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Population Medicine

Key considerations in digital population health interventions

Digital health technologies (DHTs) have become an integral part of global public health initiatives from encouraging and monitoring vaccine uptake to supporting self-management of long-term...

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Monitoring Hate Speech and the Limits of Current Definition

Current definitions of hate speech are inadequate as the basis for monitoring hate speech targeted at groups.

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First Amendment Protections for “Good Trouble”

The more things change, the more they stay the same. This unfortunately is true with respect to the efforts of civil rights activities and the response of the dominant power structure in the United...

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The Digital Services Act and the Brussels Effect on Platform Content Moderation

The European Union (EU) is at it again — engaging in extensive regulation of social media platforms in ways that will affect how the platforms regulate not just in the EU, but the world over.

PsyArXiv

The Role of Mental Representation in Sharing Misinformation Online

Fuzzy-Trace Theory posits that people will be more likely to share misinformation online if it promotes gist mental representations that cue motivationally-relevant values. In this paper, the...

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Could a Global “Wicked Problems Agency” Incentivize Data Sharing?

Global data sharing could help solve “wicked” problems (problems such as climate change, terrorism and global poverty that no one knows how to solve without creating further problems).

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Industry marketing of tobacco products on social media: case study of Philip Morris International’s IQOS

Newer tobacco products might be more likely to use social media as they grow in the global market. This study examined global social media marketing of HTPs.

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Building Trust in AI: A Landscape Analysis of Government AI Programs

As countries around the world expand their use of artificial intelligence (AI), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has developed the most comprehensive website on AI...

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Visual Misinformation on Facebook

In this study the researchers conducted the first large-scale study of image-based political misinformation on Facebook.

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A pilot randomized controlled trial of automated and counselor-delivered text messages for e-cigarette cessation

A growing body of evidence indicates that e-cigarettes deliver fewer harmful chemicals than traditional cigarettes and may support smoking cessation.

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Building trust in digital trade will require a rethink of trade policy-making

Trust is essential to democratic capitalist functioning because buyers and sellers don’t know each other. But the same is true for users and providers online.

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Which matters more, the means or the ends? Preferences for responsiveness in process and policy

Public dissatisfaction with democracy seems to have increased across the world.

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Graggle: A Graph-based Approach to Document Clustering

In this work, researchers have designed and implemented a new system they call Graggle, which builds a graph to model a corpus.

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Economic risk framing increases intention to vaccinate among Republican COVID-19 vaccine refusers

The COVID-19 pandemic remains a global threat to lives, livelihoods, and lifestyles.

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Beyond Digital "Echo Chambers": The Role of Viewpoint Diversity in Political Discussion

Modern political conversations are typically perceived to be unproductively affirming -- siloed in "echo chambers" of exclusively like-minded discussants.

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A Text-Based Smoking Cessation Intervention for Sexual and Gender Minority Groups: Protocol for a Feasibility Trial

Cigarette smoking among sexual and gender minority (SGM) groups in the United States is higher than heterosexual and cisgender individuals.

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Fact-checking Trump’s election lies can improve confidence in U.S. elections: Experimental evidence

As the 2020 campaign unfolded President Trump’s attacks on the integrity of the U.S. electoral system grew louder and more frequent.

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Impact of FDA endorsement and modified risk versus exposure messaging in IQOS ads: a randomised factorial experiment among US and Israeli adults

To enter or stay in the US market, tobacco manufacturers must submit a Premarket Tobacco Product Application (PMTA) to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

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Conceptual Replication of Four Key Findings about Factual Corrections and Misinformation During the 2020 U.S. Election: Evidence from Panel Survey Experiments

The researchers conducted experiments to evaluate the immediate and medium-term effects of misinformation and factual corrections during the 2020 election.

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"It's Not Just Hate'': A Multi-Dimensional Perspective on Detecting Harmful Speech Online

Well-annotated data is a prerequisite for good Natural Language Processing models.

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Foreign support does not mean sway for illiberal nationalist regimes: Putin sympathy, Russian influence, and Trump foreign policy in the Balkans

New information technologies increasingly allow autocrats to shape public opinion outside their borders.

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A Missed Opportunity to Further Build Trust in AI: A Landscape Analysis of OECD.AI

The world needs a better understanding of how policymakers can effectively encourage AI innovation and adoption, while mitigating potential AI risks.

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Wicked Problems Might Inspire Greater Data Sharing

Global public goods are goods and services with benefits and costs that potentially extend to all countries, people, and generations.

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Novel Implementation Strategy to Electronically Screen and Signpost Patients to Health Behavior Apps: Mixed Methods Implementation Study (OptiMine Study)

Behavior change apps have the potential to provide individual support on a population scale at low cost, but they face numerous barriers to implementation.

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Time and skeptical opinion content erode the effects of science coverage on climate beliefs and attitudes

Although experiments show that exposure to factual information can increase factual accuracy, the public remains stubbornly misinformed about many issues.

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A Future Built on Data: Data Strategies, Competitive Advantage and Trust

In the twenty-first century, data became the subject of national strategy. This paper examines these visions and strategies.

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Correcting COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation in Ten Countries

What can be done to reduce misperceptions about COVID-19 vaccines?

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Protecting Free Speech and Due Process Values on Dominant Social Media Platforms

In recent years, dominant social media platforms have been increasingly perceived as engaging in discrimination against conservative and right-wing viewpoints.

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The impact of Facebook’s vaccine misinformation policy on user endorsements of vaccine content: An interrupted time series analysis

The anti-vaccination movement, fueled by a mass of unsubstantiated, misleading, and manipulated messages, has reemerged in recent years.

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Evaluating the Efficacy of Facebook's Vaccine Misinformation Content Removal Policies

Social media platforms have attempted to remove misinformation about vaccines because it obstructs efforts to end the COVID-19 pandemic.

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An Investigation of Influential Users in the Promotion and Marketing of Heated Tobacco Products on Instagram: A Social Network Analysis

This study constructed a social network of Instagram users who posted IQOS content, a leading HTP brand, between 1 January and 5 April 2021 and identified users who positioned near the center of the...

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Political Misinformation and Factual Corrections on the Facebook News Feed: Experimental Evidence

As concerns about the spread of political misinformation have mounted, scholars have found that fact-checks can reduce the extent to which people believe misinformation.

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Twitter and Facebook posts about COVID-19 are less likely to spread misinformation compared to other health topics

The COVID-19 pandemic brought widespread attention to an “infodemic” of potential health misinformation.

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Do Local Newspapers Mitigate the Effects of the Polarized National Rhetoric on COVID-19?

This analysis tests two distinct predictions regarding local newspapers’ coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.

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Applying Word Embeddings to Measure Valence in Information Operations Targeting Journalists in Brazil

Among the goals of information operations are to change the overall information environment vis-á-vis specific actors.

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Framing Covid-19: Constitutional Versus Demagogic Rhetoric in Presidential Messaging

When Donald Trump was a candidate for president in 2016, his campaign rhetoric caused commentators to use a term they rarely applied to viable challengers for the country’s highest office: “...

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Visualizing Paired Image Similarity in Transformer Networks

The lack of explainability or interpretability is often cited as one of the main drawbacks of deep neural networks used in computer vision and machine learning.

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Research note: Examining how various social media platforms have responded to COVID-19 misinformation

Efforts to contain the COVID-19 pandemic have been complicated by a parallel infodemic, defined as an overabundance of information, including misinformation, which occurs during a disease outbreak.

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Viruses, Vaccines, and COVID-19: Explaining and Improving Risky Decision-making

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, risky decision-making has determined its trajectory, from deciding whether to socially distance or wear a mask to whether to get vaccinated.

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Questioning the Yelp Effect: Mixed Methods Analysis of Web-Based Reviews of Urgent Cares

The World Health Organization has deemed antibiotic resistance, which is primarily caused by antibiotic overuse, to be one of the world's most pressing health problems.

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“We Don’t Know” Means “They’re Not Sure”

The most familiar approach to handling respondent uncertainty about survey questions, the “don’t know” (DK) response, has an inconvenient feature.

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Misinformation or Activism: Mapping Networked Moral Panic Through An Analysis of #SAVETHECHILDREN

When looking at the recent social-political history of America it is difficult to avoid references to QAnon, a widespread,...

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The global effectiveness of fact-checking: Evidence from simultaneous experiments in Argentina, Nigeria, South Africa, and the United Kingdom

Little evidence exists on the global effectiveness, or lack thereof, of potential solutions to misinformation.

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Feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary effectiveness of a text messaging intervention for smoking cessation in Vietnam

Text messaging (SMS) smoking cessation programs can reach a large amount of cigarette smokers and are effective in increasing quit rates, but their efficacy has not yet been explored in Vietnam.

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Effectiveness of an optimized text message and Internet intervention for smoking cessation: a randomized controlled trial

Internet interventions are effective for smoking cessation and a recommended treatment approach.

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Trump sympathy in the Balkans: cross-border populist appeal

Do populist leaders tend to win support from the same kinds of people abroad as they do at home?

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Data is disruptive: How data sovereignty is challenging data governance

As data has become essential to economic growth, data governance has become critical to modern governance.

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Causal Understanding of Fake News Dissemination on Social Media

Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress towards computational fake news detection. To mitigate its negative impact,...

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Could Trade Agreements Help Address the Wicked Problem of Cross-Border Disinformation?

Whether produced domestically or internationally, disinformation is a “wicked” problem that has global impacts.

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Global Data Governance Mapping: 5 countries case study

Firms and governments have a variety of reasons for collecting data, including to create new products and to stimulate innovation.

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Book Chapter: Interactive Propaganda: How Fox News and Donald Trump co-produced false narratives about the Covid-19 crisis

This book examines how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the flows of communication between politicians, journalists and citizens.

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Elite rhetoric can undermine democratic norms

Democratic stability depends on citizens on the losing side accepting election outcomes.

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Spread of Misinformation About Face Masks and COVID-19 by Automated Software on Facebook

The dangers of misinformation spreading on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic are known.

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DCAP: Deep Cross Attentional Product Network for User Response Prediction

User response prediction is crucial to many industrial applications such as online advertising, recommender systems, and search ranking.

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Book Chapter: Countering hate speech

Counterspeech refers to communication that responds to hate speech in order to reduce it and negate its harmful potential effects.

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Global Data Governance Mapping: 52 case studies

Data is the most collected, analyzed, shared, and/or traded goods or services around the world.

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User Preference-aware Fake News Detection

Disinformation and fake news have posed detrimental effects on individuals and society in recent years, attracting broad attention to fake news detection.

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Factual Corrections Eliminate False Beliefs About COVID-19 Vaccines

The spread of misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines threatens to prolong the pandemic, with prior evidence indicating that exposure to misinformation has negative effects on intent to take the...

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QAnon on Twitter: An Overview

By Sam Jackson, Brandon Gorman and Mayuko Nakatsuka; University at Albany

Since the election of Donald Trump...

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Mining Dual Emotion for Fake News Detection

Emotion plays an important role in detecting fake news online. When leveraging emotional signals, the existing methods focus...

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Mainstreaming of conspiracy theories and misinformation

Parents - particularly moms - increasingly consult social media for support when taking decisions about their young children,...

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Where Have All the Data Gone? A Critical Reflection on Academic Digital Research in the Post-API Age

When the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica (CA) scandal burst into the headlines in March 2018, it cast a spotlight on tech...

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Debunking the Misinfodemic: Coronavirus Social Media Contains More, Not Less, Credible Content

Several high-profile sources have focused worldwide attention on the dangers of misinformation about COVID.

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Fact-Enhanced Synthetic News Generation

The advanced text generation methods have witnessed great success in text summarization, language translation, and synthetic...

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SWARMGRAPH: Analyzing Large-Scale In-Memory Graphs on GPUs

Graph computation has attracted a significant amount of attention since many real-world data come in the format of graph.

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BugGraph: Differentiating Source-Binary Code Similarity with Graph Triplet-Loss Network

Binary code similarity detection, which answers whether two pieces of binary code are similar, has been used in a number of applications.

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Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases

In this paper researchers show that standard machine learning can acquire stereotyped biases from textual data that reflect...

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Does Elite Rhetoric Undermine Democratic Norms?

In this paper, the researchers test the extent to which elite rhetoric can erode democratic norms in the contemporary United States.

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State media warning labels can counteract the effects of foreign misinformation

The rise of disinformation campaigns on social media has led platforms to lay out wide-ranging solutions to mitigate foreign interference.

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A Multi-Modal Method for Satire Detection using Textual and Visual Cues

Satire is a literary device that writers employ to mock or ridicule a person, group, or ideology by passing judgment on them for a cultural transgression or poor social behavior.

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Validating Social Media Monitoring: Statistical Pitfalls and Opportunities from Public Opinion

Social media are a promising new data source for real-world behavioral monitoring.

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Pandemic Politics in Eurasia: Roadmap for a New Research Subfield

Rarely do major research themes spring upon a discipline so suddenly that scholars must proceed without a robust research...

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Adapting and Extending a Typology to Identify Vaccine Misinformation on Twitter

One of the greatest risks to human health comes from the deluge of misleading, conflicting, and manipulated information currently available online

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Facebook Pages, the “Disneyland” Measles Outbreak, and Promotion of Vaccine Refusal as a Civil Right, 2009–2019

Facebook connects billions of people globally, enabling individuals to share information on pages organized around common interests.

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Not sure? Handling hesitancy of COVID-19 vaccines

From the moment the first COVID-19 vaccines are rolled out, there will need to be a large fraction of the global population...

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Not just conspiracy theories: Vaccine opponents and pro-ponents add to the COVID-19 ‘infodemic’ on Twitter

In February 2020, the World Health Organization announced an ‘infodemic’ that accompanied the global pandemic of COVID-19.

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Unifying casualty distributions within and across conflicts

The distribution of whole war sizes and the distribution of event sizes within individual wars, can both be well approximated...

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Covid-19 infodemic reveals new tipping point epidemiology and a revised R formula

Many governments have managed to control their COVID-19 outbreak with a simple message: keep the effective 'R number' R<1 ...

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Hidden order in online extremism and its disruption by nudging collective chemistry

Disrupting the emergence and evolution of potentially violent extremist movements is a crucial challenge. In recent months,...

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The COVID-19 Social Media Infodemic Reflects Uncertainty and State-Sponsored Propaganda

Significant attention has been devoted to determining the credibility of online misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic on social media.

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Iterative Effect-Size Bias in Ridehailing: Measuring Social Bias in Dynamic Pricing of 100 Million Rides

In 2015, the dynamic algorithmic pricing used by the Princeton Review was found to be charging Asian-Americans higher prices...

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Content analysis of Persian/Farsi Tweets during COVID-19 pandemic in Iran using NLP

As COVID-19 has rapidly and widely spread in the United States and globally, this now pandemic is shaking up all aspects of daily life in all countries affected in an unforeseen manner.

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Quantifying COVID-19 content in the online health opinion war using machine learning

This paper features R.F. Sear a GW undergraduate student in computer science as first author.

A huge amount...

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The online competition between pro- and anti-vaccination views

Social media companies are struggling to control online health dis- and misinformation, for example, during the COVID-19...

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Misinformation on the Facebook News Feed: Experimental Evidence

The proliferation of misinformation and fake news represents a pressing policy issue, with potentially deleterious consequences for democracies around the world.

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Detecting East Asian Prejudice on Social Media

The outbreak of COVID-19 has raised concerns about the spread of Sinophobia and other forms of East Asian prejudice across the world.

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Hate multiverse spreads malicious COVID-19 content online beyond individual platform control

Controlling the spread of COVID-19 misinformation and its weaponization against certain demographics (e.g. anti-Asian) -- in...

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Pro-Russian Biases in Anti-Chinese Tweets about the Novel Coronavirus

The recent COVID-19 pandemic, which was first detected in Wuhan, China, has been linked to increased anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States.

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The Twitter Social Mobility Index: Measuring Social Distancing Practices from Geolocated Tweets

The outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, a Coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19, has caused a pandemic on a scale unseen in a generation.

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Chinese social media suggest decreased vaccine acceptance in China: An observational study on Weibo following the 2018 Changchun Changsheng vaccine incident

Vaccine acceptance is a crucial public health issue, which has been exacerbated by the use of social media to spread content opposing vaccination.

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Machines Learn Appearance Bias in Face Recognition

Researchers have raised concerns about the use of face recognition for, inter alia, police surveillance and job candidate...

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A computational science approach to understanding human conflict

We discuss how computational data science and agent-based modeling, are shedding new light on the age-old issue of human...

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Surfacing the Submerged State: Operational Transparency Increases Trust in and Engagement with Government

As trust in government reaches historic lows, frustration with government performance approaches record highs.

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Vaccine-related advertising in the Facebook Ad Archive

Facebook has over two billion active users, making it one of the largest communities in the world.

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GraphOne: A Data Store for Real-time Analytics on Evolving Graphs

There is a growing need to perform a diverse set of real-time analytics (batch and stream analytics) on evolving graphs to deliver the values of big data to users.

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Identifying Nuances in Fake News vs. Satire: Using Semantic and Linguistic Cues

The efforts by social media platforms to reduce the exposure of users to misinformation have resulted, on several occasions,...

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Health Wars and Beyond: The Rapidly Expanding and Efficient Network Insurgency Interlinking Local and Global Online Crowds of Distrust

Distrust and misinformation pose an acute global threat to established science and medicine, as well as political processes.

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Framing and Strategic Narratives: Synthesis and Analytical Framework

Standard journalistic tropes were of little use after the 2016 US elections. Talk of blue and red states was eclipsed by distressed discussions.

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Government Role in Regulating Vaccine Misinformation on Social Media Platforms

Recognizing that interactive computer services offered a forum for true diversity of political discourse, Congress enacted the Communications Decency Act.

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Elites and foreign actors among the alt-right: The Gab social media platform

Content regulation and censorship of social media platforms is increasingly discussed by governments and the platforms themselves.