Stickers are multimodal resources widely used in everyday digital conversations. Despite their popularity, most studies have focused on emojis and emoticons. Therefore, this study analyzes, from a sociopragmatic perspective, the use of stickers in the comments from a corpus of Facebook posts containing acts of face-enhancing politeness, created during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The main objective is to identify their communicative functions and determine the extent to which they act as strategies of face-enhancing politeness also considering the gender variable. The results show a predominance of naked stickers and those representing human emotions and gestures, and festive situations. Six main functions were identified: affective, illocutionary, interactional, gestural, aesthetic, and representative or substitutive. It was found that stickers can intensify polite messages and express face-enhancing politeness autonomously. Furthermore, gender differences were observed: women use more stickers, especially cute and affectionate ones, whereas men prefer masculine human figures. These findings highlight the key and multifunctional role of stickers in affective digital communication.
In this paper, we provide a novel measure for greenwashing -- i.e., climate-related misinformation -- that shows how polluting companies can use social media advertising related to climate change to redirect criticism. To do so, we identify greenwashing content in 11 million social-political ads in Meta's Ad Targeting Datset with a measurement technique that combines large language models, human coders, and advances in Bayesian item response theory. We show that what is called greenwashing has diverse actors and components, but we also identify a very pernicious form, which we call political greenwashing, that appears to be promoted by fossil fuel companies and related interest groups. Based on ad targeting data, we show that much of this advertising happens via organizations with undisclosed links to the fossil fuel industry. Furthermore, we show that greenwashing ad content is being micro-targeted at left-leaning communities with fossil fuel assets, though we also find comparatively little evidence of ad targeting aimed at influencing public opinion at the national level.
Shang Chieh Lee, Bhuva Narayan, Simon Buckingham Shum
et al.
Research on the implementation of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in higher education often focuses on strategic goals, overlooking the hidden, and often politically charged, labour required to make it functional. This paper provides an insider's account of the sociotechnical friction that arises when an institutional goal of empowering non-technical staff conflicts with the technical limitations of enterprise Large Language Models (LLMs). Through analytic autoethnography, this study examines a GenAI project pushed to an impasse, focusing on a workaround developed to navigate not only technical constraints but also the combined challenge of organisational territoriality and assertions of positional power. Drawing upon Alter's (2014) theory of workarounds, the analysis interprets "articulation work" as a form of "invisible labour". By engaging with the Information Systems (IS) domains of user innovation and technology-in-practice, this study argues that such user-driven workarounds should be understood not as deviations, but as integral acts of sociotechnical integration. This integration, however, highlights the central paradoxes of modern GenAI where such workarounds for "unfinished" systems can simultaneously create unofficial "shadow" systems and obscure the crucial, yet invisible, sociotechnical labour involved. The findings suggest that the invisible labour required to integrate GenAI within complex organisational politics is an important, rather than peripheral, component of how it becomes functional in practice.
Tolulope Oshinowo, Sohyeon Hwang, Amy X. Zhang
et al.
Calls to decentralize feed-based social media have been driven by concerns about the concentrated power of centralized platforms and their societal impact. In response, numerous decentralized social media protocols have emerged, each interpreting "decentralization" in different ways. We analyze four such protocols -- ActivityPub, AT Protocol, Nostr, and Farcaster -- to develop a novel conceptual framework for understanding how protocols operationalize decentralization. Drawing from protocol documentation, media coverage, and first-hand interviews with protocol developers and experts, we contextualize each protocol's approach within their respective socio-technical goals. Our framework highlights how control over key components is distributed differently across each protocol, shaping who holds power over what kinds of decisions. How components are arranged in relation to one another further impacts how component owners might offset each other's power in shaping social media. We argue that examining protocols as artifacts reveals how values shape infrastructure and power dynamics -- and that with a holistic framework as a guide, we can more effectively evaluate and design decentralized platforms aligned with the social and political futures we envision.
The proliferation of linguistically subtle political disinformation poses a significant challenge to automated fact-checking systems. Despite increasing emphasis on complex neural architectures, the empirical limits of text-only linguistic modeling remain underexplored. We present a systematic diagnostic evaluation of nine machine learning algorithms on the LIAR benchmark. By isolating lexical features (Bag-of-Words, TF-IDF) and semantic embeddings (GloVe), we uncover a hard "Performance Ceiling", with fine-grained classification not exceeding a Weighted F1-score of 0.32 across models. Crucially, a simple linear SVM (Accuracy: 0.624) matches the performance of pre-trained Transformers such as RoBERTa (Accuracy: 0.620), suggesting that model capacity is not the primary bottleneck. We further diagnose a massive "Generalization Gap" in tree-based ensembles, which achieve more than 99% training accuracy but collapse to approximately 25% on test data, indicating reliance on lexical memorization rather than semantic inference. Synthetic data augmentation via SMOTE yields no meaningful gains, confirming that the limitation is semantic (feature ambiguity) rather than distributional. These findings indicate that for political fact-checking, increasing model complexity without incorporating external knowledge yields diminishing returns.
Patrick Haller, Jannis Vamvas, Rico Sennrich
et al.
A growing body of work has been querying LLMs with political questions to evaluate their potential biases. However, this probing method has limited stability, making comparisons between models unreliable. In this paper, we argue that LLMs need more context. We propose a new probing task, Questionnaire Modeling (QM), that uses human survey data as in-context examples. We show that QM improves the stability of question-based bias evaluation, and demonstrate that it may be used to compare instruction-tuned models to their base versions. Experiments with LLMs of various sizes indicate that instruction tuning can indeed change the direction of bias. Furthermore, we observe a trend that larger models are able to leverage in-context examples more effectively, and generally exhibit smaller bias scores in QM. Data and code are publicly available.
Fabíola Cristina de Oliveira Bento Aquino, Edilson Fernandes Souza, José Luís Simões
et al.
Este artigo trata das representações sociais dos professores da Escola Municipal de Frevo Maestro Fernando Borges, situada na cidade do Recife/PE. De caráter qualitativo e descritivo, o estudo foi realizado por meio de entrevistas semiestruturadas com os quatro professores que compõem a equipe docente da escola, tendo a técnica corporal da dança frevo como o principal foco de atenção e elemento de confluência profissional. As falas provenientes das referidas entrevistas foram submetidas a análise de conteúdo na perspectiva de Laurence Bardin (1977), para identificar as unidades de significação e se constituir como fonte de referência à Teoria das Representações Sociais. Além dos aspectos culturais de matriz africana, a dança frevo, enquanto prática educativa, faz parte da história de vida dos professores, que verbalizam o sentimento de pertencimento a uma territorialidade e identidade profissional e social, bem como gera um sentimento de gratidão por tudo que a escola lhes proporcionou.
Social Sciences, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class
Federico Albanese, Esteban Feuerstein, Pablo Balenzuela
Individuals engaging on social media often tend to establish online communities where interactions predominantly occur among like-minded peers. While considerable efforts have been devoted to studying and delineating these communities, there has been limited attention directed towards individuals who diverge from these patterns. In this study, we examine the community structure of re-post networks within the context of a polarized political environment at two different times. We specifically identify individuals who consistently switch between opposing communities and analyze the key features that distinguish them. Our investigation focuses on two crucial aspects of these users: the topological properties of their interactions and the political bias in the content of their posts. Our analysis is based on a dataset comprising 2 million tweets related to US President Donald Trump, coupled with data from over 100 000 individual user accounts spanning the 2020 US presidential election year. Our findings indicate that individuals who switch communities exhibit disparities compared to those who remain within the same communities, both in terms of the topological aspects of their interaction patterns (pagerank, degree, betweenness centrality.) and in the sentiment bias of their content towards Donald Trump.
Tanusree Sharma, Yujin Potter, Zachary Kilhoffer
et al.
How AI models should deal with political topics has been discussed, but it remains challenging and requires better governance. This paper examines the governance of large language models through individual and collective deliberation, focusing on politically sensitive videos. We conducted a two-step study: interviews with 10 journalists established a baseline understanding of expert video interpretation; 114 individuals through deliberation using InclusiveAI, a platform that facilitates democratic decision-making through decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) mechanisms. Our findings reveal distinct differences in interpretative priorities: while experts emphasized emotion and narrative, the general public prioritized factual clarity, objectivity, and emotional neutrality. Furthermore, we examined how different governance mechanisms - quadratic vs. weighted voting and equal vs. 20/80 voting power - shape users' decision-making regarding AI behavior. Results indicate that voting methods significantly influence outcomes, with quadratic voting reinforcing perceptions of liberal democracy and political equality. Our study underscores the necessity of selecting appropriate governance mechanisms to better capture user perspectives and suggests decentralized AI governance as a potential way to facilitate broader public engagement in AI development, ensuring that varied perspectives meaningfully inform design decisions.
KamerRaad is an AI tool that leverages large language models to help citizens interactively engage with Belgian political information. The tool extracts and concisely summarizes key excerpts from parliamentary proceedings, followed by the potential for interaction based on generative AI that allows users to steadily build up their understanding. KamerRaad's front-end, built with Streamlit, facilitates easy interaction, while the back-end employs open-source models for text embedding and generation to ensure accurate and relevant responses. By collecting feedback, we intend to enhance the relevancy of our source retrieval and the quality of our summarization, thereby enriching the user experience with a focus on source-driven dialogue.
Andréa Pereira de Oliveira Alves, Andréa Kochhann, João Gabriel Modesto
A discussão acerca dos contributos e dos obstáculos que permeiam a Extensão Universitária pode fomentar a formação docente em uma perspectiva de transformação e intercâmbio de saberes. O presente artigo tem como objetivo analisar as contribuições, os desafios e as vivências da Extensão Universitária aliados à formação docente, mediante uma revisão sistemática de literatura, embasada nos autores Costa e Zoltowski (2014). O estudo foi realizado a partir da consulta às bases de dados da Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), do Catálogo de Teses e Dissertações da Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES), da Biblioteca Digital Brasileira de Teses e Dissertações (BDTD) e nos periódicos da CAPES. Conforme critérios de inclusão e exclusão, foram selecionadas 24 publicações para análise, com enfoque na Extensão Universitária como possibilidade de formação acadêmica, docente e humanizada. Os resultados da revisão revelam que a Extensão Universitária pode promover momentos significativos de aprendizagem pela práxis, unidade da teoria e da prática, de forma a favorecer a formação humanizada de professores conscientes e solidários.
Social Sciences, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class
A relação entre educação popular e extensão rural é evidente em diversos textos que abordam a trajetória da extensão rural no Brasil e na América Latina. Em alguns casos, a extensão rural é apontada como influenciada pelo ideário da educação popular e, em outros, a educação popular é indicada como uma maneira de se fazer extensão rural. Por meio de uma revisão de literatura, mapeamos aportes acerca do vínculo entre ambas, tendo como recorte artigos científicos publicados em revistas, avaliados por pares e em língua portuguesa, recuperados nos seguintes repositórios: i) Periódicos Capes; ii) Google Acadêmico; iii) Web of Science; e iv) Scopus. Inicialmente, identificamos 19 publicações, as quais foram avaliadas com o intuito de selecionar as que de fato atendem o nosso objetivo. Ao final dessa análise, restaram oito artigos, os quais foram analisados e os resultados apresentados em nossa discussão. Foi possível concluir que a agroecologia é um ponto de encontro muito recorrente entre a extensão rural e a educação popular, em que majoritariamente se trabalha com intercâmbios, troca de saberes e construção coletiva do conhecimento.
Social Sciences, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class
Populist rhetoric employed on online media is characterized as deeply impassioned and often imbued with strong emotions. The aim of this paper is to empirically investigate the differences in affective nonverbal communication of political leaders. We use a deep-learning approach to process a sample of 220 YouTube videos of political leaders from 15 different countries, analyze their facial expressions of emotion and then examine differences in average emotion scores representing the relative presence of 6 emotional states (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) and a neutral expression for each frame of the YouTube video. Based on a sample of manually coded images, we find that this deep-learning approach has 53-60\% agreement with human labels. We observe statistically significant differences in the average score of negative emotions between groups of leaders with varying degrees of populist rhetoric.
Political polling is a multi-billion dollar industry with outsized influence on the societal trajectory of the United States and nations around the world. However, it has been challenged by factors that stress its cost, availability, and accuracy. At the same time, artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots have become compelling stand-ins for human behavior, powered by increasingly sophisticated large language models (LLMs). Could AI chatbots be an effective tool for anticipating public opinion on controversial issues to the extent that they could be used by campaigns, interest groups, and polling firms? We have developed a prompt engineering methodology for eliciting human-like survey responses from ChatGPT, which simulate the response to a policy question of a person described by a set of demographic factors, and produce both an ordinal numeric response score and a textual justification. We execute large scale experiments, querying for thousands of simulated responses at a cost far lower than human surveys. We compare simulated data to human issue polling data from the Cooperative Election Study (CES). We find that ChatGPT is effective at anticipating both the mean level and distribution of public opinion on a variety of policy issues such as abortion bans and approval of the US Supreme Court, particularly in their ideological breakdown (correlation typically >85%). However, it is less successful at anticipating demographic-level differences. Moreover, ChatGPT tends to overgeneralize to new policy issues that arose after its training data was collected, such as US support for involvement in the war in Ukraine. Our work has implications for our understanding of the strengths and limitations of the current generation of AI chatbots as virtual publics or online listening platforms, future directions for LLM development, and applications of AI tools to the political domain. (Abridged)
Daniel Racek, Brittany I. Davidson, Paul W. Thurner
et al.
The use of language is innately political and often a vehicle of cultural identity as well as the basis for nation building. Here, we examine language choice and tweeting activity of Ukrainian citizens based on more than 4 million geo-tagged tweets from over 62,000 users before and during the Russian-Ukrainian War, from January 2020 to October 2022. Using statistical models, we disentangle sample effects, arising from the in- and outflux of users on Twitter, from behavioural effects, arising from behavioural changes of the users. We observe a steady shift from the Russian language towards the Ukrainian language already before the war, which drastically speeds up with its outbreak. We attribute these shifts in large part to users' behavioural changes. Notably, we find that more than half of the Russian-tweeting users shift towards Ukrainian as a result of the war.
If checks and balances are aimed at protecting citizens from the government's abuse of power, why do they sometimes weaken them? We address this question in a laboratory experiment in which subjects choose between two decision rules: with and without checks and balances. Voters may prefer an unchecked executive if that enables a reform that, otherwise, is blocked by the legislature. Consistent with our predictions, we find that subjects are more likely to weaken checks and balances when there is political gridlock. However, subjects weaken the controls not only when the reform is beneficial but also when it is harmful.
Carlos Eduardo de Faria Cardoso, Juliana Isabela Raposo Magrani, Victória Andrade de Paula
et al.
O mercado de trabalho vem sofrendo, ao longo dos últimos anos, significativas modificações em seu cenário e dinâmica de uma forma geral. Esse dinamismo, que perpassa o mercado, demanda das universidades e polos de formação acadêmica preparo e inovação no que diz respeito às perspectivas de empregabilidade, de tal modo a esclarecer e oportunizar que seu corpo docente se prepare para encarar a realidade da vida profissional ainda na formação. Nessa perspectiva, a idealização e implementação de projetos, tais como a “Empresa Júnior”, tornam-se uma via de fomento ao conhecimento, possibilitando o direcionamento para novas descobertas e contribuindo para a colocação no mercado. Dito isso, o objetivo deste artigo é relatar a experiência de acadêmicos do curso de graduação em Nutrição na idealização de uma Empresa Júnior, bem como apontar suas contribuições na formação profissional.
Social Sciences, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class
O objetivo deste artigo é identificar os princípios da educação popular que contribuem e fundamentam a estruturação de processos de formação em agroecologia. Situamos historicamente as experiências e as concepções de educação popular, de forma a compreender sua relação com o desenvolvimento das experiências educativas que passaram a compor essa concepção educacional. Partimos da experiência histórica do Movimento Agroecológico no desenvolvimento de processos formativos junto a trabalhadores/as do campo na Zona da Mata de Minas Gerais. Utilizamos como procedimentos de pesquisa a análise documental, pesquisa bibliográfica e entrevistas semiestruturadas. Os princípios e práticas da educação popular se manifestam e fundamentam a organização pedagógica do Movimento Agroecológico da seguinte forma: a) elaboração de métodos e técnicas de estudos e de socialização; b) criação de ambientes favoráveis à experimentação e sistematização conjunta de tecnologias alternativas desenvolvidas entre técnicos/as, agricultores/as e pesquisadores/as; c) elaboração de recursos pedagógicos e metodologias participativas voltadas para a extensão rural; d) diálogo de saberes, ou seja, pela interação entre diferentes formas de conhecimento; e) princípio educativo do trabalho camponês; e f) postura pedagógica crítica e democrática na condução dos processos educativos.
Social Sciences, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class