Influence modeling of opinion switching by Twitter users in public shaming events
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Influence modeling of opinion switching by Twitter users in public shaming events Rajesh Basak1 · Soumya K. Ghosh1 · Shamik Sural1 Received: 28 April 2020 / Revised: 23 August 2020 / Accepted: 23 September 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Public shaming is mass criticism of someone for perceived violation of an established social norm. These events are ever increasing in number and scope on online social media platforms. An individual instance of shaming is, as a matter of fact, an expression of opinion regarding the target or victim of the event. Public shaming events are more engaging and often evoke stronger opinions from users than word of mouth spreading of information. This work models polarity of a user’s opinion as a function of several factors, such as his/her recently held opinions, received opinions and the environment, in online public shaming events on Twitter. Specifically, we investigate the opinion change process of Twitter users by highlighting the influence of responsible factors. A semi-supervised representation learning model is used to get opinion vectors from tweets. Next, an opinion prediction model based on the user’s past opinions, received opinions and environment is designed. We show that opinion changes can be attributed to factors in varying proportions depending on the direction of the change. Thus, a strategy to stop a shaming event by inducing opinion changes in the participants needs to take into account the direction of the change. Efficacy of possible counter measures to shaming is analyzed based on our findings. Keywords Opinion polarity change · Online public shaming · Twitter
1 Introduction Public shaming events in popular social media platforms are a growing menace (Ronson 2015). There is a basic design which such events follow: an action by the victim, a mob catapulted into action apparently offended by it, a stream of criticism and finally some contemplation. In the meantime, the victim is cornered and reduced to a social stigma, adversely affecting him/her both psychologically and financially for years to follow. The lack of empathy shown toward the victim from the online social media Web site owners in countering this menace is evident from the absence of right tools in the victim’s hands.
* Rajesh Basak [email protected] Soumya K. Ghosh [email protected] Shamik Sural [email protected] 1
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India
The shamers as well as their victims are a varied lot. After studying the tweets of several shaming events, the authors noticed that following the barrage of shaming comments at the beginning of the events, conciliatory comments start pouring in Basak et al. (2019). A significant proportion of users (about 18,000 users out of 145,000 in our dataset) made multiple comments in a single event which includes both shaming and non-shaming categories. Evidently, their perception of the victim changed from n
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