The moderation of content in many social media systems, such as Twitter and Facebook, motivated the emergence of a new social network system that promotes free speech, named Gab. Soon after that, Gab has been removed from Google Play Store for violating the company's hate speech policy and it has been rejected by Apple for similar reasons. In this paper we characterize Gab, aiming at understanding who are the users who joined it and what kind of content they share in this system. Our findings show that Gab is a very politically oriented system that hosts banned users from other social networks, some of them due to possible cases of hate speech and association with extremism. We provide the first measurement of news dissemination inside a right-leaning echo chamber, investigating a social media where readers are rarely exposed to content that cuts across ideological lines, but rather are fed with content that reinforces their current political or social views.
Sentiment analysis has become a key tool for several social media applications, including analysis of user's opinions about products and services, support to politics during campaigns and even for market trending. There are multiple existing sentiment analysis methods that explore different techniques, usually relying on lexical resources or learning approaches. Despite the large interest on this theme and amount of research efforts in the field, almost all existing methods are designed to work with only English content. Most existing strategies in specific languages consist of adapting existing lexical resources, without presenting proper validations and basic baseline comparisons. In this paper, we take a different step into this field. We focus on evaluating existing efforts proposed to do language specific sentiment analysis. To do it, we evaluated twenty-one methods for sentence-level sentiment analysis proposed for English, comparing them with two language-specific methods. Based on nine language-specific datasets, we provide an extensive quantitative analysis of existing multi-language approaches. Our main result suggests that simply translating the input text on a specific language to English and then using one of the existing English methods can be better than the existing language specific efforts evaluated. We also rank those implementations comparing their prediction performance and identifying the methods that acquired the best results using machine translation across different languages. As a final contribution to the research community, we release our codes and datasets. We hope our effort can help sentiment analysis to become English independent.
WhatsApp was alleged to have been widely used to spread misinformation and propaganda during the 2018 elections in Brazil and the 2019 elections in India. Due to the private encrypted nature of the messages on WhatsApp, it is hard to track the dissemination of misinformation at scale. In this work, using public WhatsApp data from Brazil and India, we observe that misinformation has been largely shared on WhatsApp public groups even after they were already fact-checked by popular fact-checking agencies. This represents a significant portion of misinformation spread in both Brazil and India in the groups analyzed. We posit that such misinformation content could be prevented if WhatsApp had a means to flag already fact-checked content. To this end, we propose an architecture that could be implemented by WhatsApp to counter such misinformation. Our proposal respects the current end-to-end encryption architecture on WhatsApp, thus protecting users' privacy while providing an approach to detect the misinformation that benefits from fact-checking efforts.
The widespread adoption and dissemination of online news through social media systems have been revolutionizing many segments of our society and ultimately our daily lives. In these systems, users can play a central role as they share content to their friends. Despite that, little is known about news spreaders in social media. In this paper, we provide the first of its kind in-depth characterization of news spreaders in social media. In particular, we investigate their demographics, what kind of content they share, and the audience they reach. Among our main findings, we show that males and white users tend to be more active in terms of sharing news, biasing the news audience to the interests of these demographic groups. Our results also quantify differences in interests of news sharing across demographics, which has implications for personalized news digests.
Recently, messaging applications, such as WhatsApp, have been reportedly abused by misinformation campaigns, especially in Brazil and India. A notable form of abuse in WhatsApp relies on several manipulated images and memes containing all kinds of fake stories. In this work, we performed an extensive data collection from a large set of WhatsApp publicly accessible groups and fact-checking agency websites. This paper opens a novel dataset to the research community containing fact-checked fake images shared through WhatsApp for two distinct scenarios known for the spread of fake news on the platform: the 2018 Brazilian elections and the 2019 Indian elections.
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