Latest Twitter publications

Researchers from Finland and Qatar have conducted a survey of eight years’ worth of social media output on Twitter, with the findings suggesting an increase in retrenched or polarised conversations and polemics over the last eight years. The paper studies tweets from 679,000 consistently active users who discuss U.S. politics and adopts three criteria to… Read More

Twitter has announced today that it is rolling out a raft of additional measures to counteract abuse of the platform – including a feature whereby the missives of identified abusers would only be visible for a time to themselves and those following them. In YCombinator’s Hacker News community, this is similar to a ‘hellban’ –… Read More

Information posted publicly on social media provides a rich source of data for researchers to study, but ethical questions arise when data is used without the person’s express consent – according to researchers from St. Andrews University, who propose that a dynamic consent framework is necessary to ethically perform data mining from social networks. The… Read More

Scientists and environmentalists across the United States are setting up ‘rogue’ Twitter accounts in support of climate change research, as a stand against the newly-inaugurated Donald Trump’s policies on the issue. President Trump has been relentless in his denial of climate change, calling the phenomenon a creation of Chinese propaganda to damage U.S. businesses. The… Read More

A team of researchers from Oxford University has argued that a sufficiently sophisticated recommender algorithm, curating content to engage social networking customers, may use curation strategies that are detrimental to users. A recommendation algorithm sifts through data, predicting what a user will like best among a list of given items. In a social networking context,… Read More