This paper aimed to analyze the public response to different\nYouTube videos concerning the Zika virus. Conspiracy theory and informational\nvideos were analyzed. The paper defined a conspiracy theory as \u201cexplanations\nfor important events that involve secret plots by powerful and malevolent groups\u201d.\nSince the spread of conspiracy theory videos is harmful because they contain\nmisleading or untrue information and distract from important health messages,\nthe researchers looked to analyze the sentiment and content of user responses\nso that implications for online health campaigns and knowledge dissemination\nare known. False news, of which conspiracy videos fall under, has been shown to\nspread faster and father than true news. The researchers used 35 of the most\npopular Zika-virus YouTube videos for their study. They used metrics such as\nviews, comments, replies, likes, dislikes, and shares and compared them for conspiracy\nand informational videos. They found that there was no statistically\nsignificant difference between the two groups of videos. One conclusion was\nthat users respond in similar ways in terms of these metrics to both types of\nvideos. In addition, topic modeling showed that informational videos center around\nthe causes and consequences of the virus while conspiracy videos focus on\nunfounded theories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I did not find this paper to provide any surprising results.\nI think the most significant conclusion was that users responded in similar ways\nin terms of views, shares, and likes to both types of content. This means that\nboth types of content spread in similar ways. The researchers found that Zika virus\nvideo comments were all slightly negative on average, which contradicts prior\nresearch that found that false news triggers more negative sentiments than true\nnews. However, they did not suggest why this happened. A takeaway from this\nstudy is that health organizations looking to spread helpful health information\nshould give careful thought to how to target audiences and engage them. Future research\ncould include exploring other subjects besides the Zika virus. Since some of\nthe findings contradicted prior work, I think it would be interesting to see if\nthis holds true for other topics. Also, the most effective techniques for\nspreading true news could be studied. Is it effective to debunk conspiracy videos?\nWhat is the best way to engage views with true news?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hate speech classifier algorithms have been created before\nwith limited accuracy. Hate speech is particularly challenging to classify because\nit overlaps with offensive language and context must be take into account when\nanalyzing it. This paper looks to create a hate speech detection model that\ndistinguishes between hate speech and offensive language, with the goal of\nreaching higher accuracy. They used logistic regression on a sample of about\n25,000 tweets to train the model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I thought the paper had significant implications since many parties\nare interested in flagging hate speech, such as Twitter, Instagram, or countries\nwith hate speech laws. The researched shared a significant amount of challenges\nrelated classifying hate speech. I found it interesting that the definition of\nhate speech is not well defined and that the researchers had to establish a\ndefinition for the premise of this paper. In addition, they found and mentioned\nseveral tweets that were misclassified by human coders. I seems difficult to train\nan algorithm to classify something that is not well defined and is often done with\nerror by even humans. Future work could involve similar research taking into\naccount human biases and using more data. I think that a more established\ndefinition of hate speech is necessary before these algorithms can be more\naccurate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Early Public Responses to the Zika-Virus on Youtube: Prevalence of and Differences Between Conspiracy Theory and Informational Videos This paper aimed to analyze the public response to different YouTube videos concerning the Zika virus. Conspiracy theory and informational videos were analyzed. The paper defined a conspiracy theory as \u201cexplanations for important events that involve secret […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":240,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-409","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\/409","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\/240"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=409"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":410,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409\/revisions\/410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}