Social media platforms provide users with various ways of interacting with each other, such as commenting, reacting to posts, sharing content, and uploading pictures. Facebook is one of the most popular platforms, and its users frequently share and reshare posts, including research articles. Moreover, the reactions feature on Facebook allows users to express their feelings towards the content they view, providing valuable data for analysis. This study aims to predict the emotional impact of Facebook posts relating to research articles. We collected data on Facebook posts related to various scientific research domains, including Health Sciences, Social Sciences, Dentistry, Arts, and Humanities. We observed Facebook users’ reactions towards research articles and posts and found that ‘Like’ reactions were the most common. We also noticed that research articles from the Dentistry research domain received a lot of ‘Haha’ reactions. We used machine learning models to predict the sentiment of Facebook posts related to research articles. We used features such as the research article’s title sentiment, abstract sentiment, abstract length, author count, and research domain to build the models. We used five classifiers: Random Forest, Decision Tree, K-Nearest Neighbors, Logistic Regression, and Naïve Bayes. The models were evaluated using accuracy, precision, recall, and F-1 score metrics. The Random Forest classifier was the best model for two- and three-class labels, achieving accuracy measures of 86% and 66%, respectively. We also evaluated the feature importance for the Random Forest model and found that the sentiment of the research article’s title is crucial in predicting the sentiment of the Facebook post. This study has substantial implications for public engagement in science-related messages. The emotional reactions of Facebook users towards research articles and posts can provide valuable insights into public engagement in science, and predicting the emotional impact of Facebook posts related to research articles can help researchers understand how the public perceives scientific research. The findings of the study can aid researchers in effectively communicating their research and engaging the public in scientific discourse.
more »
« less
Moving Beyond Set-It-And-Forget-It Privacy Settings on Social Media
When users post on social media, they protect their privacy by choosing an access control setting that is rarely revisited. Changes in users' lives and relationships, as well as social media platforms themselves, can cause mismatches between a post's active privacy setting and the desired setting. The importance of managing this setting combined with the high volume of potential friend-post pairs needing evaluation necessitate a semi-automated approach. We attack this problem through a combination of a user study and the development of automated inference of potentially mismatched privacy settings. A total of 78 Facebook users reevaluated the privacy settings for five of their Facebook posts, also indicating whether a selection of friends should be able to access each post. They also explained their decision. With this user data, we designed a classifier to identify posts with currently incorrect sharing settings. This classifier shows a 317% improvement over a baseline classifier based on friend interaction. We also find that many of the most useful features can be collected without user intervention, and we identify directions for improving the classifier's accuracy.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10148264
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 991 to 1008
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Social media companies wield power over their users through design, policy, and through their participation in public discourse. We set out to understand how companies leverage public relations to influence expectations of privacy and privacy-related norms. To interrogate the discourse productions of companies in relation to privacy, we examine the blogs associated with three major social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram (both owned by Facebook Inc.), and Snapchat. We analyze privacy-related posts using critical discourse analysis to demonstrate how these powerful entities construct narratives about users and their privacy expectations. We find that each of these platforms often make use of discourse about "vulnerable" identities to invoke relations of power, while at the same time, advancing interpretations and values that favor data capitalism. Finally, we discuss how these public narratives might influence the construction of users' own interpretations of appropriate privacy norms and conceptions of self. We contend that expectations of privacy and social norms are not simply artifacts of users' own needs and desires, but co-constructions that reflect the influence of social media companies themselves.more » « less
-
Voluntary sharing of personal information is at the heart of user engagement on social media and central to platforms' business models. From the users' perspective, so-called self-disclosure is closely connected with both privacy risks and social rewards. Prior work has studied contextual influences on self-disclosure, from platform affordances and interface design to user demographics and perceived social capital. Our work takes a mixed-methods approach to understand the contextual information which might be integrated in the development of privacy-enhancing technologies. Through observational study of several Reddit communities, we explore the ways in which topic of discussion, group norms, peer effects, and audience size are correlated with personal information sharing. We then build and test a prototype privacy-enhancing tool that exposes these contextual factors. Our work culminates in a browser extension that automatically detects instances of self-disclosure in Reddit posts at the time of posting and provides additional context to users before they post to support enhanced privacy decision-making. We share this prototype with social media users, solicit their feedback, and outline a path forward for privacy-enhancing technologies in this space.more » « less
-
User adoption of security and privacy (S&P) best practices remains low, despite sustained efforts by researchers and practitioners. Social influence is a proven method for guiding user S&P behavior, though most work has focused on studying peer influence, which is only possible with a known social graph. In a study of 104 Facebook users, we instead demonstrate that crowdsourced S&P suggestions are significantly influential. We also tested how reflective writing affected participants’ S&P decisions, with and without suggestions. With reflective writing, participants were less likely to accept suggestions — both social and Facebook default suggestions. Of particular note, when reflective writing participants were shown the Facebook default suggestion, they not only rejected it but also (unknowingly) configured their settings in accordance with expert recommendations. Our work suggests that both non-personal social influence and reflective writing can positively influence users’ S&P decisions, but have negative interactions.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Many social media sites permit users to delete, edit, anonymize, or otherwise modify past posts. These mechanisms enable users to protect their privacy, but also to essentially change the past. We investigate perceptions of the necessity and acceptability of these mechanisms. Drawing on boundary-regulation theories of privacy, we first identify how users who reshared or responded to a post could be impacted by its retrospective modification. These mechanisms can cause boundary turbulence by recontextualizing past content and limiting accountability. In contrast, not permitting modification can lessen privacy and perpetuate harms of regrettable content. To understand how users perceive these mechanisms, we conducted 15 semi-structured interviews. Participants deemed retrospective modification crucial for fixing past mistakes. Nonetheless, they worried about the potential for deception through selective changes or removal. Participants were aware retrospective modification impacts others, yet felt these impacts could be minimized through context-aware usage of markers and proactive notifications.more » « less
An official website of the United States government

