Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5
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- All Subjects: Social Media
- All Subjects: Social Network Analysis
- Creators: Li, Baoxin
Description
A statement appearing in social media provides a very significant challenge for determining the provenance of the statement. Provenance describes the origin, custody, and ownership of something. Most statements appearing in social media are not published with corresponding provenance data. However, the same characteristics that make the social media environment challenging, including the massive amounts of data available, large numbers of users, and a highly dynamic environment, provide unique and untapped opportunities for solving the provenance problem for social media. Current approaches for tracking provenance data do not scale for online social media and consequently there is a gap in provenance methodologies and technologies providing exciting research opportunities. The guiding vision is the use of social media information itself to realize a useful amount of provenance data for information in social media. This departs from traditional approaches for data provenance which rely on a central store of provenance information. The contemporary online social media environment is an enormous and constantly updated "central store" that can be mined for provenance information that is not readily made available to the average social media user. This research introduces an approach and builds a foundation aimed at realizing a provenance data capability for social media users that is not accessible today.
ContributorsBarbier, Geoffrey P (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Bell, Herbert (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Social Computing is an area of computer science concerned with dynamics of communities and cultures, created through computer-mediated social interaction. Various social media platforms, such as social network services and microblogging, enable users to come together and create social movements expressing their opinions on diverse sets of issues, events, complaints, grievances, and goals. Methods for monitoring and summarizing these types of sociopolitical trends, its leaders and followers, messages, and dynamics are needed. In this dissertation, a framework comprising of community and content-based computational methods is presented to provide insights for multilingual and noisy political social media content. First, a model is developed to predict the emergence of viral hashtag breakouts, using network features. Next, another model is developed to detect and compare individual and organizational accounts, by using a set of domain and language-independent features. The third model exposes contentious issues, driving reactionary dynamics between opposing camps. The fourth model develops community detection and visualization methods to reveal underlying dynamics and key messages that drive dynamics. The final model presents a use case methodology for detecting and monitoring foreign influence, wherein a state actor and news media under its control attempt to shift public opinion by framing information to support multiple adversarial narratives that facilitate their goals. In each case, a discussion of novel aspects and contributions of the models is presented, as well as quantitative and qualitative evaluations. An analysis of multiple conflict situations will be conducted, covering areas in the UK, Bangladesh, Libya and the Ukraine where adversarial framing lead to polarization, declines in social cohesion, social unrest, and even civil wars (e.g., Libya and the Ukraine).
ContributorsAlzahrani, Sultan (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Corman, Steve R. (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Hsiao, Ihan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
With the rise of Online Social Networks (OSN) in the last decade, social network analysis has become a crucial research topic. The OSN graphs have unique properties that distinguish them from other types of graphs. In this thesis, five month Tweet corpus collected from Bangladesh - between June 2016 and October 2016 is analyzed, in order to detect accounts that belong to groups. These groups consist of official and non-official twitter handles of political organizations and NGOs in Bangladesh. A set of network, temporal, spatial and behavioral features are proposed to discriminate between accounts belonging to individual twitter users, news, groups and organization leaders. Finally, the experimental results are presented and a subset of relevant features is identified that lead to a generalizable model. Detection of tiny number of groups from large network is achieved with 0.8 precision, 0.75 recall and 0.77 F1 score. The domain independent network and behavioral features and models developed here are suitable for solving twitter account classification problem in any context.
ContributorsGore, Chinmay Chandrashekhar (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Hsiao, Ihan (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
The development of the internet provided new means for people to communicate effectively and share their ideas. There has been a decline in the consumption of newspapers and traditional broadcasting media toward online social mediums in recent years. Social media has been introduced as a new way of increasing democratic discussions on political and social matters. Among social media, Twitter is widely used by politicians, government officials, communities, and parties to make announcements and reach their voice to their followers. This greatly increases the acceptance domain of the medium.
The usage of social media during social and political campaigns has been the subject of a lot of social science studies including the Occupy Wall Street movement, The Arab Spring, the United States (US) election, more recently The Brexit campaign. The wide
spread usage of social media in this space and the active participation of people in the discussions on social media made this communication channel a suitable place for spreading propaganda to alter public opinion.
An interesting feature of twitter is the feasibility of which bots can be programmed to operate on this platform. Social media bots are automated agents engineered to emulate the activity of a human being by tweeting some specific content, replying to users, magnifying certain topics by retweeting them. Network on these bots is called botnets and describing the collaboration of connected computers with programs that communicates across multiple devices to perform some task.
In this thesis, I will study how bots can influence the opinion, finding which parameters are playing a role in shrinking or coalescing the communities, and finally logically proving the effectiveness of each of the hypotheses.
The usage of social media during social and political campaigns has been the subject of a lot of social science studies including the Occupy Wall Street movement, The Arab Spring, the United States (US) election, more recently The Brexit campaign. The wide
spread usage of social media in this space and the active participation of people in the discussions on social media made this communication channel a suitable place for spreading propaganda to alter public opinion.
An interesting feature of twitter is the feasibility of which bots can be programmed to operate on this platform. Social media bots are automated agents engineered to emulate the activity of a human being by tweeting some specific content, replying to users, magnifying certain topics by retweeting them. Network on these bots is called botnets and describing the collaboration of connected computers with programs that communicates across multiple devices to perform some task.
In this thesis, I will study how bots can influence the opinion, finding which parameters are playing a role in shrinking or coalescing the communities, and finally logically proving the effectiveness of each of the hypotheses.
ContributorsAhmadi, Mohsen (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Background: As the growth of social media platforms continues, the use of the constantly increasing amount of freely available, user-generated data they receive becomes of great importance. One apparent use of this content is public health surveillance; such as for increasing understanding of substance abuse. In this study, Facebook was used to monitor nicotine addiction through the public support groups users can join to aid their quitting process. Objective: The main objective of this project was to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms of nicotine addiction online and provide content analysis of Facebook posts obtained from "quit smoking" support groups. Methods: Using the Facebook Application Programming Interface (API) for Python, a sample of 9,970 posts were collected in October 2015. Information regarding the user's name and the number of likes and comments they received on their post were also included. The posts crawled were then manually classified by one annotator into one of three categories: positive, negative, and neutral. Where positive posts are those that describe current quits, negative posts are those that discuss relapsing, and neutral posts are those that were not be used to train the classifiers, which include posts where users have yet to attempt a quit, ads, random questions, etc. For this project, the performance of two machine learning algorithms on a corpus of manually labeled Facebook posts were compared. The classification goal was to test the plausibility of creating a natural language processing machine learning classifier which could be used to distinguish between relapse (labeled negative) and quitting success (labeled positive) posts from a set of smoking related posts. Results: From the corpus of 9,970 posts that were manually labeled: 6,254 (62.7%) were labeled positive, 1,249 (12.5%) were labeled negative, and 2467 (24.8%) were labeled neutral. Since the posts labeled neutral are those which are irrelevant to the classification task, 7,503 posts were used to train the classifiers: 83.4% positive and 16.6% negative. The SVM classifier was 84.1% accurate and 84.1% precise, had a recall of 1, and an F-score of 0.914. The MNB classifier was 82.8% accurate and 82.8% precise, had a recall of 1, and an F-score of 0.906. Conclusions: From the Facebook surveillance results, a small peak is given into the behavior of those looking to quit smoking. Ultimately, what makes Facebook a great tool for public health surveillance is that it has an extremely large and diverse user base with information that is easily obtainable. This, and the fact that so many people are actually willing to use Facebook support groups to aid their quitting processes demonstrates that it can be used to learn a lot about quitting and smoking behavior.
ContributorsMolina, Daniel Antonio (Author) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis director) / Tian, Qiongjie (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05