United States

Italy was the first European country to be hit by COVID-19 in the early 2020, since then losing over 100,000 people to the disease. By the end of the vaccination campaign of 2021, 81% of the public received at least one dose. These dramatic developments were accompanied by a rigorous discussion around vaccination, both about its urgency and its possible negative effects. Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms in the country, but pre-pandemic vaccination debate has been shown to be polarized and siloed into echo chambers. It is thus imperative to understand the nature of this discourse, with a specific focus on the vaccination hesitant individuals, whose healthcare decisions may affect their communities and the country at large. In this study we ask, how has the Italian discussion around vaccination changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and have the unprecedented events of 2020-2021 been able to break the echo chamber around this topic? We use a Twitter dataset spanning September 2019 - November 2021 to examine the state of polarization around vaccination. We propose a hierarchical clustering approach to find the largest communities in the endorsement networks of different time periods, and manually illustrate that it produces communities of users sharing a stance. Examining the structure of these networks, as well as textual content of their interactions, we find the stark division between supporters and hesitant individuals to continue throughout the vaccination campaign. However, we find an increasing commonality in the topical focus of the vaccine supporters and vaccine hesitant, pointing to a possible common set of facts the two sides may agree on. Still, we discover a series of concerns voiced by the hesitant community, ranging from unfounded conspiracies (microchips in vaccines) to public health policy discussion (vaccine passport limitations). We recommend an ongoing surveillance of this debate, especially to uncover concerns around vaccination before the public health decisions and official messaging are made public.

ICWSM 2022

Echoes through Time: Evolution of the Italian COVID-19 Vaccination Debate

echo chambers

controversy

vaccination

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The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) is a forum for researchers from multiple disciplines to come together to share knowledge, discuss ideas, exchange information, and learn about cutting-edge research in diverse fields with the common theme of online social media. This overall theme includes research in new perspectives in social theories, as well as computational algorithms for analyzing social media. ICWSM is a singularly fitting venue for research that blends social science and computational approaches to answer important and challenging questions about human social behavior through social media while advancing computational tools for vast and unstructured data.


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The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) is a forum for researchers from multiple disciplines to come together to share knowledge, discuss ideas, exchange information, and learn about cutting-edge research in diverse fields with the common theme of online social media. This overall theme includes research in new perspectives in social theories, as well as computational algorithms for analyzing social media. ICWSM is a singularly fitting venue for research that blends social science and computational approaches to answer important and challenging questions about human social behavior through social media while advancing computational tools for vast and unstructured data.

technical paper

Today, administering COVID-19 vaccines at a societal scale has been deemed as the most appropriate way to defend against the COVID-19 pandemic. This global vaccination drive naturally fueled a possibility of pro-vax and anti-vax users strongly expressing their supports and concerns regarding the vaccines in online social media platforms. Understanding this online discourse is crucial for policy makers. This understanding is likely to impact the success of vaccination drives and might even impact the final outcome of our fight against the pandemic. The goal of this work is to improve this understanding using the lens of Twitter-discourse data. We first develop a classifier to categorize users according to their vaccine-related stance with high precision (97%). Using this method we detect and investigate specific user-groups who posted about vaccines in pre-COVID and COVID times. We specifically identify distinct topics that these users talk about, and investigate how vaccine-related discourse has changed between pre-COVID times and COVID times. Finally, for the first time, we investigate the change of vaccine-related stances in Twitter users and shed light on potential reasons for such changes in stance.

Winds of Change: Impact of COVID-19 on Vaccine-related Opinions of Twitter users

Online harassment in the form of hate speech has been on the rise in recent years. Addressing the issue requires a combination of content moderation by people, aided by automatic detection methods. As content moderation is itself harmful to the people doing it, we desire to reduce the burden by improving the automatic detection of hate speech.  Hate speech presents a challenge as it is directed at different target groups using a completely different vocabulary.  Further the authors of the hate speech are incentivized to disguise their behavior to avoid being removed from a platform.  This makes it difficult to develop a comprehensive data set for training and evaluating hate speech detection models because the examples that represent one hate speech domain do not typically represent others, even within the same language or culture.  We propose an unsupervised domain adaptation approach to augment labeled data for hate speech detection. We evaluate the approach with three different models (character CNNs, BiLSTMs and BERT) on three different collections.  We show our approach improves Area under the Precision/Recall curve by as much as 42% and recall by as much as 278%, with no loss (and in some cases a significant gain) in precision.

Domain Adaptive Hate Speech Detection

Concerns over the spread of abusive content in social media have led online platforms to explore large scale community-level forms of moderation.
As an alternative to full bans, Reddit has implemented quarantines of subreddits, limiting access to controversial communities without explicit removal.
Previous evaluations of the effectiveness of quarantines have focused on their impact on toxicity in affected communities.
In this work, however, we focus on examining the impacts of quarantines of political subreddits on issues of political engagement in the broader Reddit community.
We present a case study of two ideologically distinct political subreddits, r/The\_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse, and examine the impact of quarantines on activity, visibility, and political discussion.
We find that while quarantines had a homogenizing effect on participation in political subreddits, they had limited impact on the visibility of community-internal issues and political language, due to the entrenchment of subreddit norms.

A Tale of Two Subreddits: Measuring the Impacts of Quarantines on Political Engagement on Reddit

Because  traditional social media platforms continue to ban actors spreading hate speech or other forms of abusive languages (a process known as deplatforming), these actors migrate to alternative platforms that do not moderate user content to the same degree. One popular platform relevant for the German community is Telegram for which limited research efforts have been made so far.

This study aimed to develop a broad framework comprising (i) an abusive language classification model for German Telegram messages and (ii) a classification model for the hatefulness of Telegram channels. For the first part, we use existing abusive language datasets containing posts from other platforms to develop our classification models. For the channel classification model, we develop a method that combines channel-specific content information collected from a topic model with a social graph to predict the hatefulness of channels. Furthermore, we complement these two approaches for hate speech detection with insightful results on the evolution of German speaking communities focused on hateful content on the Telegram platform. We also propose methods for conducting scalable network analyses for social media platforms to the hate speech research community. As an additional output of this study, we provide an annotated abusive language dataset containing 1,149 annotated Telegram messages.

Introducing an Abusive Language Classification Framework for Telegram to Investigate the German Hater Community

Modelling differential stress expressions in urban and rural regions in China can provide a better understanding of the effects of urbanization on psychological well-being in a country that has rapidly grown economically in the last two decades. Using Weibo posts from over 65,000 users across 329 counties, we build hierarchical mixed-effects models to understand linguistic differences in the experiences and expressions of stress in urban-rural China. We analyze phrases, topical themes, and psycho-linguistic word choices in Weibo posts mentioning stress to better understand appraisal differences surrounding psychological stress in urban and rural communities in China; we then compare them with large-scale polls from Gallup. After controlling for socioeconomic and gender differences, we find that rural communities tend to express stress in emotional and personal themes such as relationships, health, and opportunity while users in urban areas express stress using relative, temporal, and external themes such as work, politics, and economics. We find corroborative trends in physical, financial, and social wellness with urbanization in Gallup polls.

Understanding Urban-Rural Differences in Stress in China Using Hierarchical Modeling

A breadth of literature has examined how gig workers use online forums. The past literature focuses primarily on how gig workers for mainstream corporate platforms leverage forums. Yet, marginalization, stigma, censorship, and criminalization all shape how people, including gig workers, use digital technology. In this work, we seek to take a first step toward understanding how marginalized, stigmatized, digitally censored, and in some cases criminalized gig workers leverage the affordances of online public forums to build community and increase their welfare. To do so, we conduct a qualitative analysis of 4,000 posts and 25,851 comments shared over four months in a large online public forum used by sex workers for peer support. Sex workers sit at the intersection of multiple marginalized communities, and thus offer a lens into the broader use of forums by marginalized labor communities. Our findings offer insight into how these workers use moderation to preserve their safety and community. Further, we highlight similarities and differences between how this community utilizes the forum platform and prior scholarship on the use of online forums by gig workers.

Community Under Surveillance: Impacts of Marginalization on an Online Labor Forum

Evacuations have a significant impact on saving human lives during hurricanes. However, as a complex dynamic process, it is typically difficult to know  individual evacuation decisions in real-time. Since a large amount of information is continuously posted through social media platforms, we can use them to understand individual evacuation behavior. In this paper, we collect tweets during Hurricane Irma in 2017 and train a text classifier in an active learning way to distinguish tweets expressing positive evacuation decisions from both negative and irrelevant ones. Additionally, we perform a demographic analysis and content clustering to investigate the potential causes and correlates of evacuation decisions. The results can be used to help inform planning strategies of emergency response agencies.

Identifying Hurricane Evacuation Intent on Twitter

Information on social media spreads through an underlying diffusion network that connects people of common interests and opinions. This diffusion network often comprises multiple layers, each capturing the spreading dynamics of a certain type of information characterized by, for example, topic, language, or attitude. Researchers have previously proposed methods to infer these underlying multilayer diffusion networks from observed spreading patterns but little is known about how well these methods perform across the range of realistic spreading data. In this paper, we conduct an extensive series of synthetic data experiments to systematically analyze the performance of the multilayer diffusion network inference framework, under varied network structure (e.g. density, number of layers) and information diffusion settings (e.g. cascade size, layer mixing) that are designed to mimic real-world spreading on social media. Our results show extreme performance variation of the inference framework: notably, it achieves much higher accuracy when inferring a denser diffusion network, while it fails to decompose the diffusion network correctly when most cascades in the data reach a limited audience. In demonstrating the conditions under which the inference accuracy is extremely low, our paper highlights the need to carefully evaluate the applicability of the inference before running it on real data. Practically, our results serve as a reference for this evaluation, and our publicly available implementation, which outperforms previous implementations in accuracy, supports further testing under personalized settings.

Limits of Multilayer Diffusion Network Inference in Social Media Research

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is responsible for producing the standards that underpin the web (e.g., HTTP, WebSockets, and WebRTC). While the IETF follows an open, consensus-driven process, protocol standardisation is inherently social and political, and latent influential structures might exist in the community. Exploring and understanding these is essential to ensuring the IETF's resilience and openness. We use network analysis to explore the social graphs of IETF participants and the influence that key contributors have.
We show that a small core dominates: the top 10% of participants contribute 43.75% of emails and come from a relatively small set of organisations. On the other hand, we also find that influence has become relatively more decentralised with time.
IETF participants also propose and work on protocol drafts that are either adopted by a working group for further refinement or get rejected at the early stage.
Using the social graph features combined with email text features, we perform regression analysis to understand the effect of user influence on the success of proposed protocol drafts being adopted. Our findings shed useful insights into behavior of participants across time, correlation between influence and success in draft adoption, and the significance of affiliated organisations in development of protocol drafts.

The Web We Weave: Untangling the Social Graph of the IETF

Due to the rise in toxic speech on social media and other
online platforms, there is a growing need for systems that
could automatically flag or filter such content. Various supervised
machine learning approaches have been proposed,
trained from manually-annotated toxic speech corpora. However,
annotators sometimes struggle to judge or to agree on
which text is toxic and which group is being targeted in a
given text. This could be due to bias, subjectivity, or unfamiliarity
with used terminology, (e.g. domain language, slang).
In this paper, we propose the use of a knowledge graph to help
in better understanding such toxic speech annotation issues.
Our empirical results show that 3% in a sample of 19k texts
mention terms associated with frequently attacked gender and
sexual orientation groups that were not correctly identified by
the annotators.

Echoes through Time: Evolution of the Italian COVID-19 Vaccination Debate

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Echoes through Time: Evolution of the Italian COVID-19 Vaccination Debate

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Next from ICWSM 2022

Winds of Change: Impact of COVID-19 on Vaccine-related Opinions of Twitter users

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