National Eating Disorders Association conducts a NEDAwareness week every year, during which it pu... more National Eating Disorders Association conducts a NEDAwareness week every year, during which it publishes content on social media and news aimed to raise awareness of eating disorders. Measuring the impact of these actions is vital for maximizing the effectiveness of such interventions. This study is an effort to empirically measure the change in behavior of users who engage with NEDAwareness content, and compare the detected changes between campaigns in two different years. We analyze a total of 35,895 tweets generated during two campaigns of NEDAwareness campaigns in 2019 and 2020. In order to assess the reach of each campaign, we consider the users participating in the campaigns and their number of followers, as well as retweeting engagement. We use the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text modeling and causal impact analysis in order to gauge the change in self-expression of users who have interacted with the NEDAwareness content, compared to a baseline group of users. We...
Proceedings of the 28th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, 2017
Online social media plays an increasingly significant role in shaping the political discourse dur... more Online social media plays an increasingly significant role in shaping the political discourse during elections worldwide. In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, political campaigns strategically designed candidacy announcements on Twitter to produce a significant increase in online social media attention. We use large-scale online social media communications to study the factors of party, personality, and policy in the Twitter discourse following six major presidential campaign announcements for the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We observe that all campaign announcements result in an instant bump in attention, with up to several orders of magnitude increase in tweets. However, we find that Twitter discourse as a result of this bump in attention has overwhelmingly negative sentiment. The bruising criticism, driven by crosstalk from Twitter users of opposite party affiliations, is organized by hashtags such as #NoMoreBushes and #WhyImNotVotingForHillary. We analyze how people take to Twitter to criticize specific personality traits and policy positions of presidential candidates.
Among the myriad barriers to abortion access, crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) pose an additional ... more Among the myriad barriers to abortion access, crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) pose an additional difficulty by targeting women with unexpected or “crisis” pregnancies in order to dissuade them from the procedure. Web search engines may prove to be another barrier, being in a powerful position to direct their users to health information, and above all, health services. In this study we ask, to what degree does Google Search provide quality responses to users searching for an abortion provider, specifically in terms of directing them to abortion clinics (ACs) or CPCs. To answer this question, we considered the scenario of a woman searching for abortion services online, and conducted 10 abortion-related queries from 467 locations across the United States once a week for 14 weeks. Overall, among Google’s location results that feature businesses alongside a map, 79.4% were ACs, and 6.9% were CPCs. When an AC was returned, it was the closest known AC location 86.9% of the time. However, w...
The FIFA Men’s World Cup Qatar 2022 has been analyzed through the frameworks of nation branding a... more The FIFA Men’s World Cup Qatar 2022 has been analyzed through the frameworks of nation branding and soft power. As the world’s most popular sport event, the World Cup has the possibility to enhance host nations’ images internationally, but we are not aware of empirical work attempting to assess public perceptions of Qatar, despite the considerable attention it has been paid. Accordingly, we assessed the discussion in the Twittersphere to shed some light on whether Qatar’s nation-branding and soft power attempts are reflected in public perceptions. We collected, geotagged, and analyzed 4,458,914 tweets with the word “Qatar.” We found that, contrary to the expectations of the organizers in Qatar, host nation status has not necessarily brought better nation branding or enhanced soft power, especially in the Global North. We conclude that social media’s interactive nature, which enables users to influence the discussion agenda, should have been considered by event organizers.
What food is so good as to be considered pornographic? Worldwide, the popular #foodporn hashtag h... more What food is so good as to be considered pornographic? Worldwide, the popular #foodporn hashtag has been used to share appetizing pictures of peoples' favorite culinary experiences. But social scientists ask whether #foodporn promotes an unhealthy relationship with food, as pornography would contribute to an unrealistic view of sexuality. In this study, we examine nearly 10 million Instagram posts by 1.7 million users worldwide. An overwhelming (and uniform across the nations) obsession with chocolate and cake shows the domination of sugary dessert over local cuisines. Yet, we find encouraging traits in the association of emotion and health-related topics with #foodporn, suggesting food can serve as motivation for a healthy lifestyle. Social approval also favors the healthy posts, with users posting with healthy hashtags having an average of 1,000 more followers than those with unhealthy ones. Finally, we perform a demographic analysis which shows nation-wide trends of behavior,...
BMC medical informatics and decision making, Jan 13, 2017
The explosion of consumer electronics and social media are facilitating the rise of the Quantifie... more The explosion of consumer electronics and social media are facilitating the rise of the Quantified Self (QS) movement where millions of users are tracking various aspects of their daily life using social media, mobile technology, and wearable devices. Data from mobile phones, wearables and social media can facilitate a better understanding of the health behaviors of individuals. At the same time, there is an unprecedented increase in childhood obesity rates worldwide. This is a cause for grave concern due to its potential long-term health consequences (e.g., diabetes or cardiovascular diseases). Childhood obesity is highly prevalent in Qatar and the Gulf Region. In this study we examine the feasibility of capturing quantified-self data from social media, wearables and mobiles within a weight lost camp for overweight children in Qatar. Over 50 children (9-12 years old) and parents used a wide range of technologies, including wearable sensors (actigraphy), mobile and social media (Wha...
In February 2016, World Health Organization declared the Zika outbreak a Public Health Emergency ... more In February 2016, World Health Organization declared the Zika outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. With developing evidence it can cause birth defects, and the Summer Olympics coming up in the worst affected country, Brazil, the virus caught fire on social media. In this work, use Zika as a case study in building a tool for tracking the misinformation around health concerns on Twitter. We collect more than 13 million tweets -- spanning the initial reports in February 2016 and the Summer Olympics -- regarding the Zika outbreak and track rumors outlined by the World Health Organization and Snopes fact checking website. The tool pipeline, which incorporates health professionals, crowdsourcing, and machine learning, allows us to capture health-related rumors around the world, as well as clarification campaigns by reputable health organizations. In the case of Zika, we discover an extremely bursty behavior of rumor-related topics, and show that, once the questiona...
Abstract. Multimedia annotation is central to its organization and re-trieval – a task which tag ... more Abstract. Multimedia annotation is central to its organization and re-trieval – a task which tag recommendation systems attempt to simplify. We propose a photo tag recommendation system which automatically extracts semantics from visual and meta-data features to complement existing tags. Compared to standard content/tag-based models, these automatic tags provide a richer description of the image and especially improve performance in the case of the “cold start problem”. 1
In The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington argued that the primary axis of global conflict ... more In The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington argued that the primary axis of global conflict was no longer ideological or eco-nomic but cultural and religious, and that this division would char-acterize the “battle lines of the future. ” In contrast to the "top down" approach in previous research focused on the relations among na-tion states, we focused on the flows of interpersonal communica-tion as a bottom-up view of international alignments. To that end, we mapped the locations of the world’s countries in global email networks to see if we could detect cultural fault lines. Using IP-geolocation on a worldwide anonymized dataset obtained from a large Internet company, we constructed a global email network. In computing email flows we employ a novel rescaling procedure to account for differences due to uneven adoption of a particular Inter-net service across the world. Our analysis shows that email flows are consistent with Huntington’s thesis. In addition to locatio...
Event tracking is the task of discovering temporal patterns of popular events from text streams. ... more Event tracking is the task of discovering temporal patterns of popular events from text streams. Existing approaches for event tracking have two limitations: scalability and inability to rule out non-relevant portions in text streams. In this study, we propose a novel approach to tackle these limitations. To demonstrate the approach, we track news events across a collection of weblogs spanning a two-month time period.
This workshop focused on applying new data analytics to address the needs of the most vulnerable ... more This workshop focused on applying new data analytics to address the needs of the most vulnerable populations, introduce resilience in vulnerable situations, and help battle new sources of vulnerabilities. The aim was to highlight latest developments in the use of new sources of data, including web and social media, in the efforts to address the health and other needs of most vulnerable, including children, families, marginalized groups, and those at the threat of poverty, conflict, natural disaster, or epidemic risk. The workshop brought together practitioners from the humanitarian sector and researchers from around the world. Main themes from the keynotes, paper and abstract presentations, and an interactive panel concerned the development of data sharing agreements and monitoring infrastructure before potential disasters strike, although the data collection should be performed such that the populations are not harmed in the process, and the resulting insights should contribute to ...
In the age of social media, disasters and epidemics usher not only a devastation and affliction i... more In the age of social media, disasters and epidemics usher not only a devastation and affliction in the physical world, but also prompt a deluge of information, opinions, prognoses and advice to billions of internet users. The coronavirus epidemic of 2019-2020, or COVID-19, is no exception, with the World Health Organization warning of a possible "infodemic" of fake news. In this study, we examine the alternative narratives around the coronavirus outbreak through advertisements promoted on Facebook, the largest social media platform in the US. Using the new Facebook Ads Library, we discover advertisers from public health and non-profit sectors, alongside those from news media, politics, and business, incorporating coronavirus into their messaging and agenda. We find the virus used in political attacks, donation solicitations, business promotion, stock market advice, and animal rights campaigning. Among these, we find several instances of possible misinformation, ranging fro...
We explore the meaning of “privacy” among citizens of the Gulf states of Qatar and Saudi Arabia a... more We explore the meaning of “privacy” among citizens of the Gulf states of Qatar and Saudi Arabia as it manifests in digital environments. Privacy is an essential and widely respected value in many cultures, and the way in which it is understood and enacted depends on context. Therefore, we conduct this research to understand user behaviors regarding privacy in the digital sphere, where individuals increasingly publish personal information. We present the results of two Arab Gulf based-studies, the first one is a mixed-methods analysis of 18K Twitter posts of Qatari nationals that mention “privacy.” The second study provides qualitative insights through 34 ethnographically-informed interviews that focus on online privacy with Saudi Arabian nationals. In our analysis, we pay attention to the face-to-face and digital contexts in which privacy is mentioned and enacted, and how those contexts lead to varied ideologies regarding privacy. Our findings reveal that in this context, the need a...
National Eating Disorders Association conducts a NEDAwareness week every year, during which it pu... more National Eating Disorders Association conducts a NEDAwareness week every year, during which it publishes content on social media and news aimed to raise awareness of eating disorders. Measuring the impact of these actions is vital for maximizing the effectiveness of such interventions. This study is an effort to empirically measure the change in behavior of users who engage with NEDAwareness content, and compare the detected changes between campaigns in two different years. We analyze a total of 35,895 tweets generated during two campaigns of NEDAwareness campaigns in 2019 and 2020. In order to assess the reach of each campaign, we consider the users participating in the campaigns and their number of followers, as well as retweeting engagement. We use the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text modeling and causal impact analysis in order to gauge the change in self-expression of users who have interacted with the NEDAwareness content, compared to a baseline group of users. We...
Proceedings of the 28th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, 2017
Online social media plays an increasingly significant role in shaping the political discourse dur... more Online social media plays an increasingly significant role in shaping the political discourse during elections worldwide. In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, political campaigns strategically designed candidacy announcements on Twitter to produce a significant increase in online social media attention. We use large-scale online social media communications to study the factors of party, personality, and policy in the Twitter discourse following six major presidential campaign announcements for the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We observe that all campaign announcements result in an instant bump in attention, with up to several orders of magnitude increase in tweets. However, we find that Twitter discourse as a result of this bump in attention has overwhelmingly negative sentiment. The bruising criticism, driven by crosstalk from Twitter users of opposite party affiliations, is organized by hashtags such as #NoMoreBushes and #WhyImNotVotingForHillary. We analyze how people take to Twitter to criticize specific personality traits and policy positions of presidential candidates.
Among the myriad barriers to abortion access, crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) pose an additional ... more Among the myriad barriers to abortion access, crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) pose an additional difficulty by targeting women with unexpected or “crisis” pregnancies in order to dissuade them from the procedure. Web search engines may prove to be another barrier, being in a powerful position to direct their users to health information, and above all, health services. In this study we ask, to what degree does Google Search provide quality responses to users searching for an abortion provider, specifically in terms of directing them to abortion clinics (ACs) or CPCs. To answer this question, we considered the scenario of a woman searching for abortion services online, and conducted 10 abortion-related queries from 467 locations across the United States once a week for 14 weeks. Overall, among Google’s location results that feature businesses alongside a map, 79.4% were ACs, and 6.9% were CPCs. When an AC was returned, it was the closest known AC location 86.9% of the time. However, w...
The FIFA Men’s World Cup Qatar 2022 has been analyzed through the frameworks of nation branding a... more The FIFA Men’s World Cup Qatar 2022 has been analyzed through the frameworks of nation branding and soft power. As the world’s most popular sport event, the World Cup has the possibility to enhance host nations’ images internationally, but we are not aware of empirical work attempting to assess public perceptions of Qatar, despite the considerable attention it has been paid. Accordingly, we assessed the discussion in the Twittersphere to shed some light on whether Qatar’s nation-branding and soft power attempts are reflected in public perceptions. We collected, geotagged, and analyzed 4,458,914 tweets with the word “Qatar.” We found that, contrary to the expectations of the organizers in Qatar, host nation status has not necessarily brought better nation branding or enhanced soft power, especially in the Global North. We conclude that social media’s interactive nature, which enables users to influence the discussion agenda, should have been considered by event organizers.
What food is so good as to be considered pornographic? Worldwide, the popular #foodporn hashtag h... more What food is so good as to be considered pornographic? Worldwide, the popular #foodporn hashtag has been used to share appetizing pictures of peoples' favorite culinary experiences. But social scientists ask whether #foodporn promotes an unhealthy relationship with food, as pornography would contribute to an unrealistic view of sexuality. In this study, we examine nearly 10 million Instagram posts by 1.7 million users worldwide. An overwhelming (and uniform across the nations) obsession with chocolate and cake shows the domination of sugary dessert over local cuisines. Yet, we find encouraging traits in the association of emotion and health-related topics with #foodporn, suggesting food can serve as motivation for a healthy lifestyle. Social approval also favors the healthy posts, with users posting with healthy hashtags having an average of 1,000 more followers than those with unhealthy ones. Finally, we perform a demographic analysis which shows nation-wide trends of behavior,...
BMC medical informatics and decision making, Jan 13, 2017
The explosion of consumer electronics and social media are facilitating the rise of the Quantifie... more The explosion of consumer electronics and social media are facilitating the rise of the Quantified Self (QS) movement where millions of users are tracking various aspects of their daily life using social media, mobile technology, and wearable devices. Data from mobile phones, wearables and social media can facilitate a better understanding of the health behaviors of individuals. At the same time, there is an unprecedented increase in childhood obesity rates worldwide. This is a cause for grave concern due to its potential long-term health consequences (e.g., diabetes or cardiovascular diseases). Childhood obesity is highly prevalent in Qatar and the Gulf Region. In this study we examine the feasibility of capturing quantified-self data from social media, wearables and mobiles within a weight lost camp for overweight children in Qatar. Over 50 children (9-12 years old) and parents used a wide range of technologies, including wearable sensors (actigraphy), mobile and social media (Wha...
In February 2016, World Health Organization declared the Zika outbreak a Public Health Emergency ... more In February 2016, World Health Organization declared the Zika outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. With developing evidence it can cause birth defects, and the Summer Olympics coming up in the worst affected country, Brazil, the virus caught fire on social media. In this work, use Zika as a case study in building a tool for tracking the misinformation around health concerns on Twitter. We collect more than 13 million tweets -- spanning the initial reports in February 2016 and the Summer Olympics -- regarding the Zika outbreak and track rumors outlined by the World Health Organization and Snopes fact checking website. The tool pipeline, which incorporates health professionals, crowdsourcing, and machine learning, allows us to capture health-related rumors around the world, as well as clarification campaigns by reputable health organizations. In the case of Zika, we discover an extremely bursty behavior of rumor-related topics, and show that, once the questiona...
Abstract. Multimedia annotation is central to its organization and re-trieval – a task which tag ... more Abstract. Multimedia annotation is central to its organization and re-trieval – a task which tag recommendation systems attempt to simplify. We propose a photo tag recommendation system which automatically extracts semantics from visual and meta-data features to complement existing tags. Compared to standard content/tag-based models, these automatic tags provide a richer description of the image and especially improve performance in the case of the “cold start problem”. 1
In The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington argued that the primary axis of global conflict ... more In The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington argued that the primary axis of global conflict was no longer ideological or eco-nomic but cultural and religious, and that this division would char-acterize the “battle lines of the future. ” In contrast to the "top down" approach in previous research focused on the relations among na-tion states, we focused on the flows of interpersonal communica-tion as a bottom-up view of international alignments. To that end, we mapped the locations of the world’s countries in global email networks to see if we could detect cultural fault lines. Using IP-geolocation on a worldwide anonymized dataset obtained from a large Internet company, we constructed a global email network. In computing email flows we employ a novel rescaling procedure to account for differences due to uneven adoption of a particular Inter-net service across the world. Our analysis shows that email flows are consistent with Huntington’s thesis. In addition to locatio...
Event tracking is the task of discovering temporal patterns of popular events from text streams. ... more Event tracking is the task of discovering temporal patterns of popular events from text streams. Existing approaches for event tracking have two limitations: scalability and inability to rule out non-relevant portions in text streams. In this study, we propose a novel approach to tackle these limitations. To demonstrate the approach, we track news events across a collection of weblogs spanning a two-month time period.
This workshop focused on applying new data analytics to address the needs of the most vulnerable ... more This workshop focused on applying new data analytics to address the needs of the most vulnerable populations, introduce resilience in vulnerable situations, and help battle new sources of vulnerabilities. The aim was to highlight latest developments in the use of new sources of data, including web and social media, in the efforts to address the health and other needs of most vulnerable, including children, families, marginalized groups, and those at the threat of poverty, conflict, natural disaster, or epidemic risk. The workshop brought together practitioners from the humanitarian sector and researchers from around the world. Main themes from the keynotes, paper and abstract presentations, and an interactive panel concerned the development of data sharing agreements and monitoring infrastructure before potential disasters strike, although the data collection should be performed such that the populations are not harmed in the process, and the resulting insights should contribute to ...
In the age of social media, disasters and epidemics usher not only a devastation and affliction i... more In the age of social media, disasters and epidemics usher not only a devastation and affliction in the physical world, but also prompt a deluge of information, opinions, prognoses and advice to billions of internet users. The coronavirus epidemic of 2019-2020, or COVID-19, is no exception, with the World Health Organization warning of a possible "infodemic" of fake news. In this study, we examine the alternative narratives around the coronavirus outbreak through advertisements promoted on Facebook, the largest social media platform in the US. Using the new Facebook Ads Library, we discover advertisers from public health and non-profit sectors, alongside those from news media, politics, and business, incorporating coronavirus into their messaging and agenda. We find the virus used in political attacks, donation solicitations, business promotion, stock market advice, and animal rights campaigning. Among these, we find several instances of possible misinformation, ranging fro...
We explore the meaning of “privacy” among citizens of the Gulf states of Qatar and Saudi Arabia a... more We explore the meaning of “privacy” among citizens of the Gulf states of Qatar and Saudi Arabia as it manifests in digital environments. Privacy is an essential and widely respected value in many cultures, and the way in which it is understood and enacted depends on context. Therefore, we conduct this research to understand user behaviors regarding privacy in the digital sphere, where individuals increasingly publish personal information. We present the results of two Arab Gulf based-studies, the first one is a mixed-methods analysis of 18K Twitter posts of Qatari nationals that mention “privacy.” The second study provides qualitative insights through 34 ethnographically-informed interviews that focus on online privacy with Saudi Arabian nationals. In our analysis, we pay attention to the face-to-face and digital contexts in which privacy is mentioned and enacted, and how those contexts lead to varied ideologies regarding privacy. Our findings reveal that in this context, the need a...
Background: The explosion of consumer electronics and social media are facilitating the rise of t... more Background: The explosion of consumer electronics and social media are facilitating the rise of the Quantified Self (QS) movement where millions of users are tracking various aspects of their daily life using social media, mobile technology, and wearable devices. Data from mobile phones, wearables and social media can facilitate a better understanding of the health behaviors of individuals. At the same time, there is an unprecedented increase in childhood obesity rates worldwide. This is a cause for grave concern due to its potential long-term health consequences (e.g., diabetes or cardiovascular diseases). Childhood obesity is highly prevalent in Qatar and the Gulf Region. In this study we examine the feasibility of capturing quantified-self data from social media, wearables and mobiles within a weight lost camp for overweight children in Qatar.
Uploads