Celia Chen, Alex Leitch, William Jordan Conway
et al.
The quality of a user's social media experience is determined both by the content they see and by the quality of the conversation and interaction around it. In this paper, we look at replies to tweets from mainstream media outlets and official government agencies and assess if they are good faith, engaging honestly and constructively with the original post, or bad faith, attacking the author or derailing the conversation. We assess automated approaches that may help in making this determination and then show that within our dataset of replies to mainstream media outlets and government agencies, bad faith interactions constitute 68.3% of all replies we studied, suggesting potential concerns about the quality of discourse in these specific conversational contexts. This is particularly true from verified accounts, where 91.7% of replies were bad faith. Given that verified accounts are algorithmically amplified, we discuss the implications of our work for understanding the user experience on social media.
The transition of Large Language Models (LLMs) from exploratory tools to active "silicon subjects" in social science lacks extensive validation of operational validity. This study introduces Conditioned Comment Prediction (CCP), a task in which a model predicts how a user would comment on a given stimulus by comparing generated outputs with authentic digital traces. This framework enables a rigorous evaluation of current LLM capabilities with respect to the simulation of social media user behavior. We evaluated open-weight 8B models (Llama3.1, Qwen3, Ministral) in English, German, and Luxembourgish language scenarios. By systematically comparing prompting strategies (explicit vs. implicit) and the impact of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), we identify a critical form vs. content decoupling in low-resource settings: while SFT aligns the surface structure of the text output (length and syntax), it degrades semantic grounding. Furthermore, we demonstrate that explicit conditioning (generated biographies) becomes redundant under fine-tuning, as models successfully perform latent inference directly from behavioral histories. Our findings challenge current "naive prompting" paradigms and offer operational guidelines prioritizing authentic behavioral traces over descriptive personas for high-fidelity simulation.
Gaspard Abel, Argyris Kalogeratos, Jean-Pierre Nadal
et al.
The emergence of online social platforms, such as social networks and social media, has drastically affected the way people apprehend the information flows to which they are exposed. In such platforms, various information cascades spreading among users is the main force creating complex dynamics of opinion formation, each user being characterized by their own behavior adoption mechanism. Moreover, the spread of multiple pieces of information or beliefs in a networked population is rarely uncorrelated. In this paper, we introduce the Mixture of Interacting Cascades (MIC), a model of marked multidimensional Hawkes processes with the capacity to model jointly non-trivial interaction between cascades and users. We emphasize on the interplay between information cascades and user activity, and use a mixture of temporal point processes to build a coupled user/cascade point process model. Experiments on synthetic and real data highlight the benefits of this approach and demonstrate that MIC achieves superior performance to existing methods in modeling the spread of information cascades. Finally, we demonstrate how MIC can provide, through its learned parameters, insightful bi-layered visualizations of real social network activity data.
Social media platforms frequently impose restrictive policies to moderate user content, prompting the emergence of creative evasion language strategies. This paper presents a multi-agent framework based on Large Language Models (LLMs) to simulate the iterative evolution of language strategies under regulatory constraints. In this framework, participant agents, as social media users, continuously evolve their language expression, while supervisory agents emulate platform-level regulation by assessing policy violations. To achieve a more faithful simulation, we employ a dual design of language strategies (constraint and expression) to differentiate conflicting goals and utilize an LLM-driven GA (Genetic Algorithm) for the selection, mutation, and crossover of language strategies. The framework is evaluated using two distinct scenarios: an abstract password game and a realistic simulated illegal pet trade scenario. Experimental results demonstrate that as the number of dialogue rounds increases, both the number of uninterrupted dialogue turns and the accuracy of information transmission improve significantly. Furthermore, a user study with 40 participants validates the real-world relevance of the generated dialogues and strategies. Moreover, ablation studies validate the importance of the GA, emphasizing its contribution to long-term adaptability and improved overall results.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to answer everyday questions, yet their performance on culturally grounded and dialectal content remains uneven across languages. We propose a comprehensive method that (i) translates Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) multiple-choice questions (MCQs) into English and several Arabic dialects, (ii) converts them into open-ended questions (OEQs), (iii) benchmarks a range of zero-shot and fine-tuned LLMs under both MCQ and OEQ settings, and (iv) generates chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales to fine-tune models for step-by-step reasoning. Using this method, we extend an existing dataset in which QAs are parallelly aligned across multiple language varieties, making it, to our knowledge, the first of its kind. We conduct extensive experiments with both open and closed models. Our findings show that (i) models underperform on Arabic dialects, revealing persistent gaps in culturally grounded and dialect-specific knowledge; (ii) Arabic-centric models perform well on MCQs but struggle with OEQs; and (iii) CoT improves judged correctness while yielding mixed n-gram-based metrics. The developed dataset will be publicly released to support further research on culturally and linguistically inclusive evaluation.
The discovery in the early 2000s of animal rock engravings near the village of Qurta in the Nile Valley (Upper Egypt) remains little discussed. This article focuses on the numerous stylistic links between these engravings and European Pleistocene figurations. These analogies allow us to date Qurta approximately to the end of the Last Glacial Maximum (between the end of Gravettian-Solutrean art and the beginning of Magdalenian art). This estimate is confirmed by OSL-dating obtained from a buried engraved panel from Qurta. The hypothesis as to European origin of the images is also reinforced by the presence of schematic female engravings identical to those scattered throughout Eurasia. The possibility of Mediterranean cultural exchange is considered. Several communication routes were possible. Taking into account the published documentation, we infer that the engravings at Qurta are less isolated than they appear and that rock engravings located on the Cyrenaican coast and in the Sinai could be the result of repeated contacts (including migrations) of people inhabiting the two shores of the Mediterranean.
Мета статті — проаналізувати специфіку жанрової мутації та конкретні прояви трансформації художньо-естетичної системи документалістики на прикладі мок’юментарі, що допоможе з’ясувати місце зазначеної жанроформи в аудіовізуальній культурі. Результати дослідження. Розглянуто контекст становлення художньо- документального кіно на початку XX ст. Досліджено специфіку мок’юментарі у проєкції розвитку документалістики «змішаних форм» впродовж минулого століття, зокрема на конкретних прикладах. Доведено, що документалістика «змішаних форм» і мок’юментарі є важливими агентами формування культурного та аудіовізуального ландшафтів ХХ ст. Наукова новизна дослідження полягає в тому, що у статті вперше розглянуто мок’юментарі як жанровий напрям документалістики «змішаних форм» та результат аудіовізуальної гібридизації. Висновки. Становлення кіномистецтва супроводжувалося видовими дифузіями на кшталт стилізації під інформаційну хроніку. На базі художньої практики режисерів-ігровиків впродовж 20–50х рр. XX ст. виникає документалістика «змішаних форм» як жанр кінематографічної творчості, в якому поєднуються елементи документального кіно з художніми або експериментальними засобами і який характеризується використанням різних технік монтажу, включаючи комбінування архівних матеріалів з перформативними елементами, анімацією та акторською грою. У другій половині XX ст. під впливом філософії та естетики постмодерну особливого поширення та популярності набуває мок’юментарі, що обумовлено бажанням документалістів експериментувати з жанровими формами та структурою фільмів, спробами більше вплинути на глядача через емоційну залученість і актуалізацію соціально важливих проблем.
Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology, Sociology (General)
Large-scale deployment of large language models (LLMs) in various applications, such as chatbots and virtual assistants, requires LLMs to be culturally sensitive to the user to ensure inclusivity. Culture has been widely studied in psychology and anthropology, and there has been a recent surge in research on making LLMs more culturally inclusive in LLMs that goes beyond multilinguality and builds on findings from psychology and anthropology. In this paper, we survey efforts towards incorporating cultural awareness into text-based and multimodal LLMs. We start by defining cultural awareness in LLMs, taking the definitions of culture from anthropology and psychology as a point of departure. We then examine methodologies adopted for creating cross-cultural datasets, strategies for cultural inclusion in downstream tasks, and methodologies that have been used for benchmarking cultural awareness in LLMs. Further, we discuss the ethical implications of cultural alignment, the role of Human-Computer Interaction in driving cultural inclusion in LLMs, and the role of cultural alignment in driving social science research. We finally provide pointers to future research based on our findings about gaps in the literature.
Ismail Hossain, Sai Puppala, Md Jahangir Alam
et al.
User activities can influence their subsequent interactions with a post, generating interest in the user. Typically, users interact with posts from friends by commenting and using reaction emojis, reflecting their level of interest on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. Our objective is to analyze user history over time, including their posts and engagement on various topics. Additionally, we take into account the user's profile, seeking connections between their activities and social media platforms. By integrating user history, engagement, and persona, we aim to assess recommendation scores based on relevant item sharing by Hit Rate (HR) and the quality of the ranking system by Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG), where we achieve the highest for NeuMF 0.80 and 0.6 respectively. Our hybrid approach solves the cold-start problem when there is a new user, for new items cold-start problem will never occur, as we consider the post category values. To improve the performance of the model during cold-start we introduce collaborative filtering by looking for similar users and ranking the users based on the highest similarity scores.
The expression "wasting time" is a colloquial label for periods of time spent waiting to receive services in various social situations in which people find themselves in state or private institutions, such as the Ministry of Internal Affairs or health institutions, banks and technical inspections of vehicles, etc. In this way, the superiority of social or cultural time over individual time is manifested. Cultural use of time represents the tendency to manage linear time by repeating events anchored in certain time segments, such as rituals, music festivals, sports events, or national holidays. Individuals perceive time based on cultural learning, understanding sociocultural time as a framework for organizing their personal time. This means that when they are not engaged in activities arising from collective time, individuals tend to organize their time according to their personal needs and intentions - as much as possible.Wasting time is therefore perceived as time not spent on activities related to work or free time that are the consequence of personal choice or existential necessity. The term most often refers to the waiting periods, which are apparently not regarded as integral to completing a task, such as a medical examination or obtaining personal documents. The concept of wasting time emerges as an uncreative, imposed, wasted time spent on completing tasks that could be organized differently. It is an empty time, devoid of important events and which is contrasted with periods of activity. The idea of wasting time corresponds to the personal experience of time. The given expression is a consequence of evaluating whether or not a certain period of time was spent usefully, viewed from a personal perspective. Everyone's experience suggests that time seems to pass more slowly when we can do nothing but wait. The networking of such experiences, arising from a multitude of social situations that impose prolonged waiting as a procedural part to obtain what is considered useful or necessary for individuals, can be characterised as a cultural practice. The contributors to this practice include all social institutions that provide services to users through direct contact and hold a societal monopoly of performing their activities.
The article is devoted to museology education in the Warsaw ethnological centre, from the beginning of its establishment in the 1930s. The text highlights the postulate of the first Head of the Department − Cezaria Baudouin de Courtenay-Ehrenkreutz-Jędrzejewiczowa to combine field research with work with museum collections, the return of museological themes to didactics in the 1960s on the initiative of Marian Pokropek, and the subsequent museological initiatives of the centre’s employees. The conducted review made it possible to conclude that museological issues have always been present in ethnological education in the Warsaw centre, even though it has not been possible to create a uniform system of teaching them. The most popular form of their presence has been the museum traineeship. It brings students into contact with experienced museum professionals, enabling them to acquire specific skills and learn directly about the collections of a particular museum. Students who choose museology subjects do not constitute a large group, but they are interested and committed, which is often reflected in the choice of topics for their diploma theses (bachelor’s, master’s) or in their choice of career after graduation. The article is supplemented by annexes: the first concerns museum traineeships conducted between 2009 and 2022, and the second contains a list of bachelor’s and master’s theses related to museology (it covers the years 1955–2022)
In the last two decades, the changes in the concept of cultural heritage intensified the attempts to create the foundations and standardize the nomenclature of heritage studies and the heritage theory. The standardization attempts mainly come from the professional associations and international organizations dealing with heritage conservation, but, at the same time, they reflect novel theoretical stand points, being continuously built in the conservation practice. These changes in heritage theory allow for a wider interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary insights in the field. Such a situation opens a question of terminological compatibility of different fields expressing direct or indirect interest in cultural forms and processes, an example of which is covering a range of research programs under the umbrella term of cultural evolution. In this article, an instrumental definition of cultural heritage is generated to support the terminological analysis. The elements of this definitions are further used as a basis for a review of terminology in the fields of cultural evolution and cultural heritage, in order to create clusters of compatible terms in both fields. This article aims at stressing the need for transdisciplinary knowledge synthesis and integrated heritage terminology.
The Protestant Christian Church in Bali (GKPB) is the largest Protestant Church in Bali. The Protestant Christian Church in Bali (GKPB), in determining the number of strategic officials, refers to the 2014 Church Order regarding membership in Article 107 paragraph 1, 8 (eight) people elected at the Synod session must consist of at least 2 female elements and 1 youth element . Complete Synod Council Personnel (MSL-GKPB) Head of Departments and Chair of Special Institutions, 2016-2020 period, totaling 30 people; 27 men (90%), while only three women (10%). The patriarchal culture is very strong in determining strategic positions in GKPB resulting in male domination in leadership structures and policies that tend to be gender biased.
With qualitative methods and using the Theory of Power-Knowledge Relationships Michel Foucault, According to Foucault, knowledge and power have a reciprocal relationship. Continuous violation of power will create a form of knowledge, and vice versa, the administration of knowledge will have an effect on power. The second is Pierre Bourdieu's Structural theory, which describes how symbolic violence and the division of roles in society shape habitus.
Keywords: Representation, Patriarchy, Symbolic Violence
The aim of the study The rise of Islam in the Balkans-the Bektashi Order was to map the development of this religion in this region. This study explains at the beginning the basic principles of Islam, its spread in the Balkan region with an important focus on the efforts of Albanians not to submit to the Ottoman Empire, and informs why Albanians decided to accept Islam through different orders, but mainly through the Bektashi Order that is still very influential in Albania. My initial effort was to present the most accurate knowledge of this order and their teachings, their customs, hierarchy and history in the territory where the Albanian population lived and lives.
Anthropology, Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology
The plague of false information, popularly called fake news has affected lives of news consumers ever since the prevalence of social media. Thus understanding the spread of false information in social networks has gained a lot of attention in the literature. While most proposed models do content analysis of the information, no much work has been done by exploring the community structures that also play an important role in determining how people get exposed to it. In this paper we base our idea on Computational Trust in social networks to propose a novel Community Health Assessment model against fake news. Based on the concepts of neighbor, boundary and core nodes of a community, we propose novel evaluation metrics to quantify the vulnerability of nodes (individual-level) and communities (group-level) to spreading false information. Our model hypothesizes that if the boundary nodes trust the neighbor nodes of a community who are spreaders, the densely-connected core nodes of the community are highly likely to become spreaders. We test our model with communities generated using three popular community detection algorithms based on two new datasets of information spreading networks collected from Twitter. Our experimental results show that the proposed metrics perform clearly better on the networks spreading false information than on those spreading true ones, indicating our community health assessment model is effective.
We draw insights from the social psychology literature to identify two facets of Twitter deliberations about migrants, i.e., perceptions about migrants and behaviors towards mi-grants. Our theoretical anchoring helped us in identifying two prevailing perceptions (i.e., sympathy and antipathy) and two dominant behaviors (i.e., solidarity and animosity) of social media users towards migrants. We have employed unsuper-vised and supervised approaches to identify these perceptions and behaviors. In the domain of applied NLP, our study of-fers a nuanced understanding of migrant-related Twitter de-liberations. Our proposed transformer-based model, i.e., BERT + CNN, has reported an F1-score of 0.76 and outper-formed other models. Additionally, we argue that tweets con-veying antipathy or animosity can be broadly considered hate speech towards migrants, but they are not the same. Thus, our approach has fine-tuned the binary hate speech detection task by highlighting the granular differences between perceptual and behavioral aspects of hate speeches.
COVID-19 resulted in an infodemic, which could erode public trust, impede virus containment, and outlive the pandemic itself. The evolving and fragmented media landscape is a key driver of the spread of misinformation. Using misinformation identified by the fact-checking platform by Tencent and posts on Weibo, our results showed that the evolution of misinformation follows an issue-attention cycle, pertaining to topics such as city lockdown, cures, and preventions, and school reopening. Sources of authority weigh in on these topics, but their influence is complicated by peoples' pre-existing beliefs and cultural practices. Finally, social media has a complicated relationship with established or legacy media systems. Sometimes they reinforce each other, but in general, social media may have a topic cycle of its own making. Our findings shed light on the distinct characteristics of misinformation during the COVID-19 and offer insights into combating misinformation in China and across the world at large.
The Sixties is a specific sociocultural phenomenon of Russian (Soviet) history. This term refers to the post-war era of the mid-1950s – late 1960s, and means the generation of the Soviet intelligentsia, born approximately between 1925 and 1945s and formed by them subculture. This concept is used to assess the phenomena and changes associated with literature, art, social processes. Special assessments of this phenomenon in science have not been available yet. Some postmodern approaches are used in the study of sociocultural phenomena during studying the phenomenon of the “sixties” in archeology including the identification of certain cultural concepts and sociopsychological determinants, consideration of the integrity of the phenomenon through the analysis of individual parts in order to provide opportunities for self-identification. The factual base of this article consists of publications, personal knowledge and impressions of the author. After the “defeat” of the Petri’s Irkutsk archaeological school in the 1930s, and until the mid-1950s. archaeology at Irkutsk State University was in a flickering state. Since mid-1950s began the Renaissance of the Irkutsk archaeological school. The dotted lines of connections from the Petri school through his scholarly M. M. Gerasimov and the “guardians” of traditions of N. A. Florensov and S. V. Shostakovich associated with the Petri school were realized in the formation of a team of young researchers and the creation of a stable system of scientific archaeological research at the Irkutsk University. The activities of the new generation of the Irkutsk archaeological school were expressed in field researches, in the development of methods, approaches and concepts, in publication activity, in international relations, in the creation of corporate entities as special structures and training systems. This activity reflects all sociopsychological determinants and cultural concepts that are characteristic of the generation of the sixties in different areas of the existing Soviet society. The nature of this activity can be defined as a new “discovery” of Siberia - archaeological. This activity formed the basis for the development of archaeological science at Irkutsk State University, the implementation of which is ongoing today.
Jonathanas Friedmanas naująja savo knyga Politicamente corretto. Il conformismo morale come regime (Friedman 2018), pasitelkęs kritinį mąstymą su dažnu poleminiu intarpu, ir vėl pataikė tiesiai į dešimtuką. Tiesą sakant, jis įtikinamai apibūdina ideologinei ir politinei praktikai būdingą veidmainystę, kurią aš vadinu „geradaryste“ ir kuri, kaip netrukus pamatysime, yra ypač išvešėjusi šių dienų antropologijoje. J. Friedmanas taikliai ir aiškiai sako, kad „politinis korektiškumas“ tapo šiandieninio elito ideologiniu instrumentu. Mano nuomone, terminas „elitas“ yra dviprasmiškas, nes semantiškai jis per platus, taigi neapibrėžtas. Šį terminą dėl jo semantinio neaiškumo kiek anksčiau kritikavo Vilfredo Pareto (Pareto 2006). Kas yra elitas? Ar tai „politinė klasė“, kurią apibrėžė Gaetano Mosca (Mosca 1958), ar, cituojant Robertą Michelsą (Michels 1989), tai – politinių partijų aukštesnioji pakopa ar valdžios elitas, kurį mini Charlesas Wrightas Millsas (Wright Mills 2000), t. y. tie žmonės, kurie valdo ir monopolizuoja parlamento gyvenimą? O gal tai asmenys, kurie užima dominuojančias pareigas kultūros ir meno srityse, tie, kurie sėkmingai kuria ar vadovauja kultūrinei veiklai? Norint išvengti tokio neišsamaus sąrašo tęsimo, šioje vietoje reikėtų nurodyti ir tuos, kurie pagrįstai ar ne visai pagrįstai yra įvardyti kaip akademinės srities atstovai, t. y. tie, kurie universitete užima tam tikras pareigas ar dirba panašiose mokslo ar humanitarinių mokslų tyrimų institucijose.