Micro blogging sites such as Twitter have fundamentally changed the way that individuals communicate and spread information, with greater speed and greater representation of how affected individuals feel about given situations. By seeking information that is available on Twitter, individuals are constructing their opinions based on a large source of data from their peers. Laypeople are now influential amplification agents during unfolding crises. Factors that amplify or attenuate perceptions of risk may have far-reaching implications for risk communication research within emerging new social media contexts. In order to explore these factors, we experimentally manipulated content about risk information, specific emotion, and emotional imagery via hypothetical Twitter community event pages and measured risk perceptions, behavioral intentions, and subjective emotions that may accompany the amplification or attenuation of risk through social media. Across three experimental studies, emotion increased the seeking and sharing of information and behavior associated with risk prevention and regulation during crisis communication via experimental Twitter feeds. Gender was a substantial factor that impacted subjective emotion, risk, and behavior. Females demonstrated higher scores than males on the majority of these dependent measures when anger and sadness were induced (Studies 1 and 2) and when only anger was manipulated (Study 3). This attests to the significant impact that gender has for processing emotion in crisis communication. Emotion and risk influenced each other recursively for information seeking and sharing behavior, and emotion content increased subjective emotion compared to information content. Spokesperson strategies effectively reduced negative emotion, information seeking and sharing, information generation, and regulatory action related to the risk event. The present research suggests that evidence-based strategies may be applicable in the domain of social media crisis management. It is imperative that we further investigate the interplay of emotion and information as underlying mechanisms in relation to how information diffusion operates in new social media, as we do not know how perceptions of risk may be generated or altered in this relatively unexplored domain. / 10000-01-01

The purpose of this paper is to look at the effect of social media use on social capital. This paper attempts to establish a dichotomy between 'real' and 'perceived' social capital and the effect of social media use on both. I use a survey instrument measuring both the social media use and `real' social capital of one group compared with the social media use and `perceived' social capital of the second group. I find that while social media use is related with survey respondents feeling more involved politically and in their community, there is no correlation between actual political/community involvement for other respondents.

BACKGROUND: Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is the leading cause of vision loss in the world. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention categorizes those with diabetes into three age groups, including a young adult group, ages 18-44. In the Boston metropolitan area, around 4.6% of this age population has diabetes. EYESPOT is a private eye care practice in Boston. Of the few diabetic patients seen, most do not fall within the young adult age range. Several studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of social media to promote awareness of healthy behaviors. OBJECTIVE: The goal of this study is to utilize social media in order to raise awareness of DR in the young adult population and encourage preventative behavior. METHODS: A Facebook page for EYESPOT Diabetes was created to engage the young adult patient population and was monitored over a four-month period. Four categories of Facebook posts, differentiated by type, were disseminated. Posts were targeted to different audiences during each month, creating three unique time blocks. Posts were analyzed for their Engagement (total number of people who interacted with the post via a “like”, click, or “share”) and their Reach (total number of people that saw the post). Preliminary Engagement measures of each post were standardized to account for measures of Reach, creating an additional measure of standardized engagement scores (SES). A 4x3 ANOVA was conducted using SPSS to evaluate the effects of post type and time block on SES. RESULTS: Main effects were found for both post type and time block. Posts of the “Advertising” type had a significantly lower SES than all other posts (p<.01). Posts in the “Promotional College Student” time block had a significantly higher SES (p<.01) than posts in other blocks. There was a significant type-by-block interaction for SES (p<.01). Post hoc analysis revealed that posts of the “Technological” type had higher SES when posted in the block aimed at College Students (p<.01). Of note, 96% of the Facebook users who saw our posts (n = 4050) fell in the young adult bracket. After the conclusion of the study, two new patients in the young adult range contacted EYESPOT with intent to make future appointments, citing our Facebook page as reference. CONCLUSION: Our study suggests that Facebook may be an effective tool to encourage the young adult population to be aware of and engage in beneficial health behaviors. Future studies will investigate how to utilize social media further to increase physical appointments and patient-clinician interactions.

This dissertation investigated the influence of legitimacy and social media on organizational image management (IM) in North American professional sport. The author used a social theory approach to public relations in which legitimization is a core function, stakeholders influence the organization’s identity, and communicating identity is a legitimacy-seeking action that co-creationally drives organizational IM. This study examined the Ottawa Sport and Entertainment Group (OSEG), a conglomerate sport organization, using a qualitative embedded exploratory case study, which allowed analysis at different organizational levels, online and offline, using thematic and content analysis. The first two research questions explored the relationships between identity, image, and legitimacy in a social media world. The second two explored the explicit effects of social media on identity, legitimacy, image, and how these constructs manifest through social media. The first phase of the study used interview (N-52) and document (N-4) analyses to explore how identity, image, and legitimacy interact. Results showed that organizations’ legitimacy-seeking behaviour drives IM. The impetuous to change image comes from the outward facing legitimacy-seeking negotiation of image with external stakeholders. In phase two, using the legitimacy framework developed by Lock, Filo, Kunkel, and Skinner (2015), 5,668 tweets and retweets were coded, revealing 10 communicated image themes that sought technical, managerial, personal, and linkage legitimacy. These types of legitimacy were present in 99.5% of tweets and retweets. They sought to build trust, reinforce an image and identity of community involvement, and create conformity pressure. Such activities indirectly encouraged or legitimized expressions of fan support while inhibiting dissenting opinions. Previous research noted that identity and its expression through image are no longer defined solely by organizations. This study sought to extend image and identity research by suggesting legitimacy judgments drive co-creational identity and image change. The research extended Gioia, Hamilton, and Patvardhan’s (2014) process model of identity-image interdependence, creating a new framework for Twitter IM. The research explored how social media technology develops organizational identity, image, and legitimacy to provide insights necessary for fostering the effective use of IM and sport PR’s role within it.

More than half the population of Saudi Arabia has access to the Internet and social media, which are considered to be the fastest growing methods of communication in the region. The Saudi Ministry of Health encourages health-care providers, health professionals, and health organizations to accept and actively engage in using technology for improving health practices. Despite their increasing importance, there is little published literature on social media use and acceptance among health educators in Saudi Arabia. The purpose of the present study was to better understand the factors that determine the use and acceptance of social media. The theoretical framework consisted of the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) as well as an extension to that theory. Through this lens, the study investigated how personal innovativeness in information technology and level of education may influence behavioral intention or use of social media among health educators in Saudi Arabia. A cross-sectional design was employed to determine the relationships among the specified factors. The participants included 320 health educators who filled out an online survey that had been constructed and validated in the literature. Findings indicated that performance expectancy, social influence, and personal innovativeness have a significant positive influence on behavioral intention. Facilitating conditions were negatively significant to user behavior. As anticipated, age and level of education were successfully shown to be a moderator. The study also discussed social media usage patterns among health educators in Saudi Arabia for personal and health-education purposes.

Researchers have suggested that social networking sites are especially suited to creating a two-way communication with audiences as described by Kent & Taylor’s dialogic communication theory. However, researchers have also shown that most organizations are failing to actually create this type of dialogue with their followers on SNS. This leads to the question: why are organizations failing to realize this potential? In this study, I consider one possible reason: that organizations are following advice offered online by self-appointed “experts” on SNS strategy and that advice is not effective. I performed a content analysis of 29 websites that promise easy tips to increase social media engagement, identified by their placement at the top of Google search listings, then tested some of the most common advice from these sites on the Facebook and Twitter pages of a group of state-level advocacy organizations to see whether that advice is effective in increasing engagement or overall reach. I found many sites advising organizations to interact with followers, create engaging content and to include visual elements in posts. However, the recommendations were often hedged with limitations, or backed up by unreliable statistics or anecdotal evidence. My own experiment showed that using a call to action increased engagement on Twitter and including a photo increased reach on Facebook, but no other test variable had an effect on impressions, reach or engagement on either site. This suggests that the advice offered online is not reliable, and organizations may fail to create dialogic communication with their followers because they are relying on faulty advice to build their SNS strategies.

No description available.

In the fall of 2014, Jian Ghomeshi, host of CBC’s Q, was accused of sexual assault and harassment by a number of women. The women who came forward were criticized for the delay in reporting the incidents. As a response, two female Canadian journalists started the hashtag #beenrapedneverreported as a way of using networked media to foster alternative dialogue about sexual assault, ostensibly so women who have experienced rape could control the conversation and say how they understood their own experiences. The literature on sexual assault suggests that discussions of rape involving members of the general public are shaped by myths that foster victim blame and lead to survivors being silenced about the assault. I decided to look at whether or not posters created an alternative discourse around rape by comparing constructions of rape on the hashtag with the common rape myths present in mainstream conversations. I employed a social constructionist lens to approach the data to allow for multiple interpretations of these myths and to explore the way posters discussed sexual assault. In particular, I conducted a qualitative content analysis of 8250 tweets that were posted to the hashtag between October 30, 2014 and June 26, 2016. The findings indicate that each myth identified in the literature was reproduced in the discussion, suggesting that they continue to have salience in the ways that all people, including victims, understand rape as a crime. A number of posters accepted the myths and used them to construct their own understanding of why their rape was not reportable because they felt that it was their fault. This suggests that there is still a long way to go to challenge these myths as they are internalized by some survivors. However, most posters reproduced the myths to explain how the attitudes were mobilized against them by others, in effect, silencing them. This created an alternative discussion of how social assumptions work against female victims of rape at a variety of levels. These assumptions occur not only within policing agencies and the criminal justice system but also within family and friend support networks. A smaller proportion of posters actively contested the myths primarily through discussions surrounding consent. In particular, sexual assault was construed as denying women their agency to choose what happens to their body and rape was constructed as a loss of agency/autonomy. Posters put forward that women have a right to control their own body and that choice/control is taken away by the rapist. From this perspective, rape is not a sexual crime but a violent crime that denies human agency/personhood of the victim. This suggests that the consent debate is a key moment of feminist politics and this transgressive construction of rape upends the social assumptions about female and male sexuality.

In practice, neighbourhood policing adopts a view of information set out by Wilmer (1970), where community intelligence is a product that is produced by the police, owned by the police, for consumption by the police, in a ‘battle for information’ that seeks criminal ‘signals’ from ‘noise’. This thesis proposes that this industrial age police centric view of intelligence is redundant in the information age and that the growth of social media provides opportunities for the police and citizens to use information from events in new ways to co-produce community safety. The work draws on the work of Granovetter (1973) who theorised that new information rests with weak ties, Shirky (2009) who argued that collaborative technologies lower the transaction cost of citizen participation to enable the flow of latent information, and Ericson & Haggerty (1997) who envisaged a role for the police as communicators of risk. Utilising a new framework of information, developed for the thesis, to describe an information market, its mixed-methodology approach incorporated qualitative methods such as focus groups and survey, quantitative methods such as secondary analysis of Twitter data. A randomised controlled trial was also used to field test the hypothesis that information about crime proactively published by the police on social media would generate more information flowing from citizens to the police than reactive policing methods. Taken together the research found that citizens were either active or passive consumers of information who expected the police to provide an information bridge with and between citizens. In doing so they expected the police to filter signals about risk from noise for citizens, and amplify that signal so that it is heard by citizens above other background noise. The results did not support the hypothesis that social media would obtain more new pieces of information than traditional approaches. Rather it was found that PCSO inquiries received more information than email requests for information or alerts posted on social media. The research also acted as a catalyst for operational change and resulted in greater use of social media by the police force and a move towards a style of tweeting that was more likely to generate engagement in neighbourhood policing.

abstract: Cyberbullying is a phenomenon which negatively affects individuals. Victims of the cyberbullying suffer from a range of mental issues, ranging from depression to low self-esteem. Due to the advent of the social media platforms, cyberbullying is becoming more and more prevalent. Traditional mechanisms to fight against cyberbullying include use of standards and guidelines, human moderators, use of blacklists based on profane words, and regular expressions to manually detect cyberbullying. However, these mechanisms fall short in social media and do not scale well. Users in social media use intentional evasive expressions like, obfuscation of abusive words, which necessitates the development of a sophisticated learning framework to automatically detect new cyberbullying behaviors. Cyberbullying detection in social media is a challenging task due to short, noisy and unstructured content and intentional obfuscation of the abusive words or phrases by social media users. Motivated by sociological and psychological findings on bullying behavior and its correlation with emotions, we propose to leverage the sentiment information to accurately detect cyberbullying behavior in social media by proposing an effective optimization framework. Experimental results on two real-world social media datasets show the superiority of the proposed framework. Further studies validate the effectiveness of leveraging sentiment information for cyberbullying detection. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Computer Science 2017