Public attitudes towards COVID-19 and social distancing are critical in reducing its spread. It is therefore important to understand public reactions and information dissemination in all major forms, including on social media. This…
Members of different political groups not only disagree about issues but also dislike and distrust each other. While social media can amplify this emotional divide -- called affective polarization by political scientists -- there is a lack…