If it looks like a spammer and behaves like a spammer,it must be a spammer: analysis and detection of microblogging spam accounts

Spam in online social networks (OSNs) is a systemic problem that imposes a threat to these services in terms of undermining their value to advertisers and potential investors, as well as negatively affecting users’ engagement. As spammers continuously keep creating newer accounts and evasive techniques upon being caught, a deeper understanding of their spamming strategies is vital to the design of future social media defense mechanisms. In this work, we present a unique analysis of spam accounts in OSNs viewed through the lens of their behavioral characteristics. Our analysis includes over 100 million messages collected from Twitter over the course of 1 month. We show that there exist two behaviorally distinct categories of spammers and that they employ different spamming strategies. Then, we illustrate how users in these two categories demonstrate different individual properties as well as social interaction patterns. Finally, we analyze the detectability of spam accounts with respect to three categories of features, namely content attributes, social interactions, and profile properties.     

The construction of self in social medias,such as Facebook

Social medias have changed and challenge the way we interact with each other. Social medias, such as Facebook, open up new possibilities for presentation of self and of managing the self you present to others. Is this process different for those that have grown up with social medias (The Net Generation) [Tapscott (Growing up digital: the rise of the net generation. Mcgraw-Hill, NY, 1998)] from how an older group of social media users would do it? What is their primary use of Facebook and how does this differ between generations? Such questions are discussed through engaging a group of Facebook users, with clear ideas of why and how they use Facebook, in joint reflections. The participants represent two generations of internet users; Those who was introduced to internet and social medias, such as Facebook, as adults (i.e. 40 years and older) and those who have grown up with the technology (i.e. under 25 years old, also called “The Net Generation”). The discussion indicate that there are differences in how these two groups relate to social medias, such as Facebook and for what they use Facebook. Further research is necessary to pursue those differences.     

Enriching in-person encounters through social media: A study on family connectedness for the elderly

Social media sites have become immensely popular. In 2010 it was estimated that Americans spent a quarter of their online time using social networking sites (SNSs) and blogs. Prior studies have shown how people spend more time socializing through digital communication services such as SNSs reducing face-to-face interaction. Individuals limited offline interactions cause a sense of self-perception of being less socially involved. In this paper we explore how the use of an ubiquitous system we developed, Tlatoque, is able to adapt and move the SNS's social capital outside the desktop into a domestic setting to support older adults' offline interactions with their family. The findings of a 21 week deployment study uncovered the offline practices surrounding the use of Tlatoque and its social implications toward the existing family ties (n=30). Results qualitatively indicate that the content shared in SNSs strengthens older adults' social network by enriching and complementing traditional social engagements such as those conducted over the phone or in-person.     

Embracing ambiguity in the design of non-stigmatizing digital technology for social interaction among senior citizens

In this paper we report our early experience with the design of technology for senior citizens. We take as our point of departure a pre-study of the ways in which older adult living occurs at three different senior housing facilities in southern Sweden. We contribute to the current debate concerning the ways in which digital technology can be designed to enable new types of living arrangements for the ever growing population of older people. We focus on technology designed to support the social rather than physical challenges of growing older. In particular we discuss how designing for social interaction can circumvent the stigma associated with being lonely in light of diminishing social networks, changed patterns of interactions with family, moving to a new neighbourhood, and the loss of a spouse. We will suggest that designers, in the design of digital technology for social interaction, deliberately leave room for ambiguity to make it possible for people to leave their intentions of use unarticulated. Furthermore, recognizing that many everyday activities already act as enablers for social interaction, we suggest utilizing such activities as an approach for design. We will support our suggestions by introducing three perspectives: a perspective emphasizing that the population of older adults is one of resourceful individuals; a perspective on social interaction emphasizing its circumstantial nature as an inherent part of everyday activities; and a perspective on the role of digital technology emphasizing its role as merely one of many resources present for human action. Finally, we will present an example concept showing how an enhanced TV remote control may be designed to enable social interactions without inflicting too much on the original experience of watching TV and most importantly, without stigmatizing the people using the remote control as lonely individuals craving the company of others.     

Users joining multiple sites: Friendship and popularity variations across sites

Our social media experience is no longer limited to a single site. We use different social media sites for different purposes and our information on each site is often partial. By collecting complementary information for the same individual across sites, one can better profile users. These profiles can help improve online services such as advertising or recommendation across sites. To combine complementary information across sites, it is critical to understand how information for the same individual varies across sites. In this study, we aim to understand how two fundamental properties of users vary across social media sites. First, we study how user friendship behavior varies across sites. Our findings show how friend distributions for individuals change as they join new sites. Next, we analyze how user popularity changes across sites as individuals join different sites. We evaluate our findings and demonstrate how our findings can be employed to predict how popular users are likely to be on new sites they join.     

Your place or mine? Learning from long-term use of Audio-Video communication

Workstations and personal computers are increasingly being delivered with the ability to handle multimedia data; more and more of us are linked by high-speed digital networks. With multimedia communication environments becoming more commonplace, what have we learned from earlier experiences with prototype media environments? This paper reports on some of our experiences as developers, researchers and users of flexible, networked, multimedia computer environments, or “media spaces”. It focusses on the lessons we can learn from extended, long-term use of media spaces, with connections that last not hours or days, but months or years. We take as our starting point a set of assumptions which differ from traditional analytical perspectives. In particular, we begin from the position that that real-world baseline is not always an appropriate point of comparison for new media technologies; that a set of complex and intricate communicative behaviours arise over time; and that media spaces connect not only individuals, but the wider social groups of which they form part. We outline a framework based on four perspectives — individual, interactional, communal and societal — from which to view the behaviour of individuals and groups linked by multimedia environments. On the basis of our long-term findings, we argue for a view of media spaces which, first, focuses on a wider interpretation of media space interaction than the traditional view of person-to-person connections, and, second, emphasises emergent communicative practices, rather than looking for the transfer of face-to-face behaviours.     

Already up? using mobile phones to track & share sleep behavior

Users share a lot of personal information with friends, family members, and colleagues via social networks. Surprisingly, some users choose to share their sleeping patterns, perhaps both for awareness as well as a sense of connection to others. Indeed, sharing basic sleep data, whether a person has gone to bed or waking up, informs others about not just one's sleeping routines but also indicates physical state, and reflects a sense of wellness. We present Somnometer, a social alarm clock for mobile phones that helps users to capture and share their sleep patterns. While the sleep rating is obtained from explicit user input, the sleep duration is estimated based on monitoring a user's interactions with the app. Observing that many individuals currently utilize their mobile phone as an alarm clock revealed behavioral patterns that we were able to leverage when designing the app. We assess whether it is possible to reliably monitor one's sleep duration using such apps. We further investigate whether providing users with the ability to track their sleep behavior over a long time period can empower them to engage in healthier sleep habits. We hypothesize that sharing sleep information with social networks impacts awareness and connectedness among friends. The result from a controlled study reveals that it is feasible to monitor a user's sleep duration based just on her interactions with an alarm clock app on the mobile phone. The results from both an in-the-wild study and a controlled experiment suggest that providing a way for users to track their sleep behaviors increased user awareness of sleep patterns and induced healthier habits. However, we also found that, given the current broadcast nature of existing social networks, users were concerned with sharing their sleep patterns indiscriminately.     

The Perils and Promises of Self-Disclosure on Social Media

In addition to their professional social media accounts, individuals are increasingly using their personal profiles and casual posts to communicate their identities to work colleagues. They do this in order to ‘stand out from the crowd’ and to signal attributes that are difficult to showcase explicitly in a work setting. Existing studies have tended to treat personal posts viewed in a professional context as a problem, since they can threaten impression management efforts. These accounts focus on the attempts of individuals to separate their life domains on social media. In contrast, we present the narratives of professional IT workers in India who intentionally disrupt the boundaries between personal and professional profiles in order to get noticed by their employers. Drawing on the dramaturgical vocabulary of Goffman (1959) we shed light on how individuals cope with increased levels of self-disclosure on social media. We argue that their self-presentations can be likened to post-modern performances in which the traditional boundaries between actor and audience are intentionally unsettled. These casual posts communicate additional personal traits that are not otherwise included in professional presentations. Since there are no strict boundaries between formal front-stage and relaxed back-stage regions in these types of performance, a liminal mental state is often used, which enables a better assessment of the type of information to present on social media.     

A life story in three parts: the use of triptychs to make sense of personal digital data

Many social media platforms support the curation of personal digital data, and, more recently, the use of that data for review and reflection. We explored the process of reflection by asking users to create a meaningful ‘triptych’ of photographs drawn from their Facebook accounts. In a first study, we asked participants to manually trawl their own accounts and select three relevant images, which we then framed and used as an interview probe. In a second study, we designed an automated triptych generation system and assessed participants’ experiences of using this system. We conducted qualitative analyses of participant interviews from both studies. Consistent with other ‘slow technology’ work, we found the act of creating a physical artefact from social media data gave that data new meaning, albeit with notable differences between manual versus automatically generated triptychs. We conclude by discussing possible improvements to the design of the automated triptych system.     

From Facebook to the Neighbourhood: Infrastructuring of Hybrid Community Engagement

In recent years, social media have increased the resources that individuals and organizations are able to mobilize for the development of socially innovative practices. In this article, we engage with a naturally occurring development in a Trentinian neighbourhood to examine the cooperative interactions amongst members of a local community. The first author and local residents of the neighbourhood participated in online discussions, decision making, and physical activities that led to material changes in the area. The interventions are motivated by and based on the concept of Social Street that combines online interactions in a closed Facebook group with face-to-face meetings seeking to practically engage the collective in accomplishing certain immediate or ongoing needs. Over the course of two years, we studied this local instantiation of Social Street in Trento, Italy by way of an action-oriented (digital) ethnography. Through this work, we demonstrate how urban neighbourhoods might benefit from hybrid forms of community engagement that are enacted through a constant back and forth between online and face-to-face interactions. We further argue that the infrastructuring of local urban collectives should follow strategies that pay attention to the multiple issues in urban neighbourhoods and people’s attachments to them. Overall, the paper reflects upon the challenges and configurations of participation that this form of community-work entails.     

Loneliness and social uses of the Internet

Loneliness has been associated with increased Internet use. Lonely individuals may be drawn online because of the increased potential for companionship, the changed social interaction patterns online, and as a way to modulate negative moods associated with loneliness. Online, social presence and intimacy levels can be controlled; users can remain invisible as they observe others’ interactions, and can control the amount and timing of their interactions. Anonymity and lack of face-to-face communication online may decrease self-consciousness and social anxiety, which could facilitate pro-social behavior and enhance online friendship formation. Support for this model was found in a survey of 277 undergraduate Internet users that was used to assess differences between lonely and not-lonely individuals in patterns of Internet use. Loneliness was assessed on the UCLA Loneliness Scale; students in the highest 20% (Lonely) were compared with all other students (Non-lonely). Lonely individuals used the Internet and e-mail more and were more likely to use the Internet for emotional support than others. Social behavior of lonely individuals consistently was enhanced online, and lonely individuals were more likely to report making online friends and heightened satisfaction with their online friends. The lonely were more likely to use the Internet to modulate negative moods, and to report that their Internet use was causing disturbances in their daily functioning.     

Is the social use of media for seeking connectedness or for avoiding social isolation? Mechanisms underlying media use and subjective well-being

This study provides a resolution for two contrasting hypotheses around media use, the augmentation and the displacement hypotheses. To do this, we conducted an online survey of 300 Korean adults examining the relationships among the social use of media, face-to-face communication, social isolation, connectedness, and subjective well-being. The results indicate that connectedness, not avoiding social isolation, mediates the effects of the social use of media on subjective well-being. On the other hand, both connectedness and avoiding social isolation mediate the effects of face-to-face communication on subjective well-being. These results suggest that the social use of media is limited to seeking connectedness to others, whereas face-to-face communication can facilitate avoiding social isolation as well as seeking connectedness, which can explain why the two contrasting hypothesis, the augmentation and the displacement hypotheses, can be right. In the domain of seeking connectedness, media can augment face-to-face communication. On the other hand, in the domain of avoiding social isolation, media may displace face-to-face communication.     

An Experimental Study of Text Representation Methods for Cross-Site Purchase Preference Prediction Using the Social Text Data

Nowadays, many e-commerce websites allow users to login with their existing social networking accounts. When a new user comes to an e-commerce website, it is interesting to study whether the information from external social media platforms can be utilized to alleviate the cold-start problem. In this paper, we focus on a specific task on cross-site information sharing, i.e., leveraging the text posted by a user on the social media platform (termed as social text) to infer his/her purchase preference of product categories on an e-commerce platform. To solve the task, a key problem is how to effectively represent the social text in a way that its information can be utilized on the e-commerce platform. We study two major kinds of text representation methods for predicting cross-site purchase preference, including shallow textual features and deep textual features learned by deep neural network models. We conduct extensive experiments on a large linked dataset, and our experimental results indicate that it is promising to utilize the social text for predicting purchase preference. Specially, the deep neural network approach has shown a more powerful predictive ability when the number of categories becomes large.     

Millennial engineers: Digital media and information ecology of engineering students

Media significantly shape how and what we learn. To date there is limited understanding of digital media and information use by engineering students. We comprehensively review existing literature and present findings from a research study investigating digital media and information use of ‘millennial’ engineers who purportedly possess distinctive experience, habits, and perceptions about technology. We administered a multiple-item survey to a cohort of first year engineering students who entered a large public university in the United States in August 2009. Self-reported information on the frequency of media device usage, participation in social networking, academic activities and information seeking tendencies, was received from 204 participants. Similar to other youth, millennial engineers use technology extensively and are frequent users of both commonly used digital devices as well as applications. Students’ device ownership was marked by a relatively low use of desktop computers and significant use of mobile devices. Students reported using the Internet extensively for both entertainment and school related work. Facebook™ use was common but Twitter™ use was limited. Multitasking was common and its self-reported effectiveness varied across participants. Gender differences were found across several items. Implications for teaching and learning are discussed.     

What does your selfie say about you?

Selfies refer to self-portraits taken by oneself using a digital camera or a smartphone. They become increasingly popular in social media. However, little is known about how selfies reflect their owners’ personality traits and how people judge others’ personality from selfies. In this study, we examined the association between selfies and personality by measuring participants’ Big Five personality and coding their selfies posted on a social networking site. We found specific cues in selfies related to agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness. We also examined zero-acquaintance personality judgment and found that observers had moderate to strong agreement in their ratings of Big Five personality based on selfies. However, they could only accurately predict selfie owners’ degree of openness. This study is the first to reveal personality-related cues in selfies and provide a picture-coding scheme that can be used to analyze selfies. We discussed the difference between personality expression in selfies and other types of photos, and its possible relationship with impression management of social media users.     

Assessing the value of brief automated biographies

New systems have been introduced that support the visualisation and sharing of personal digital data, but relatively little work has been done to establish how such systems support reminiscence and personal reflection. In this paper, we explore Intel’s Museum of Me, a tool that collates and presents Facebook data in the form of a virtual museum, by asking how such an automated biography might support personal reflection and a process of life review. We supported users in their creation of personal virtual museums and interviewed them about their experiences, using a theoretical framework that highlighted the importance of personal narratives and life review in identity formation and psychological well-being. Our participants enjoyed the experience and welcomed the opportunity for reminiscence, but considered their resulting videos to be rather shallow representations of self, reflective of some of the more trivial exchanges and relationships that can come to dominate social media. We argue that social media in its current form is not well suited to support a meaningful life-review process.     

Collaboration Support in Co-located Collaborative Systems for Users with Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Systematic Literature Review

ABSTRACT

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) often display difficulty in social interaction, verbal and non-verbal communication skills. They often have problems with recognizing and interpreting gestures and mental states of others, which restricts their capacity to understand implicit information essential to the social awareness and, consequently, the performance of collaborative activities in face-to-face situations (co-located collaboration). This study aims to identify, using a systematic literature review, how co-located collaborative systems designed for individuals with ASD provide the users with collaboration support mechanisms to encourage the performance of collaborative activities and interaction with their partners. Twenty-six studies from six electronic databases between the years 2006 and 2018 were selected and analyzed. Results evidenced the inclusion of different strategies to enforce or stimulate the collaboration among users, although there is a lack of resources for collaboration support as well as of studies designed specifically for individuals with severe ASD.     

Social media metrics: Third-person perceptions of health information

The present study investigated the role of social media metrics (i.e., number of shares and comments) displayed alongside online news stories in shaping users’ perceptions of the content and its influence. In a web-based experiment (N = 144), participants first read a cancer news story that displayed either a high or a low level of social media metrics, then reported their perceived story influence on the self and others, as well as their behavioral intentions. In the low social media metrics condition, the general story influence was perceived to be stronger for others than for the self, indicative of the “third-person effect.” This effect, however, was diminished to insignificant levels in the high social media metrics condition. Further, social media metrics had an ultimate indirect effect on behavioral intentions via the third-person effect. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are provided in the end.