9  Week 9: Social media tracking and NLP

In past weeks, we’ve discussed the use of social media and digital trace data of different kinds.

This week, we’ll be looking at the active tracking of social media as well as the use of more advanced techniques in the computational analysis of text.

To do so, we will look at examples from key substantive focuses of interest in last week: online information and misinformation.

9.1 Essential reading:

Phadke, Samory, and Mitra (2022)

Chang et al. (2022)

9.2 Additional reading:

Monti et al. (2022)

9.3 Slides

Slides for this week are available here

Chang, Keng-Chi, William R. Hobbs, Margaret E. Roberts, and Zachary C. Steinert-Threlkeld. 2022. “COVID-19 Increased Censorship Circumvention and Access to Sensitive Topics in China.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119 (4). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2102818119.

Monti, Corrado, Luca Maria Aiello, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, and Francesco Bonchi. 2022. “The Language of Opinion Change on Social Media Under the Lens of Communicative Action.” Scientific Reports 12 (1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-21720-4.

Phadke, Shruti, Mattia Samory, and Tanushree Mitra. 2022. “Pathways Through Conspiracy: The Evolution of Conspiracy Radicalization Through Engagement in Online Conspiracy Discussions.” Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 16 (May): 770–81. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19333.