Browsing by Subject "Social Media"
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Item Combating Threats to the Quality of Information in Social Systems(2013-06-04) Lee, KyuminMany large-scale social systems such as Web-based social networks, online social media sites and Web-scale crowdsourcing systems have been growing rapidly, enabling millions of human participants to generate, share and consume content on a massive scale. This reliance on users can lead to many positive effects, including large-scale growth in the size and content in the community, bottom-up discovery of ?citizen-experts?, serendipitous discovery of new resources beyond the scope of the system designers, and new social-based information search and retrieval algorithms. But the relative openness and reliance on users coupled with the widespread interest and growth of these social systems carries risks and raises growing concerns over the quality of information in these systems. In this dissertation research, we focus on countering threats to the quality of information in self-managing social systems. Concretely, we identify three classes of threats to these systems: (i) content pollution by social spammers, (ii) coordinated campaigns for strategic manipulation, and (iii) threats to collective attention. To combat these threats, we propose three inter-related methods for detecting evidence of these threats, mitigating their impact, and improving the quality of information in social systems. We augment this three-fold defense with an exploration of their origins in ?crowdturfing? ? a sinister counterpart to the enormous positive opportunities of crowdsourcing. In particular, this dissertation research makes four unique contributions: ? The first contribution of this dissertation research is a framework for detecting and filtering social spammers and content polluters in social systems. To detect and filter individual social spammers and content polluters, we propose and evaluate a novel social honeypot-based approach. ? Second, we present a set of methods and algorithms for detecting coordinated campaigns in large-scale social systems. We propose and evaluate a content- driven framework for effectively linking free text posts with common ?talking points? and extracting campaigns from large-scale social systems. ? Third, we present a dual study of the robustness of social systems to collective attention threats through both a data-driven modeling approach and deploy- ment over a real system trace. We evaluate the effectiveness of countermeasures deployed based on the first moments of a bursting phenomenon in a real system. ? Finally, we study the underlying ecosystem of crowdturfing for engaging in each of the three threat types. We present a framework for ?pulling back the curtain? on crowdturfers to reveal their underlying ecosystem on both crowdsourcing sites and social media.Item Examining the Blogging Habits of Agricultural Leadership Students at Texas A&M University: Understanding Motivation, Use, and Self-Efficacy(2013-05-31) Bumguardner, Kalee MarieBlogging is a form of social media, and student engagement is at the center of blogging. The benefits of blogging include being easy to create and maintain, making writing easier to share, encouraging students to write outside of the classroom, and supporting group collaboration. The findings suggest students are more passive in their blogging experiences, as the data found students generally read blogs more than they wrote blogs. The Unified Theory on Acceptance and Use of Technology and self-efficacy theory were used as the framework for the study. This study sought to explore agricultural leadership students? motivations for blogging. Student responses indicated on average they read blogs less than once a month. Students typically reported a preference for informal writing even if they did not blog. Teacher training could be used to increase awareness among educators about the benefits of blogging. Educators must be able to convey the benefits of educational blogging in terms of its ease and benefit for student acceptance.Item Life unfiltered: Social control theory in the age of social media and substance abuse(2017-11-10) Ford, Teri L.; Gerber, JurgHirschi (1969) may have never used Social Media, received a Like or Re-Tweet or posted a heart-felt emoji, but his Social Control Theory may be affected by the actions of Social Media and its users. Hirschi’s Social Control Theory purports to explain why individuals choose to follow the rules and accept the norms of society. Hirschi postulated that there are four components in normal social systems that instill boundaries and social mores into the psyche of young adults. These four components, attachment, belief, commitment, and involvement are the four elements of social control that prevent individuals from committing crimes. If these components are diminished or eroded, it is possible that young adults may develop a system of beliefs that run contrary to the values of the society they were brought up in. Could Social Media as a dynamic environment somehow contribute to the unfiltered behavior of many members of society who are habitual or excessive users of sites like Facebook and Twitter? The question asked is whether social media promote deviance in young adults, particularly substance issues such as cigarette smoking, underage drinking, and marijuana use. The researcher hypothesizes that excessive Social Media use is eroding the components of Hirschi’s theory, particularly attachment, belief, and commitment, and that this erosion is increasing deviant habits and attitudes among excessive Social Media users.Item Perceptions and Expressions of Social Presence During Conversations on Twitter(2012-02-14) Pritchett, KellyComputer-mediated environments such as social media create new social climates that impact communication interactions in un-mediated environments. This study examined social variables during conversations on Twitter through a qualitative document analysis that coded messages into affective, interactive or cohesive categories. Perceived social presence, participant satisfaction, and relationships between social presence and satisfaction among Twitter users during streaming conversations were examined through an online questionnaire that was created using qualtrics.com and made available to respondents over a one-week period. The researcher concluded that most social variables in the Twitter conversations of this study fall into the interactive social presence category. In addition, each category of responses functions in a different way to foster social presence. Two groups of survey respondents agreed with 10 out of 21 and 13 out of 21 statements about social presence and 10 out of 13 and 12 out of 13 statements about satisfaction. Findings indicated that positive and negative relationships exist between social presence and satisfaction. Both conversations in this study appeared to be successful. Therefore, agricultural communicators should feel comfortable using CMC more frequently to circulate agricultural information among populations across the globe. It was recommended that further research be conducted to examine social presence among new topics, populations, and other forms of CMC.Item Police agency adoption of social media as related to agency size, community-oriented policing, and technological capacity(2016-11-10) Cawley II, William Olen; Randa, Ryan X.; Wells, William M; King, William R.This thesis uses LEMAS data and an original data collection to examine the relationship between the adoption of Twitter and Facebook by municipal police departments and the characteristics of those departments. These characteristics include the size of the department, progressiveness, community-oriented policing, and technological capacity. It was found that that these variables were associated with statistically significant increases in the amount of time a department had Twitter. All variables were also significant to varying degrees for lengthening the amount of time a department was on Facebook, except for community-orientation. These results appear to indicate that social media adoption by law enforcement follows a diffusion of innovations model. Directions for future research are discussed.Item Social Media and Its Use by Law Enforcement(Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas (LEMIT), 2017) Goode, BryanAs technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, law enforcement agencies must continue to adapt to the ever-increasing use of social media in society. As Millennials have now been in the workforce for several years, the reliance on social media as a means of communication is compounded by the amount of rapidly evolving technology. Its benefits are numerous and include ease of use, mass communication abilities, investigative support, and assistance in community team building and collaborative efforts. It will also provide a layer of transparency and openness to the public. These are just some of the benefits available for agencies to consider with their use of social media. Law enforcement should continue to embrace the advantages available with social media. With the prevalence of social media, there will be less of a separation between agencies and their communities. There are numerous examples of the streamlining of information via Facebook and Twitter. Chief David Brown of the Dallas Police Department has a twitter account and regularly posts information to the public. Arlington Police Department’s Public Information Office, Chris Cook, also uses this media during some incidents. As technology continues to evolve, agencies will have to keep up with these advances if they want to be able to reach a broad base of the public.