Academic Research

The Influence of Provaping “Gatewatchers” on the Dissemination of COVID-19 Misinformation on Twitter: Analysis of Twitter Discourse Regarding Nicotine and the COVID-19 Pandemic. Nathan Silver, Elexis Kierstead, Ganna Kostygina, Hy Tran, Jodie Briggs, Sherry Emery, Barbara Schillo. Journal of Medical Internet Research. [Public Health].

From Scalability to Subsidiarity in Addressing Online Harm. Amy A. Hasinoff and Nathan Schneider. Social Media + Society. [Communications] 

A lexicon-based approach to examine depression detection in social media: The case of Twitter and university community. Junyeop Cha, Seoyun Kim & Eunil Park. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. [Psychology]. 

Privacy concerns in consumer E-commerce activities and response to social media advertising: Empirical evidence from Europe. Aras Alkis & Tekin Kose. Computers in Human Behavior. [Economics].

A Multi-Model Intelligent Approach for Rumor Detection in Social Networks. Nikita Mariam Santhosh, Jo Cheriyan & Lekshmi S Nair. IEEE. [Computer Science].

Social Media and News Fact Sheet. Jacob Liedke & Katerina Eva Matsa. Pew Research. [Survey Methodology].

Popular Press

YouTube’s Dislike Button Rarely Shifts Recommendations, Researchers Say. Nico Grant, New York Times. New research from Mozilla shows YouTube users have little control over what is recommended to them.

TikTok tightens policies around political issues in run-up to US midterms. Alex Hern, The Guardian. Politicians will be banned from using social media platform for campaign fundraising.

Calls for Papers

International Conference on Social Networks Analysis, Management and Security (SNAMS-2022). Milan, Italy. November 29th - December 1st. Submission deadline: October 14, 2022. SNAMS 2022 aims to investigate the opportunities and in all aspects of Social Networks. In addition, it seeks for novel contributions that help mitigating SNAMS challenges. That is, the objective of SNAMS 2022 is to provide the opportunity for students, scientists, engineers, and researchers to discuss and exchange new ideas, novel results and experience on all aspects of Social Networks.

Special Issue on Global Misinformation and Disinformation. International Journal of Public Opinion Research. Abstracts Due: November 4, 2022. This special issue highlights research on global misinformation and disinformation, and its relationship with public opinion. Papers must be theoretically motivated, globally conscious, and must make use of empirical methods (including, but not limited to, survey research, experimentation, and content analysis).

Calls for Proposals

Mozilla Technology Fund: Auditing Tools for AI Systems. Mozilla Foundation. Deadline: October 4, 2022. This year, the Mozilla Technology Fund (MTF) is seeking proposals from projects which are providing tools and resources to auditors who are working to create greater accountability for AI systems. 

Events, Tutorials & Workshops

CSC Workshop: Data Analysis for Social Media: A Primer on the Twitter API. Friday, October 7, 2022, 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM EDT. Barnard Vagelos Computational Science Center. In this introductory workshop, Jack LaViolette (PhD Student in Sociology at Columbia University) will demonstrate how to pull, process, and visualization social media data using the Twitter API. No prior coding experience needed.

Misinformation & Disinformation: Technology Factors and Potential Solutions. Tuesday, October 11, 2022, 6:15 PM – 8:00 PM CDT. University of Texas, Austin. Technologies are part of the misinformation/disinformation problems, but can technologies—and their makers—be part of new solutions to fight it? How? And in the meantime, how can we protect ourselves, our companies, and our communities from being misled, accidentally or on purpose, and promote identification and refutation of falsehoods and educational sharing of demonstrably accurate information?

We would like to thank the S3MC funders for supporting this newsletter, with special thanks to the McCourt School’s Massive Data Institute (MDI) at Georgetown University.