Network Analysis of Women in Otolaryngology and Demographic Trends.

Objective: This study analyzes gender disparities between men and women otolaryngology faculty in the top 20 otolaryngology departments ranked by research output and discusses the implications of these disparities.

Methods: This was a cross-sectional study of all articles published by faculty from January 2020 to December 2021 at the top 20 otolaryngology departments as ranked by Doximity's 2022 research output report. Integrated data from Web of Science, faculty directories, and NIH RePORT were used to collect data on faculty.

Corrigendum: Do you hear the people sing? Comparison of synchronized URL and narrative themes in 2020 and 2023 French protests.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fdata.2023.

Do you hear the people sing? Comparison of synchronized URL and narrative themes in 2020 and 2023 French protests.

Introduction: France has seen two key protests within the term of President Emmanuel Macron: one in 2020 against Islamophobia, and another in 2023 against the pension reform. During these protests, there is much chatter on online social media platforms like Twitter.

Methods: In this study, we aim to analyze the differences between the online chatter of the 2 years through a network-centric view, and in particular the synchrony of users.

Role of masks in mitigating viral spread on networks.

Masks have remained an important mitigation strategy in the fight against COVID-19 due to their ability to prevent the transmission of respiratory droplets between individuals. In this work, we provide a comprehensive quantitative analysis of the impact of mask-wearing. To this end, we propose a novel agent-based model of viral spread on networks where agents may either wear no mask or wear one of several types of masks with different properties (e.

Localizing COVID-19 Misinformation: A Case Study of Tracking Twitter Pandemic Narratives in Pennsylvania Using Computational Network Science.

The recent COVID-19 outbreak has highlighted the importance of effective communication strategies to control the spread of the virus and debunk misinformation. By using accurate narratives, both online and offline, we can motivate communities to follow preventive measures and shape attitudes toward them. However, the abundance of misinformation stories can lead to vaccine hesitancy, obstructing the timely implementation of preventive measures, such as vaccination.

Gender dynamics on Twitter during the 2020 U.S. Democratic presidential primary.

The Twitter social network for each of the top five U.S. Democratic presidential candidates in 2020 was analyzed to determine if there were any differences in the treatment of the candidates.

Investigating coordinated account creation using burst detection and network analysis.

Unlabelled: Democracies around the world face the threat of manipulation of their electorates via coordinated online influence campaigns. Researchers have responded by developing valuable methods for finding automated accounts and identifying false information, but these valiant efforts often fall into a cat-and-mouse game with perpetrators who constantly change their behavior. This has forced several researchers to go beyond the detection of individual malicious actors by instead identifying the coordinated activity that propels potent information operations.

A combined synchronization index for evaluating collective action social media.

Social media has provided a citizen voice, giving rise to grassroots collective action, where users deploy a concerted effort to disseminate online narratives and even carry out offline protests. Sometimes these collective action are aided by inorganic synchronization, which arise from bot actors. It is thus important to identify the synchronicity of emerging discourse on social media and the indications of organic/inorganic activity within the conversations.

Coordinating Narratives Framework for cross-platform analysis in the 2021 US Capitol riots.

Coordinated disinformation campaigns are used to influence social media users, potentially leading to offline violence. In this study, we introduce a general methodology to uncover coordinated messaging through an analysis of user posts on Parler. The proposed Coordinating Narratives Framework constructs a user-to-user coordination graph, which is induced by a user-to-text graph and a text-to-text similarity graph.

Cross-platform information spread during the January 6th capitol riots.

Social media has become an integral component of the modern information system. An average person typically has multiple accounts across different platforms. At the same time, the rise of social media facilitates the spread of online mis/disinformation narratives within and across these platforms.

How disinformation operations against Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny influence the international audience on Twitter.

Previous research dedicated a lot of effort to investigation of the activities of the Internet Research Agency, a Russia-based troll factory, as well as other information operations. However, those studies are mostly focused on the 2016 U.S.

Adolescent-Adult Social Networks and Experiences of Violence Among Black Youth in Neighborhoods With High Levels of Community Violence.

Purpose: Adult support is inversely linked to health-affecting risk behaviors. This study aimed to describe adolescent-adult support network structure and quality, and to analyze associations among network properties, strength of emotional and instrumental support, and violence involvement among predominantly Black youth residing in neighborhoods with high levels of community violence.

Methods: One hundred six youth from urban neighborhoods with high levels of community violence in Pittsburgh, PA completed egocentric social network surveys describing adult supports, measures of support across contexts, and past 30-day violence perpetration, victimization, and witnessing.

Mapping state-sponsored information operations with multi-view modularity clustering.

This paper presents a new computational framework for mapping state-sponsored information operations into distinct strategic units. Utilizing a novel method called multi-view modularity clustering (MVMC), we identify groups of accounts engaged in distinct narrative and network information maneuvers. We then present an analytical pipeline to holistically determine their coordinated and complementary roles within the broader digital campaign.

Duped by Bots: Why Some are Better than Others at Detecting Fake Social Media Personas.

Objective: We examine individuals' ability to detect social bots among Twitter personas, along with participant and persona features associated with that ability.

Background: Social media users need to distinguish bots from human users. We develop and demonstrate a methodology for assessing those abilities, with a simulated social media task.

Social-Cyber Maneuvers During the COVID-19 Vaccine Initial Rollout: Content Analysis of Tweets.

Background: During the time surrounding the approval and initial distribution of Pfizer-BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine, large numbers of social media users took to using their platforms to voice opinions on the vaccine. They formed pro- and anti-vaccination groups toward the purpose of influencing behaviors to vaccinate or not to vaccinate. The methods of persuasion and manipulation for convincing audiences online can be characterized under a framework for social-cyber maneuvers known as the BEND maneuvers.

Assessment of Hospital Characteristics and Interhospital Transfer Patterns of Adults With Emergency General Surgery Conditions.

Importance: Although patients with emergency general surgery (EGS) conditions frequently undergo interhospital transfers, the transfer patterns and associated factors are not well understood.

Objective: To examine whether patients with EGS conditions are consistently directed to hospitals with more resources and better outcomes.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This cohort study performed a network analysis of interhospital transfers among adults with EGS conditions from January 1 to December 31, 2016.

Operation gridlock: opposite sides, opposite strategies.

Twitter and other social media platforms are important tools for competing groups to push their preferred messaging and respond to opposing views. Special attention has been paid to the role these tools play in times of emergency and important public decision-making events such as during the current COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we analyze the Pro- and Anti-Protest sides of the Twitter discussion surrounding the first few weeks of the anti-lockdown protests in the United States.

Disrupted Care Continuity: Testing Associations between Social Networks and Transition Success for Children with Autism.

Children with autism situated in lower income families often receive intensive educational interventions as their primary form of treatment, due to financial barriers for community interventions. However, the continuity of care can be disrupted by school transitions. The quality of social relationships during the transition to a new school among parents, school staff and community providers, called the team-around-the-child (TAC), can potentially buffer a child with autism from the adverse effects caused by care disruptions.

Best Practices for Modeling Egocentric Social Network Data and Health Outcomes.

Objective/aim: We describe best practices for modeling egocentric networks and health outcomes using a five-step guide.

Background: Social network analysis (SNA) is common in social science fields and has more recently been used to study health-related topics including obesity, violence, substance use, health organizational behavior, and healthcare utilization. SNA, alone or in conjunction with spatial analysis, can be used to uniquely evaluate the impact of the physical or built environment on health.

Active, aggressive, but to little avail: characterizing bot activity during the 2020 Singaporean elections.

Digital disinformation presents a challenging problem for democracies worldwide, especially in times of crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. In countries like Singapore, legislative efforts to quell fake news constitute relatively new and understudied contexts for understanding local information operations. This paper presents a social cybersecurity analysis of the 2020 Singaporean elections, which took place at the height of the pandemic and after the recent passage of an anti-fake news law.

"The coronavirus is a bioweapon": classifying coronavirus stories on fact-checking sites.

The 2020 coronavirus pandemic has heightened the need to flag coronavirus-related misinformation, and fact-checking groups have taken to verifying misinformation on the Internet. We explore stories reported by fact-checking groups PolitiFact, Poynter and Snopes from January to June 2020. We characterise these stories into six clusters, then analyse temporal trends of story validity and the level of agreement across sites.

Learning future terrorist targets through temporal meta-graphs.

In the last 20 years, terrorism has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and massive economic, political, and humanitarian crises in several regions of the world. Using real-world data on attacks occurred in Afghanistan and Iraq from 2001 to 2018, we propose the use of temporal meta-graphs and deep learning to forecast future terrorist targets. Focusing on three event dimensions, i.

Characterizing network dynamics of online hate communities around the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hate speech has long posed a serious problem for the integrity of digital platforms. Although significant progress has been made in identifying hate speech in its various forms, prevailing computational approaches have tended to consider it in isolation from the community-based contexts in which it spreads. In this paper, we propose a dynamic network framework to characterize hate communities, focusing on Twitter conversations related to COVID-19 in the United States and the Philippines.

Benefits and Risks: A Systematic Review of Information and Communication Technology Use by Autistic People.

Background: Communication via the internet is a regular feature of everyday interactions for most people, including autistic people. Researchers have investigated how autistic people use information and communication technology (ICT) since the early 2000s. However, no systematic review has been conducted to summarize findings.

Social cybersecurity: an emerging science.

With the rise of online platforms where individuals could gather and spread information came the rise of online cybercrimes aimed at taking advantage of not just single individuals but collectives. In response, researchers and practitioners began trying to understand this digital playground and the way in which individuals who were socially and digitally embedded could be manipulated. What is emerging is a new scientific and engineering discipline-social cybersecurity.