Derek Ruths
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View article: TikTok vs. the Fourth Estate: Engagement With News on TikTok
TikTok vs. the Fourth Estate: Engagement With News on TikTok Open
In addition to content from accounts the user follows, TikTok frequently emphasizes content with similar subject matter to videos the user has previously liked. As long as a user has indicated an interest in the topic (most likely by engag…
View article: TikTok vs. the Fourth Estate: Comparing Event Coverage in News Media and TikTok
TikTok vs. the Fourth Estate: Comparing Event Coverage in News Media and TikTok Open
TikTok is a major news item, but what happens to news on TikTok? To explore this question, we ask how the coverage of the Russian-Ukrainian war on TikTok differs from traditional news coverage. To answer this question, we used topic modell…
View article: Lessons in resilience: Canada's Digital Media Ecosystem and the 2019 Election
Lessons in resilience: Canada's Digital Media Ecosystem and the 2019 Election Open
Researchers, policy-makers and the public at large are paying more attention to the threats that disinformation and other forms of online media manipulation pose to democratic institutions and political life. Starting with the Brexit refer…
View article: Evaluating Event Embeddings on Commodity Future Prices
Evaluating Event Embeddings on Commodity Future Prices Open
Using news text-as-data to predict complex socio-political and economic measures is difficult. Modern pre-training natural language processing techniques can deliver intuitive and sophisticated methods that produce cogent results, but they…
View article: The Invasion of Ukraine Viewed through TikTok: A Dataset
The Invasion of Ukraine Viewed through TikTok: A Dataset Open
We present a dataset of video descriptions, comments, and user statistics, from the social media platform TikTok, centred around the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, an event that launched TikTok into the geopolitical arena. User activity on t…
View article: Is hate speech detection the solution the world wants?
Is hate speech detection the solution the world wants? Open
The machine learning (ML) research community has landed on automated hate speech detection as the vital tool in the mitigation of bad behavior online. However, it is not clear that this is a widely supported view outside of the ML world. S…
View article: The Invasion of Ukraine Viewed through TikTok: A Dataset
The Invasion of Ukraine Viewed through TikTok: A Dataset Open
We present a dataset of video descriptions, comments, and user statistics, from the social media platform TikTok, centred around the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, an event that launched TikTok into the geopolitical arena. User activity on t…
View article: The Invasion of Ukraine Viewed through TikTok: A Dataset
The Invasion of Ukraine Viewed through TikTok: A Dataset Open
This is a dataset of videos and comments related to the invasion of Ukraine, published on TikTok by a number of users over the year of 2022. It was compiled by Benjamin Steel, Sara Parker and Derek Ruths at the Network Dynamics Lab, McGill…
View article: Invasion of Ukraine Discourse on TikTok Dataset
Invasion of Ukraine Discourse on TikTok Dataset Open
This is a dataset of videos and comments related to the invasion of Ukraine, published on TikTok by a number of users over the year of 2022. It was compiled by Benjamin Steel, Sara Parker and Derek Ruths at the Network Dynamics Lab, McGill…
View article: The Invasion of Ukraine Viewed through TikTok: A Dataset
The Invasion of Ukraine Viewed through TikTok: A Dataset Open
This is a dataset of videos and comments related to the invasion of Ukraine, published on TikTok by a number of users over the year of 2022. It was compiled by Benjamin Steel, Sara Parker and Derek Ruths at the Network Dynamics Lab, McGill…
View article: Enriching Abusive Language Detection with Community Context
Enriching Abusive Language Detection with Community Context Open
Uses of pejorative expressions can be benign or actively empowering. When models for abuse detection misclassify these expressions as derogatory, they inadvertently censor productive conversations held by marginalized groups. One way to en…
View article: The epidemiological impact of the Canadian COVID Alert app
The epidemiological impact of the Canadian COVID Alert app Open
Objectives We analyzed the effectiveness of the Canadian COVID Alert app on reducing COVID-19 infections and deaths due to the COVID-19 virus. Methods Two separate but complementary approaches were taken. First, we undertook a comparative …
View article: The epidemiological impact of the Canadian COVID Alert App
The epidemiological impact of the Canadian COVID Alert App Open
Objectives We analyzed the effectiveness of the Canadian COVID Alert app on reducing COVID-19 infections and deaths due to the COVID-19 virus. Methods Two separate, but complementary approaches, were taken. First, we undertook a comparativ…
View article: Enriching Abusive Language Detection with Community Context
Enriching Abusive Language Detection with Community Context Open
Uses of pejorative expressions can be benign or actively empowering. When models for abuse detection misclassify these expressions as derogatory, they inadvertently censor productive conversations held by marginalized groups. One way to en…
View article: Corrigendum: Infodemic Pathways: Evaluating the Role that Traditional and Social Media Play in Cross-National Information Transfer
Corrigendum: Infodemic Pathways: Evaluating the Role that Traditional and Social Media Play in Cross-National Information Transfer Open
CORRECTION article Front. Polit. Sci., 21 October 2021Sec. Political Participation https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2021.727073
View article: User Migration in Online Social Networks: A Case Study on Reddit During a Period of Community Unrest
User Migration in Online Social Networks: A Case Study on Reddit During a Period of Community Unrest Open
Platforms like Reddit have attracted large and vibrant communities, but the individuals in those communities are free to migrate to other platforms at any time. History has borne this out with the mass migration from Slashdot to Digg. The …
View article: To Buy or to Read: How a Platform Shapes Reviewing Behavior
To Buy or to Read: How a Platform Shapes Reviewing Behavior Open
We explore how platforms influence user-generated content by comparing reviews made on the retail platform Amazon, with those on the (non-retail) community platform Goodreads. We find the retail setting gives rise to shorter, more declamat…
View article: Classifying Political Orientation on Twitter: It’s Not Easy!
Classifying Political Orientation on Twitter: It’s Not Easy! Open
Numerous papers have reported great success at inferring the political orientation of Twitter users. This paper has some unfortunate news to deliver: while past work has been sound and often methodologically novel, we have discovered that …
View article: Organizations Are Users Too: Characterizing and Detecting the Presence of Organizations on Twitter
Organizations Are Users Too: Characterizing and Detecting the Presence of Organizations on Twitter Open
Much work on the demographics of social media platforms such as Twitter has focused on the properties of individuals, such as gender or age. However, because credible detectors for organization accounts do not exist, these and future large…
View article: Homophily and Latent Attribute Inference: Inferring Latent Attributes of Twitter Users from Neighbors
Homophily and Latent Attribute Inference: Inferring Latent Attributes of Twitter Users from Neighbors Open
In this paper, we extend existing work on latent attribute inference by leveraging the principle of homophily: we evaluate the inference accuracy gained by augmenting the user features with features derived from the Twitter profiles and po…
View article: Goodreads Versus Amazon: The Effect of Decoupling Book Reviewing And Book Selling
Goodreads Versus Amazon: The Effect of Decoupling Book Reviewing And Book Selling Open
Book reviewing is a commonplace activity on many ecommerce sites. However, it is nested within the broader context of book buying and selling. Goodreads, an online platform for social curation of book collections, provides an opportunity t…
View article: The Effect of Mobile Platforms on Twitter Content Generation
The Effect of Mobile Platforms on Twitter Content Generation Open
The increased popularity of feature-rich mobile devices in recent years has enabled widespread consumption and production of social media content via mobile devices. Because mobile devices and mobile applications change context within whic…
View article: Everyone's Invited: A New Paradigm for Evaluation on Non-Transferable Datasets
Everyone's Invited: A New Paradigm for Evaluation on Non-Transferable Datasets Open
Social media data mining and analytics has stimulated a wide array of computational research. Traditionally, individual researchers are responsible for acquiring and managing their own datasets. However, the temporal nature of social data,…
View article: An Analysis of Exercising Behavior in Online Populations
An Analysis of Exercising Behavior in Online Populations Open
Exercise plays a central role in many peoples' fitness goals. While prior work has examined how individuals pursue these health and fitness goals on general purpose platforms such as Twitter, the lack of precise activity recording has limi…