{"id":392,"date":"2019-02-05T13:08:35","date_gmt":"2019-02-05T13:08:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/?p=392"},"modified":"2019-02-05T13:08:35","modified_gmt":"2019-02-05T13:08:35","slug":"early-public-responses-to-the-zika-virus-on-youtube-prevalence-of-and-differences-between-conspiracy-theory-and-informational-videos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/2019\/02\/05\/early-public-responses-to-the-zika-virus-on-youtube-prevalence-of-and-differences-between-conspiracy-theory-and-informational-videos\/","title":{"rendered":"Early Public Responses to the Zika-Virus on YouTube: Prevalence of and Differences Between Conspiracy Theory and Informational Videos"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Summary:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This paper was primarily about the differences between informational\nand conspiracy videos referring to the Zika virus during the most recent\noutbreak. Through analyzing the 35 most popular informational and conspiracy\nvideos concerning the virus, comparisons were made between these types of\nvideos based on a set of features. Some of the key conclusions drawn are listed\nbelow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>A majority of the videos were classified as\nbeing informational videos (23 out of 35).<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>There were no differences found in user activity\nor the sentiment of user responses between the two types of videos.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Reflection:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I have listed below a line that interested me in the paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cYouTube\nconsiders the number of views as the fundamental parameter of video popularity.\nHence, collecting videos with the highest number of views, for our given search\nstring, allows us to capture those videos that would be listed first by search\nengines\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I\u2019m very hesitant to believe that views are the fundamental parameter\nof video popularity. Although views are the most obvious factor in portraying\nvideo popularity, they can easily be skewed. It\u2019s impossible to determine if\nviews are <strong>paid or organic<\/strong>, and if a\nuser wants to get a point across with a video that likely won\u2019t garnish much\nattention (i.e. a conspiracy theory), they may resort to this method. I think\nanother potential factor to consider in choosing videos would be <em>audience retention<\/em>, as there are users\nwho see a title and click on a video, but immediately stop watching after a few\nseconds. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Other Thoughts:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Overall, I was surprised by the similar sentiment found in both types of videos, as I had imagined there to be a drastic difference. One statistic that did not surprise me was the lower vaccination rates in states where misinformation was prevalent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Automated Hate Speech Detection and the Problem of Offensive Language<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Summary:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This paper was primarily about hate-speech detection, and\ndifferentiating between hate speech, offensive language, and neither. Through analyzing\ntweets from each of these categories, a crowd-sourced classifier was trained to\nclassify between these groups. Some of the key conclusions drawn are listed\nbelow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Tweets with the highest probability of being\nhate speech usually contain racial or homophobic slurs.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Lexical methods are effective ways to identify\noffensive language, but are inaccurate in determining hate speech.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Reflection:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I have listed below a line that interested me in the paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cWhile\nthese tweets contain terms that can be considered racist and sexist it is\napparent than many Twitter users use this type of language in their everyday\ncommunications.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Classifying hate speech appears to be an arduous task, arguably more\ndifficult than detecting fake news articles. This is especially due to the fact\nthat many Twitter users use hate speech trigger words when they are not tweeting\nout hate speech (a common misclassification is with song lyrics). In order to\nbetter detect and classify hate speech, I believe that there needs to be a <strong>more consistent definition<\/strong> of what the\nterm encompasses. More research also needs to be done on being able to factor\nin false words such as \u201clove\u201d that <em>consistently<\/em>\n<em>fool hate speech detectors<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Other Thoughts:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Overall,\nI found myself pretty engaged in this topic. I think that the topic of targeting\nhateful content is interesting, and I\u2019m heavily considering working on it for\nthe semester project. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Summary: This paper was primarily about the differences between informational and conspiracy videos referring to the Zika virus during the most recent outbreak. Through analyzing the 35 most popular informational and conspiracy videos concerning the virus, comparisons were made between these types of videos based on a set of features. Some of the key conclusions [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":255,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/255"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":393,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392\/revisions\/393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}