Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Ciencias, Mención Computación / Memoria para optar al título de Ingeniero Civil en Computación / Motivación. Twitter es una red social que permite a las personas la interacción con otras y la difusión de información del mundo real. Por otro lado, en los desastres naturales, surge la necesidad de una rápida y confiable recopilación de lo sucedido y sus consecuencias. Por lo anterior, Twitter es considerado una posible gran fuente de información para eventos físicos significativos, en particular, en desastres naturales como los sismos. Objetivo. Dado el contexto, el objetivo de este trabajo es evidenciar la correspondencia medible entre la intensidad de un evento sísmico y la visibilidad del evento en Twitter. Se estudiará si esta correspondencia sea traducible en un modelo predictivo de intensidad de sismos. Contribución. El trabajo es un puente entre los eventos sísmicos y Twitter. Permite mostrar las características de Twitter que son relevantes en un evento sísmico, y a su vez, establece una metodología para identificar correlación entre sismos y Twitter. Finalmente, plantea un método que logra la correcta relación entre eventos sísmicos y Twitter. Este trabajo es pionero en el uso de las redes sociales para la estimación de los daños provocados por un sismo. Metodología. Se propone y aplica una metodología que considera desde la extracciónde los datos hasta la generación de modelos y comparación de resultados. Primeramente, se extraen los sismos de un intervalo definido de tiempo, y a su vez, los mensajes asociados a dicho evento sísmico. Luego ubicamos geográficamente los mensajes y generamos las características que serán relacionadas con los sismos. Posteriormente, se identifican las ubicaciones que percibieron el sismo y sobre estas comunas, se crea un modelo para estimar la intensidad de Mercalli. Finalmente, mejoramos el modelo utilizando la dimensión espacial y comparamos los resultados. Valor. El valor de este trabajo es ir más allá en las investigaciones que relacionan sismos con redes sociales, al incluir un mayor grado de profundización, al predecir la intensidad de los sismos a nivel de comunas y en la predicción restringida al uso exclusivo de información de Twitter.

Right-wing radicalism has moved to the periphery of public and academic attention. This is despite the fact that hate crimes are increasing and right-wing populist parties win enough votes to be represented in parliament or even make up governments Europe-wide. In addition, the Internet has made it easy for the right-wing to network and transport their ideology to a large audience. The research, therefore, asks how the German right-wing as a contrast society is portrayed on Twitter networks. Because it is the goal of contrast societies to change the target society in its favor, the Internet offers a space where an ideal society can be created online. Right-wing networks on Twitter will be analyzed with a social media analysis using Twitter statistics, NodeXL Pro and Gephi. The analysis will be conducted by identifying online radicalization themes, like for example hate towards refugees, in the form of hashtags, that constitute the alternative reality created online. The results of the analysis will then be presented in the context of radical contrast society's efforts to change society. This way, it will be possible to come to a meaningful conclusion that includes wider societal implications of the right-wings' networking on Twitter.

With the rise of the right- and left-wing populism growing in Europe, it is important for political scientists to look into this trend and what might be causing it. Studying the rise of Populism throughout Europe is important because of its potential threats to democracy. In this research, I examine one trend that may attribute to this growth of these political parties. In my research, I examine whether Eurosceptic ideas on social media are correlated to electoral success in European Parliament elections. Many populist party leaders have turned to social media to reach out and to gain followers. Social media has been a great platform for misperception and false news. Social media is also relatively easy to use and is used by many to obtain political information. For this research, I analyze the Twitter accounts of right-winged populist political actors in Germany, Italy, and Hungary during the two years before the 2019 EU Parliament elections. The four leaders looked into were Alice Weidel for the Alternative for Germany, Matteo Salvini for Lega in Italy, Gabor Vona, and Tamas Sneider for Jobbik in Hungary. There are two leaders from Hungary due to the switch in power during the two years. By doing content analysis in this analytical paper and looking into the reactions of followers on these actor’s social media pages, there will be a better understanding of how social media can help spread the growth of Eurosceptic attitudes in citizens in the EU. The anticipated results from this research are that as time progresses towards EP elections, populist actors will increase their social media usage with a stronger emphasis on Eurosceptic ideologies in their posts. With an increase in postings and rhetoric, it is expected that citizens in the EU will be adopting similar views with these leaders and will then vote for these populist parties into the European Parliament. This research is important in helping the EU and its leaders obtain a better understanding of the growth and progression of populism in relation to Euroscepticism and its role in social media. Having a better understanding of the concept, it can aid in slowing the progression of populism and Euroscepticism, the one thing that is undermining its institutions.

Due to the evolution of new media technologies, social networking websites have become major avenues for online media consumption. Twitter is one of many proven beneficial for online users. It is utilized for many different reasons, one of which includes music. It is then necessary to know how beneficial Twitter is for music fans and consumers. This study attempts to analyze the benefits of Twitter for music fans and consumers. Using an online survey, different gratification items are measured. Results reveal that some music fans and consumers do use Twitter for music purposes and that there is a statistically significant difference in terms of gratifications between those who use Twitter for music purposes and those who do not.

The Covid-19 pandemic first entered the international news cycle with mixed levels of concern. How did people across the globe react to first encounters with this virus? For many it was like seeing for the first time the spewing ash of a volcano, or the receding tides of a tsunami. Many reacted with disbelief, not knowing the proper course of action for themselves or for their community. This study explores the topics of discussion and reactions to the pandemic through the lens of quote-tweets--from the initial confusion and disbelief to the eventual politicization, economic closures, and reopening events. Quote-tweets are reactions to other tweets. This makes them idea to study opinions on various topics. If a tweet covers something interesting, often a quote-tweet will follow, displaying a reaction message tacked under the original message. This generates discussion about the topic in the original tweet. We gathered tweets from five of the first months of the pandemic and found several trends. Early on, collected quote-tweets were much more likely to discuss health-related topics such as symptoms, demographic information, or death. Conspiracy theories and disinformation also abounded during this time. Quote-tweet reactions were often short, simple, and expressing disbelief. Quote-tweets made up between 30 and 40 percent of all tweets streamed from twitter using search terms of Coronavirus and Covid-19. Later in our collected data, quote-tweets discussing the economy in relation to Covid-19 began to appear. They also grew more critical and political, often directing criticisms toward local or foreign government officials. Quote-tweet reactions followed suit and more often expressed criticisms and opinions of their own. Both agreement and disagreement increased over time. Although disasters often generate political debate, online discussion about the Covid-19 pandemic shifted dramatically over the course of this study. The trends of topics and opinions that make up these online discussions via quote-tweets and original tweets can inform health and emergency officials on trends to be found in pandemics and disasters to come.

Existe limitada información sobre el uso que los profesionales de la traducción dan a las redes sociales. Twitter, por ejemplo, es una de las plataformas de microblogging más usadas por esta comunidad y, a diferencia de otras, es considerada una esfera pública donde tienen lugar el intercambio de información y la accesibilidad inmediata a ella para cualquier usuario registrado. Los comportamientos relacionados a la producción de contenido y la interacción, así como las motivaciones de esta comunidad y la utilidad de esta red social para sus miembros, son aún inexplorados. Por ello, la presente investigación estudiará, mediante una etnografía digital, los comportamientos de aquellos traductores profesionales que utilicen Twitter como medio para interactuar con otros usuarios, pertenecientes o no a la comunidad traductora, en base a tres aspectos: la construcción de una red de contactos o clientes, la visibilización de su profesión y la interacción con usuarios internos o externos a la comunidad. Para la investigación, se propone hacer una observación no participante a la comunidad basada en los tuits y en las interacciones públicas en esta plataforma. Asimismo, se propone realizar entrevistas a aquellos usuarios que puedan tener cierta influencia dentro de la comunidad. / The information available on the use of social media by professional translators is limited. Twitter, for instance, is one of the most used microblogging platforms by this community and, unlike others, it is considered a public sphere in which the exchange of information and the immediate accessibility to it take place. Content production and interaction related behaviours, as well as this community’s motivations and its members’ gains from this social network, are still unexplored. In light of this, we intend to study the behaviours of professional translators that use Twitter as a means for interacting with other users, in and out of their community, through a digital ethnography and based on three aspects: the building of a network, the visibilization of their careers and the interaction with other users. For this study, we intent to perform a non-participant observation on the tweets and public interactions and conduct interviews to those users who have a certain influence or large following within the community. / Trabajo de investigación

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / As the size of Twitter© data is increasing, so are undesirable behaviors of its users. One such undesirable behavior is cyberbullying, which could lead to catastrophic consequences. Hence, it is critical to efficiently detect cyberbullying behavior by analyzing tweets, in real-time if possible. Prevalent approaches to identifying cyberbullying are mainly stand-alone, and thus, are time-consuming. This thesis proposes a new approach called distributed-collaborative approach for cyberbullying detection. It contains a network of detection nodes, each of which is independent and capable of classifying tweets it receives. These detection nodes collaborate with each other in case they need help in classifying a given tweet. The study empirically evaluates various collaborative patterns, and it assesses the performance of each pattern in detail. Results indicate an improvement in recall and precision of the detection mechanism over the stand- alone paradigm. Further, this research analyzes scalability of the approach by increasing the number of nodes in the network. The empirical results obtained from experimentation show that the system is scalable. The study performed also incorporates the experiments that analyze behavior distributed-collaborative approach in case of failures in the system. Additionally, the proposed thesis tests this approach on a different domain, such as politics, to explore the possibility of the generalization of results.

No description available.

The study examined students’ perceptions of Facebook, Twitter and blogs as tools for learning in a classroom environment. The population of the research was of 109 students from a 4-year college located in the southern region of the US. The results showed that most of the students were undecided in their perception of Facebook, Twitter and blogs as learning tools. The findings also showed that most of the participants were undecided in perception that Facebook, Twitter and blogs were viewed as sources of learning distraction. The findings equally indicated that significant number (about half of the population) of the participants disagreed that they felt intimidated using blogs to enhance learning while a third of the population was undecided. The results of the study did reveal that statistically significant differences existed among students in their perception of Twitter based on ethnicity. Hispanic and African American students perceived that using Twitter in the learning environment helped them to engage in collaborative learning. In addition, the findings showed African American respondents perceived that tweeting was also perceived as a distraction unlike other ethnic groups. The findings equally indicated that African American students perceived that Twitter was used as a tool to share life experiences unlike other ethnic groups represented in this study. The results equally revealed that female students actively participated in discussion forums more than their male counterparts did. The findings showed that Hispanic and African American students believed that using tweeting in the learning environment helped them to learn from one another. Whites and Native Americans did not share similar opinions. The results also revealed that African Americans and Hispanic Americans perceived that using Facebook during instruction enhanced collaboration among learners. In addition, the findings revealed that African American respondents perceived that tweets were helpful to them in sharing ideas as they complete assignments. However, White Americans, Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans did not have a similar view. The conclusion drawn from this study was that students enjoyed using social media tools for personal and entertainment purposes however; they did not enjoy using the tools for educational purposes. The general conclusion was that students were undecided in their perception of Facebook, Twitter and blogs as learning tools as well as perceived sources of distraction and intimidation.

This study identified what Twitter followers were discussing in reference to the top five megachurches in size. The methods utilized within this study involved an examination of all tweets hashtagging the top five megachurches over a sixteen day timeframe. The first research question was answered by categorizing tweets into predetermined content categories. This study also addressed the second research question by determining if Twitter implementation was beneficial in executing the missions of the top five megachurches. This question was answered by analyzing tweets using a five point Likert scale measuring how reflective each tweet was to the mission statement of each of the Top five megachurches. Ultimately, this study revealed that hashtagged tweets did reflect topics that are beneficial to each individual church's growth, however, tweets hashtagging the top three megachurches did not reflect the mission statements of each church. Therefore, this study concluded that Twitter implementation is beneficial to church growth because followers discuss topics relevant to the success of the church, however, Twitter may not be the most suitable social media platform for megachurches in their attempts to execute their mission statements.