Online social networking platforms (OSNs) like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit have become valuable data sources in studying societal response to high-impact events (terror attacks, natural disasters, mass demonstrations, etc.). These events unfold rapidly, with users posting their responses and new developments to OSNs as they happen. Rapidly understanding these responses can be critical to providing assistance or reducing conflict.
This talk discusses three main areas in this research:
- How well does OSN data reflect real-world population data,
- What are the patterns in response behavior to these events, and
- How can low-quality information be filtered out from these data sources?
I will present findings across these questions, showing social media data mirrors certain geographic populations, discussing event-detection algorithms, and outlining some current research in cross-platform information quality. I will then open discussion on future work in: OSN data for qualitative study, crisis informatics, and studies of population/platform differences in online information quality.
Dr. Cody Buntain is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Maryland’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab and is funded by the Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Fellowship. His current areas of research include studying complex social systems and how society leverages social media in the aftermath of crises and social unrest. This research includes evaluating information credibility across social media platforms, real-time information retrieval and event detection in response to crises, social media reflections of real-world phenomena, and the intersection of machine learning and computational social science.