“Social media platforms give us access to datasets of unprecedented scale that enable analysis of a wide range of social phenomena by using state-of-the-art methods for computational social science. There is however also malicious activity in social media that needs countering, as is the case with hate speech and misinformation.” – Arkaitz Zubiaga, Lecturer, Queen Mary University of London
The number of users in online social media has increased substantially in the last two decades. With a growing number of users posting and resharing content, interacting with others and exchanging files, online social media platforms have become an invaluable data source to perform scientific analyses at scale. These analyses are conducted in a wide range of scientific fields, including research in computational social science, understanding social phenomena, natural language processing analyzing language at scale and social network analysis investigating how interactions are shaped online, inter alia.
Along with the many advantages that social media platforms have offered with unprecedented means for communication with one another, they are also often misused for malicious purposes. Indeed, there is evidence of many users exploiting social media platforms to perform uncivil actions and engage in toxic conversations. This can cause harmful consequences for online users, many of whom have no other option but to delete their social media accounts. Detection and mitigation of this kind of activity has become a priority in the scientific community, as is the need to further analyze, measure and understand this phenomenon.
“Developing tools and methods for mining social media data has become increasingly important in the era of big data, where a large number of users are using social media platforms even through mobile devices.” – Paolo Rosso, Full Professor, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia
This special issue seeks to gather a diverse set of contributions with novel research analyzing and/or mining social media data to address a wide range of priorities in the scientific community.
For more information and to submit your abstract, please visit: https://peerj.com/special-issues/102-mining-social-media