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1. Examining risk and crisis communications of government agencies and stakeholders during early stages of COVID-19 on Twitter

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2020.106568  

   Wang, Yan; Hao, Haiyan; Platt, Lisa S. (September 2020, Computers in human behavior)

   null (Ed.)

   During COVID-19, social media has played an important role for public health agencies and government stakeholders (i.e. actors) to disseminate information regarding situations, risks, and personal protective action inhibiting disease spread. However, there have been notable insufficient, incongruent, and inconsistent communications regarding the pandemic and its risks, which was especially salient at the early stages of the outbreak. Sufficiency, congruence and consistency in health risk communication have important implications for effective health safety instruction as well as critical content interpretability and recall. It also impacts individual- and community-level responses to information. This research employs text mining techniques and dynamic network analysis to investigate the actors’ risk and crisis communication on Twitter regarding message types, communication sufficiency, timeliness, congruence, consistency and coordination. We studied 13,598 pandemic-relevant tweets posted over January to April from 67 federal and state-level agencies and stakeholders in the U.S. The study annotates 16 categories of message types, analyzes their appearances and evolutions. The research then identifies inconsistencies and incongruencies on four critical topics and examines spatial disparities, timeliness, and sufficiency across actors and message types in communicating COVID-19. The network analysis also reveals increased communication coordination over time. The findings provide unprecedented insight of Twitter COVID-19 information dissemination which may help to inform public health agencies and governmental stakeholders future risk and crisis communication strategies related to global hazards in digital environments. 

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2. Law Enforcement Privilege

   https://doi.org/10.36644/mlr.123.8.law  

   Wexler, Rebecca (January 2025, Michigan Law Review)

   You can’t question a secret you haven’t been told. The criminal legal system depends on fair and open proceedings to expose and regulate unlawful and unconstitutional police conduct through the courts. If police can use claims of secrecy to systematically thwart criminal defendants’ access to evidence, judicial review will fail. And yet that is exactly what is happening under a common-law doctrine called the “law enforcement privilege.” The privilege empowers police and prosecutors to rely on the results of secret investigative methods while withholding information from the defense about how those methods work. It risks perpetuating unconstitutional conduct, enabling wrongful convictions, and rendering Fourth Amendment, Sixth Amendment, Brady, and statutory discovery laws moot. At the same time, it has a non-frivolous policy rationale. If all police investigative methods were public information, then more people committing crimes could evade detection.How can a better balance be struck? This Article argues that current law enforcement privilege doctrine creates a dangerously boundless police secrecy power because of a subtle conceptual collapse: The policy rationale itself is mistakenly used as the test for assessing claims of privilege. The Article recommends that courts instead evaluate privilege claims by reference to the marginal risk of leaking posed by in-court disclosure. Specifically, judges should demand to know what conditions law enforcement previously imposed on access to the information. The answer to that question can be adjudicated publicly without jeopardizing a legitimate privilege claim and will help judges detect mistaken, exaggerated, pretextual, or fraudulent claims to the privilege. Further, even when law enforcement has taken care with the information, if a court-ordered protective order can match or exceed the safeguards that law enforcement itself previously maintained, then judges should default to ordering disclosure. The Article concludes by suggesting a theory of the role of confidentiality in privilege law. 

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3. Measuring Public Open-Source Software in the Federal Government: An Analysis of Code.gov

   https://doi.org/10.6339/24-JDS1148  

   Shrivastava, Rahul; Korkmaz, Gizem (January 2024, Journal of Data Science)

   This paper presents an in-depth analysis of patterns and trends in the open-source software (OSS) contributions by the U.S. federal government agencies. OSS is a unique category of computer software notable for its publicly accessible source code and the rights it provides for modification and distribution for any purpose. Prompted by the Federal Source Code Policy (USCIO, 2016), Code.gov was established as a platform to facilitate the sharing of custom-developed software across various federal government agencies. This study leverages data from Code.gov, which catalogs OSS projects developed and shared by government agencies, and enhances this data with detailed development and contributor information from GitHub. By adopting a cost estimation methodology that is consistent with the U.S. national accounting framework for software investment proposed in Korkmaz et al. (2024), this research provides annual estimates of investment in OSS by government agencies for the 2009–2021 period. The findings indicate a significant investment by the federal government in OSS, with the 2021 investment estimated at around $407 million. This study not only sheds light on the government’s role in fostering OSS development but also offers a valuable framework for assessing the scope and value of OSS initiatives within the public sector. 

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4. Online sale of small turtles circumvents public health regulations in the United States

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278443  

   Montague, Lauren E.; Marcotrigiano, Juliana M.; Keane, Niamh E.; Marquardt, Hannah E.; Sevin, Jennifer A.; Karraker, Nancy E. (December 2022, PLOS ONE)

   Weckerly, Floyd W. (Ed.)

   In the United States (U.S.), pet turtles have been associated with outbreaks of salmonellosis, a serious and sometimes-fatal intestinal illness caused by Salmonella bacteria, with nearly 300,000 people being infected in some years. Children are particularly susceptible because of their propensity to put items, including small turtles, in their mouths. In 1975, a U.S. federal regulation prohibited the sale of turtles <4 inches (101.6 mm) in size, except for the purposes of export, scientific, or educational purposes. This regulation was established to reduce the incidence of salmonellosis, particularly in small children. Previous research has not evaluated the availability of turtles <4 inches in size on websites selling wildlife. We monitored 16 websites in 2021 and quantified listings of small turtles. We determined whether information on Salmonella , the 1975 federal regulation, or related state regulations were provided on the websites and determined legality of sales of small turtles by state regulations. We found that all 16 websites openly advertised and sold turtles <4 inches in size, but only half of these websites provided information about Salmonella and/or the federal regulation. These websites required buyers to confirm that they were not purchasing a turtle as a pet, thereby putting the onus on the consumer to adhere to the regulation. We documented 515 listings of turtles <4 inches in size, including 47 species and one hybrid. Our study has demonstrated that internet sales of small turtles currently represent part of the thriving online pet trade in the U.S. Enforcement of the federal regulation faces jurisdictional challenges in most states. Therefore, we recommend continued public education campaigns by public health agencies in the U.S. to help reduce the risk that pet turtle ownership presents. 

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5. Narratives Shape Cognitive Representations of Immigrants and Immigration-Policy Preferences

   https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620963610  

   Martinez, Joel_E; Feldman, Lauren_A; Feldman, Mallory_J; Cikara, Mina (January 2021, Psychological Science)

   Scholars from across the social and media sciences have issued a clarion call to address a recent resurgence in criminalized characterizations of immigrants. Do these characterizations meaningfully impact individuals’ beliefs about immigrants and immigration? Across two online convenience samples (total N = 1,054 adult U.S. residents), we applied a novel analytic technique to test how different narratives—achievement, criminal, and struggle-oriented—impacted cognitive representations of German, Russian, Syrian, and Mexican immigrants and the concept of immigrants in general. All stories featured male targets. Achievement stories homogenized individual immigrant representations, whereas both criminal and struggle-oriented stories racialized them along a White/non-White axis: Germany clustered with Russia, and Syria clustered with Mexico. However, criminal stories were unique in making our most egalitarian participants’ representations as differentiated as our least egalitarian participants’. Narratives about individual immigrants also generalized to update representations of nationality groups. Most important, narrative-induced representations correlated with immigration-policy preferences: Achievement narratives and corresponding homogenized representations promoted preferences for less restriction, and criminal narratives promoted preferences for more. 

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