Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 01, 2025

"Perceived Community Alignment Increases Information Sharing"

One of my papers was published in final form today. Here are some details about it.

Title: Perceived Community Alignment Increases Information Sharing

Authors: Elisa C. Baek, Ryan Hyon, Karina López, Mason A. Porter, and Carolyn Parkinson

Abstract: It has been proposed that information sharing, which is a ubiquitous and consequential behavior, plays a critical role in cultivating and maintaining a sense of shared reality. Across three studies, we test this theory by investigating whether or not people are especially likely to share information that they believe will be interpreted similarly by others in their social circles. Using neuroimaging data collected while people who live in the same residential community viewed brief film clips, we find that more similar neural responses across participants is associated with a greater likelihood to share content. We then test this relationship using two behavioral studies and find (1) that people are particularly likely to share content that they believe others in their social circles will interpret similarly and (2) that perceived similarity with others leads to increased sharing likelihood. In concert, our findings support the idea that people are driven to share information to create and reinforce shared understanding, which is critical to social connection.

Thursday, July 11, 2024

RIP Barry Wellman (1942–2024)

I'm very sad to hear about sociologist Barry Wellman's death.

He was one of the people who welcomed me warmly to the Sunbelt community (though he did make a point to inform me, with much spittle flying in the process, of course, that the Dodgers shouldn't have left Brooklyn).

I figured (but never officially knew) that Barry had been sick for a while, given his sudden lack of activity starting a couple of years ago on Facebook and SOCnet after always making a point of stressing that the point of such social gathering spaces (including social media) was to be very active, so he always purposely did that.

(h/t through the SOCnet mailing list)

Thursday, June 08, 2023

"Detecting Political Biases of Named Entities and Hashtags on Twitter"

One of my papers came out in final form earlier today. Here are some details. (This is in collaboration with computer scientists, and stylistically it is rather different from much of my work. However, you'll still notice my hand in it. :P)

Title: Detecting Political Biases of Named Entities and Hashtags on Twitter

Authors: Zhiping Xiao, Jeffrey Zhu, Yining Wang, Pei Zhou, Wen Hong Lam, Mason A. Porter, and Yizhou Sun

Abstract: Ideological divisions in the United States have become increasingly prominent in daily communication. Accordingly, there has been much research on political polarization, including many recent efforts that take a computational perspective. By detecting political biases in a text document, one can attempt to discern and describe its polarity. Intuitively, the named entities (i.e., the nouns and the phrases that act as nouns) and hashtags in text often carry information about political views. For example, people who use the term “pro-choice” are likely to be liberal and people who use the term “pro-life” are likely to be conservative. In this paper, we seek to reveal political polarities in social-media text data and to quantify these polarities by explicitly assigning a polarity score to entities and hashtags. Although this idea is straightforward, it is difficult to perform such inference in a trustworthy quantitative way. Key challenges include the small number of known labels, the continuous spectrum of political views, and the preservation of both a polarity score and a polarity-neutral semantic meaning in an embedding vector of words. To attempt to overcome these challenges, we propose the Polarity-aware Embedding Multi-task learning (PEM) model. This model consists of (1) a self-supervised context-preservation task, (2) an attention-based tweet-level polarity-inference task, and (3) an adversarial learning task that promotes independence between an embedding’s polarity component and its semantic component. Our experimental results demonstrate that our PEM model can successfully learn polarity-aware embeddings that perform well at tweet-level and account-level classification tasks. We examine a variety of applications—including a study of spatial and temporal distributions of polarities and a comparison between tweets from Twitter and posts from Parler—and we thereby demonstrate the effectiveness of our PEM model. We also discuss important limitations of our work and encourage caution when applying the PEM model to real-world scenarios.

Sunday, January 16, 2022

The `PrickRank' Algorithm

One way to gather information is to purposely write an incorrect 'factual' statement on social media.

People love to correct others (often obnoxiously, but at least one acquires info).

Google has PageRank, and social-media platforms like Twitter have this `PrickRank algorithm'.

(This monicker is destined to become a classic, just like FIPO.)

Sunday, January 09, 2022

The Donkey Kong Visual Illusion

This visual illusion ought to be called the "Donkey Kong Illusion"

Wednesday, March 24, 2021

"Twitter" in 1803: The Finger of Contempt

Tuesday, March 16, 2021

My Top-5 Emoji: The Power of Positive Thinking

Sunday, November 22, 2020

A Visual Illusion: Game-and-Watch Style

Here is a visual illusion (in game-and-watch style) for you. The illusion is of the forward motion. It arises from a border of about 1 pixel that lags/leads the dominant color. (Tip of the cap to Sydney Padua.)

Sunday, November 15, 2020

Revenge of the Oxford Comma: 2020 Edition

Truth is stranger than fiction. Always.

(Tip of the cap to Jan van den Heuvel.)

Saturday, September 12, 2020

Usage of the Word 'Oy'

Tuesday, August 25, 2020

"Networks of Necessity: Preventing COVID-19 Among Disabled People and Their Caregivers"

We have a new white paper. Take a look at it. Eventually we'll also be posting an academic paper related to this project.

Sunday, August 16, 2020

Establish Dominance in Academia

"If [fill in] wants to establish dominance, they can just pee in the corner." is going to be my new go-to line in academia.

"Rotating" Cubes: An Impressive Visual Illusion

This visual illusion is very impressive. (I was skeptical and stopped and restarted the animated gif many times to look at the angles.)


(Tip of the cap to Philip E. Tetlock.)

Tuesday, August 04, 2020

When a Math Problem Comes Along, You Must Whip it!

Be Both the Doctor and the Kid

Yes!!!


(Tip of the cap to Sydney Padua.)

Monday, July 20, 2020

Cardboard "Fans" at Dodger Stadium

Sunday, June 07, 2020

The COVID-19 Graduating Class

Friday, May 29, 2020

Topography Will Tear Us Apart

I feel like this tweet was written just for me.

(Tip of the cap to Dave Richeson.)

Monday, April 20, 2020

A Paper Called "Lunch Menu" on Google Scholar

I love it!



Saturday, March 14, 2020

Preparing to Teach Classes in Cyberspace