United States

Research into influence campaigns on Twitter has mostly relied on identifying malicious activities from tweets obtained via public APIs. By design, these approaches ignore deleted tweets. However, bad actors can delete content strategically to manipulate the system. Here, we provide the first exhaustive, large-scale analysis of anomalous deletion patterns involving more than a billion deletions by over 11 million accounts. Estimates based on publicly available Twitter data underestimate the true deletion volume. A small fraction of accounts delete a large number of tweets daily. We uncover two abusive behaviors that exploit deletions. First, limits on tweet volume are circumvented, allowing certain accounts to flood the network with over 26 thousand daily tweets. Second, coordinated networks of accounts engage in repetitive likes and unlikes of content that is eventually deleted, which can manipulate ranking algorithms. These kinds of abuse can be exploited to amplify content and inflate popularity, while evading detection. Our study provides platforms and researchers with new methods for identifying social media abuse.

ICWSM 2022

Manipulating Twitter Through Deletions

abusive behavior

manipulation

social media

**ICWSM-2022 will be held from June 6th – 9th in a hybrid format, both in-person in Atlanta, Georgia and online.**

**The Workshop and Tutorial Sessions are accessible to those that registered separately for these sessions. If you registered to attend but are not able to access the these sessions from the [Schedule tab](https://underline.io/events/291/schedule?day=2022-06-06T04%3A00%3A00.000Z), please email icwsm@underline.io
**

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.


ICWSM, now in its sixteenth year, has become one of the premier venues for computational social science, and previous years of ICWSM have featured papers, posters, and demos that draw upon network science, machine learning, computational linguistics, sociology, communication, and political science. The uniqueness of the venue and the quality of submissions have contributed to a rapidly growing conference, and a competitive acceptance rate of approximately 20% for full-length research papers published in the proceedings by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).


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Additionally, participants are encouraged to be courteous when sharing screen captures and photographs of conference events. Seek permission when possible and respect requests to take down images if those featured ask. Concerns around code of conduct or inclusion may be sent to icwsm22@aaai.org. If you have any concerns or items to report, please reach out to the General Chairs: Diyi Yang and Yelena Mejova.<br><br>


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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

On social media, due to complex interactions between users' attention and recommendation algorithms, the visibility of users' posts can be unpredictable and vary wildly, sometimes creating unexpected viral events for `ordinary’ users. How do such events affect users' subsequent behaviors and long-term visibility on the platform? For almost 3 years, we collected activities and changes in follower graphs of 17,157 scientists on Twitter, and identified those who experienced `unusual' virality for the first time in their profile lifespan.
Using a matching strategy, we investigated how viral events influence behavioral patterns and follower counts of those who experienced virality (`viral' group) vs. those who didn't.  After virality, the viral group increased tweeting frequency, their tweets became more objective and focused on fewer topics, and expressed more positive sentiment relative to their pre-virality tweets. Also, their post-virality tweets were more aligned with their professional expertise and similar to the viral tweet compared to past tweets. Finally, the viral group gained more followers in short and long terms than their matched counterparts.

The Impact of Viral Posts on Visibility and Behavior of Professionals: A Longitudinal Study of Scientists on Twitter

For AI technology to fulfill its full promises, we must have effective means to ensure Responsible AI behavior and curtail potential irresponsible use, e.g., in areas of privacy protection, human autonomy, robustness, and prevention of biases and discrimination in automated decision making. Recent literature in the field has identified serious shortcomings of narrow technology focused and formalism-oriented research and has proposed an interdisciplinary approach that brings the social context into the scope of study.
In this paper, we take a sociotechnical approach to propose a more expansive framework of thinking about the Responsible AI challenges in both technical and social context. Effective solutions need to bridge the gap between a technical system with the social system that it will be deployed to. To this end, we propose human agency and regulation as main mechanisms of intervention and propose a decentralized computational infrastructure, or a set of public utilities, as the computational means to bridge this gap. A decentralized infrastructure is uniquely suited for meeting this challenge and enable technical solutions and social institutions in a mutually reinforcing dynamic to achieve Responsible AI goals. Our approach is novel in its sociotechnical approach and its aim in tackling the structural issues that cannot be solved within the narrow confines of AI technical research. We then explore possible features of the proposed infrastructure and discuss how it may help solve example problems recently studied in the field.

A Decentralized Approach Towards Responsible AI in Social Ecosystems

The environment we are in can affect our mood and behavior. One environment factor is weather, which is linked to sentiment as expressed on social media. However, less is known about how integrating changes in weather, along with time and location contextual cues, can improve sentiment detection and understanding. In this paper, we explore the effects of three contextual features--weather, location, and time--on expressed sentiment in social media. Leveraging a large Snapchat dataset, we provide extensive experimental evidence that including contextual features in addition to textual features significantly improves textual sentiment detection performance by 3\% over transformer-based language models. Our results also generalize cross-domain to Twitter. Ablation studies indicate the relative importance of weather compared to location and time. We also conduct correlation analyses on 8 million Snapchat posts to highlight the link between past weather and current sentiment, showing that weather has a lasting impact on mood.  Users generally exhibit more positive sentiment in better weather conditions as well as in improved weather conditions. Additionally, we show that temperature's link with mood holds after controlling for time or population density, but there exist geographical differences in how temperature affects mood. Our work demonstrates the effectiveness of including external contexts in linguistic tasks and carries design implications for researchers and designers of social media.

Sunshine with a Chance of Smiles: How does Weather Impact Sentiment on Social Media?

On Reddit, individual subreddits are used to organize content and connect users. One mode of interaction is the subreddit link, which occurs when a user makes a direct reference to a subreddit in another community. Based on the ubiquity of these references, we have undertaken a study on subreddit links on Reddit, with the goal of understanding their impact on both the referenced subreddit, and on the subreddit landscape as a whole. By way of an extensive observational study along with several natural experiments using the entire history of Reddit, we were able to determine that (1) subreddit links are a significant driver of new suberddit creation; (2) subreddit links (2a) substantially drive activity in the referenced subreddit, and (2b) are frequently created in response to high levels of activity in the referenced subreddit; and (3) the graph of subreddit links has become less dense and more treelike over time. We conclude with a discussion of how these results confirm, add to, and in some cases conflict with existing theories on information-seeking behavior and self-organizing behavior in online social systems.

Subreddit Links Drive Community Creation and User Engagement on Reddit

Sinophobia, anti-Chinese sentiment, has existed on the Web for a long time. The outbreak of COVID-19 and the extended quarantine has further amplified it. However, we lack a quantitative understanding of the cause of Sinophobia as well as how it evolves over time. In this paper, we conduct a largescale longitudinal measurement of Sinophobia, between 2016 and 2021, on two mainstream and fringe Web communities. By analyzing 8B posts from Reddit and 206M posts from 4chan’s /pol/, we investigate the origins, evolution, and content of Sinophobia. We find that, anti-Chinese content can be evoked by political events not direclty related to China, e.g., the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement [59]. And during the COVID-19 pandemic, daily usage of Sinophobic slurs has significantly increased even with the hate-speech ban policy [43]. We also show that the semantic meaning of the words “China” and “Chinese” are shifting towards Sinophobic slurs with the rise of COVID-19 and remain the same in the pandemic period. We further use topic modeling to show the topics of Sinophobic discussion are pretty diverse and broad. We find that both Web communities share some common Sinophobic topics like ethnics, economics and commerce, weapons and military, foreign relations, etc. However, compared to 4chan’s /pol/, more daily life-related topics including food, game, and stock are found in Reddit. Our finding also reveals that the topics related to COVID-19 and blaming the Chinese government are more prevalent in the pandemic period. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the longest quantitative measurement of Sinophobia.

On Xing Tian and the Perseverance of Anti-China Sentiment Online

The proliferation of harmful and offensive content is a problem that many online platforms face today. One of the most common approaches for moderating offensive content online is via the identification and removal after it has been posted, increasingly assisted by machine learning algorithms. More recently, platforms have begun employing moderation approaches which seek to intervene prior to offensive content being posted. In this paper, we conduct an online randomized controlled experiment on Twitter to evaluate a new intervention that aims to encourage participants to reconsider their offensive content and, ultimately, seeks to reduce the amount of offensive content on the platform. The intervention prompts users who are about to post harmful content with an opportunity to pause and reconsider their Tweet. We find that users in our treatment prompted with this intervention posted 6% fewer offensive Tweets than non-prompted users in our control. This decrease in the creation of offensive content can be attributed not just to the deletion and revision of prompted Tweets - we also observed a decrease in both the number of offensive Tweets that prompted users create in the future and the number of offensive replies to prompted Tweets. We conclude that interventions allowing users to reconsider their comments can be an effective mechanism for reducing offensive content online.

Reconsidering Tweets: Intervening During Tweet Creation Decreases Offensive Content

Online social support via avatar communication is a powerful tool for bullying victims because they often lack offline social resources. Additionally, avatar communication allows users rich nonverbal interactions (e.g., emotional expressions) while maintaining online anonymity. This study investigates the role of online social support via avatars for victims and how to facilitate such support. Accordingly, we conducted an online questionnaire survey twice on an avatar communication application, Pigg Party, regarding mental health, offline and online social support, and offline bullying victimization (participants: 3,288 (1st wave) and 758 (2nd wave)). We found that online social support via avatars supplemented insufficient offline social resources, particularly when there was a high risk of offline bullying victimization. Furthermore, we investigated how online social support is improved by ego networks using social network data from Pigg Party. We demonstrated that belonging to large and closely connected communities can enhance online social support. Our findings suggest that avatar communication applications can improve players' mental health through online social support, reinforced by facilitating ego networks.

Online Social Support via Avatar Communication Buffers Harmful Effects of Offline Bullying Victimization

Social media is increasingly used for large-scale population predictions, such as estimating community health statistics. However, social media users are not typically a representative sample of the intended population --- a "selection bias". Within the social sciences, such a bias is typically addressed with restratification techniques, where observations are reweighted according to how under- or over-sampled their socio-demographic groups are. Yet, restratifaction is rarely evaluated for improving prediction.  Across four tasks of predicting U.S. county population health statistics from Twitter, we find standard restratification techniques provide no improvement and often degrade prediction accuracies. The core reasons for this seems to be both shrunken estimates (reduced variance of model predicted values) and sparse estimates of each population's socio-demographics. We thus develop and evaluate three methods to address these problems: estimator redistribution to account for shrinking, and adaptive binning and informed smoothing to handle sparse socio-demographic estimates. We show that each of these methods significantly outperforms the standard restratification approaches. Combining approaches, we find substantial improvements over non-restratified models, yielding a 53.0% increase in predictive accuracy (R^2) in the case of surveyed life satisfaction, and a 17.8% average increase across all tasks.

Correcting Sociodemographic Selection Biases for Population Prediction from Social Media

Computer vision applications like automated face detection are used for a variety of purposes ranging from unlocking smart devices to tracking potential persons of interest for surveillance. Audits of these applications have revealed that they tend to be biased against minority groups which result in unfair and concerning societal and political outcomes. Despite multiple studies over time, these biases have not been mitigated completely and have in fact increased for certain tasks like age prediction. While such systems are audited over benchmark datasets, it becomes necessary to evaluate their robustness for adversarial inputs. In this work, we perform an extensive adversarial audit on multiple systems and datasets, making a number of concerning observations- there has been a drop in accuracy for some tasks on CelebSET dataset since a previous audit. While there still exists a bias in accuracy against individuals from minority groups for multiple datasets, a more worrying observation is that these biases tend to get exorbitantly pronounced with adversarial inputs toward the minority group. We conclude with a discussion on the broader societal impacts in light of these observations and a few suggestions on how to collectively deal with this issue.

Two-Face: Adversarial Audit of Commercial Face Recognition Systems

Much attention has been on the behaviors of computer vision services when describing images of people. Audits have revealed rampant biases that could lead to harm, when services are used by developers and researchers. We focus on temporal auditing, replicating experiments originally conducted three years ago. We document the changes observed over time, relating this to the growing awareness of structural oppression and the need to align technology with social values. While we document some positive changes in the services’ behaviors, such as increased accuracy in the use of gender-related tags overall, we also replicate findings concerning larger error rates for images of Black individuals. In addition, we find cases of increased use of inferential tags (e.g., emotions), which are often sensitive. The analysis underscores the difficulty in following changes in services’ behaviors over time, and the need for more oversight of such services.

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The Impact of Viral Posts on Visibility and Behavior of Professionals: A Longitudinal Study of Scientists on Twitter

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Next from ICWSM 2022

The Impact of Viral Posts on Visibility and Behavior of Professionals: A Longitudinal Study of Scientists on Twitter

Similar lecture

DISMISS: Database of Indian Social Media Influencers (Snowballed Sequentially) on Twitter

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

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RESOURCES

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