Masanori Takano, Kenji Yokotani, Takahiro Kato
et al.
Online communication via avatars provides a richer online social experience than text communication. This reinforces the importance of online social support. Online social support is effective for people who lack social resources because of the anonymity of online communities. We aimed to understand online social support via avatars and their social relationships to provide better social support to avatar users. Therefore, we administered a questionnaire to three avatar communication service users (Second Life, ZEPETO, and Pigg Party) and three text communication service users (Facebook, X, and Instagram) (N=8,947). There was no duplication of users for each service. By comparing avatar and text communication users, we examined the amount of online social support, stability of online relationships, and the relationships between online social support and offline social resources (e.g., offline social support). We observed that avatar communication service users received more online social support, had more stable relationships, and had fewer offline social resources than text communication service users. However, the positive association between online and offline social support for avatar communication users was more substantial than for text communication users. These findings highlight the significance of realistic online communication experiences through avatars, including nonverbal and real-time interactions with co-presence. The findings also highlighted avatar communication service users' problems in the physical world, such as the lack of offline social resources. This study suggests that enhancing online social support through avatars can address these issues. This could help resolve social resource problems, both online and offline in future metaverse societies.
Ziv Epstein, Farnaz Jahanbakhsh, Tiziano Piccardi
et al.
The value alignment of sociotechnical systems has become a central debate, but progress depends on how human values are perceived in the content these systems surface and how such perceptions can be measured at scale. Social media platforms are a prominent class of sociotechnical systems where algorithmic curation shapes exposure to value-laden content at scale. Large-language models offer new opportunities for measuring expressions of human values (e.g., humility or equality) in social media data, but value expressions can be subjective: different people will annotate the same post with different values. In this paper, we draw on the Schwartz value system as a broadly encompassing and theoretically grounded set of basic human values, and introduce a framework to personalize the measurement of expressions of Schwartz values in social media posts at scale. We collect 32,370 ground truth value expression annotations from N=1,079 people on 5,211 social media posts representative of real users' feeds. Due to the subjectivity of the task, we observe low levels of inter-rater agreement between people, and low agreement between human raters and LLM-based methods. In response, we construct a personalization architecture for classifying value expressions by learning from a small number of highly informative calibration annotations per user. In evaluation, we find that modeling these differences successfully yields value expression predictions that people agree with more than they agree with other people. These results contribute new methods and understanding for the measurement of human values in social media data.
AI-generated images are increasingly prevalent on social media, raising concerns about trust and authenticity. This study investigates how different levels of label detail (basic, moderate, maximum) and content stakes (high vs. low) influence user engagement with and perceptions of AI-generated images through a within-subjects experimental study with 105 participants. Our findings reveal that increasing label detail enhances user perceptions of label transparency but does not affect user engagement. However, content stakes significantly impact user engagement and perceptions, with users demonstrating higher engagement and trust in low-stakes images. These results suggest that social media platforms can adopt detailed labels to improve transparency without compromising user engagement, offering insights for effective labeling strategies for AI-generated content.
Wid H. Daghustani, Eid G. Abo Hamza, Eid G. Abo Hamza
et al.
This review investigates the relationship between autism, vulnerability to bullying, and the impact of bullying on mental health for this cohort. Neurotypical social mores can be exclusionary, creating social risks for autistic people, while differences in communication and social engagement can impact peer-to-peer interaction, making autistic people more vulnerable to bullying and social discrimination. The current systematic review investigates risk factors related to the bullying of autistic people, considering both societal and individual factors. Our PRIMA guided search reported 74 studies. Our results show that the prevalence of bullying of autistic individuals vary across studies, autistic individuals face verbal, social, and physical bullying, and that bullying was found to lead to the development of depression, anxiety, and social withdrawal. The importance of education, creating inclusive environments, building resilience, collaborative efforts, policy and legislation, mental health support, and prevention and protection implications, are discussed. By implementing these strategies, we can work to reduce vulnerability to bullying in autistic people as well as promote their overall well-being. This review emphasises the importance of comprehensive interventions and support systems in combating bullying and improving the lives of autistic people.
Mining and mineral exploration has many effects on the surrounding environment. The present study reviews the hydrological and environmental impacts of coal and nonmetal mining operations by mine lifecycle stages and facility patterns. Further, a critical review of regulations and policies in South Korea focusing on the mining-water interaction, conservation, and management was performed to emphasize the current state of legislation in the country. The counties where mining was the primary employer in Gangwon-do province in South Korea were assessed for the mining impact on the community's social life and com-pared to the non-mining counties in the same province. The results of the comparative study showed the less education, healthcare and employment chances in mining counties than the adjacent counties with no mining activities.
Abstract ‘Flight shame’ describes an unease about the climate implications of air travel, and bears evidence of a change in social norms that have so far associated flying with social status. This paper discusses whether Fridays for Future demonstrations and ensuing flight shame have influenced social norms regarding the desirability of air travel, and whether this is measurable in a decline in air travel, or policy support for measures curbing emissions from aviation. These aspects are discussed on the basis of German flight statistics and an online panel survey (n = 1002) conducted in August 2019 in Germany. Results show that, against a background of falling domestic air transport demand, respondents do not report a significant change in travel behaviour. However, a two-third majority of respondents indicate support for market-based measures increasing the cost of flying, as well as policies forcing airlines to reduce emissions and legislation abolishing subsidies. These findings point at an ongoing change in social norms, which could be reinforced if policymakers took advantage of public support for ambitious climate policies.
The absence of consensus on what should constitute Corporate Social Responsibility has inhibited consistent CSR legislation around the world. This paper poses a fundamental question on what should constitute CSR and what should be the nature of CSR regulation? By constructing the boundaries of CSR, the paper offers scope for consistently developing CSR regulation around the world. It construes CSR as consisting of business relation and impact relation, and demonstrates that these are intertwined with legal responsibilities of business and, consequentially, with accountability. It accomplishes this by establishing the obligatory nature of responsibilities using the lens of ethical and legal jurisprudence. This new approach towards CSR recasts it as an obligatory responsibility that is linked to accountability. Furthermore, the framework provides a foundation for consistent development of CSR regulation across different countries that can lead to effective discharge of corporates’ social responsibilities.
Although some authors claim that deception requires intention, we argue that there can be deception in social robotics, whether or not it is intended. By focusing on the deceived rather than the deceiver, we propose that false beliefs can be created in the absence of intention. Supporting evidence is found in both human and animal examples. Instead of assuming that deception is wrong only when carried out to benefit the deceiver, we propose that deception in social robotics is wrong when it leads to harmful impacts on individuals and society. The appearance and behaviour of a robot can lead to an overestimation of its functionality or to an illusion of sentience or cognition that can promote misplaced trust and inappropriate uses such as care and companionship of the vulnerable. We consider the allocation of responsibility for harmful deception. Finally, we make the suggestion that harmful impacts could be prevented by legislation, and by the development of an assessment framework for sensitive robot applications.
The friendship paradox in social networks states that your friends have more friends than you do, on average. Recently, a stronger variant of the paradox was shown to hold for most people within a network: `most of your friends have more friends than you do.' Unlike the original paradox, which arises trivially because a few very popular people appear in the social circles of many others and skew their average friend popularity, the strong friendship paradox depends on features of higher-order network structures. Similar to the original paradox, the strong friendship paradox generalizes beyond popularity. When individuals have traits, many will observe that most of their friends have more of that trait than they do. This can lead to the Majority illusion, in which a rare trait will appear highly prevalent within a network. Understanding how the strong friendship paradox biases local observations within networks can inform better measurements of network structure and our understanding of collective phenomena in networks.
Luis Jiro Suzuri Hernández, Alexa Villavicencio Queijeiro, Valeria Alexandra Alonzo Matamoros
En virtud de la importancia que, para la comunidad forense, tiene la perspectiva de las ciencias forenses planteada en el artículo publicado por Roux y Col. 2022, la Editora de la RCFH, considero importante traducir al español este trabajo y ponerlo a disposición de nuestros lectores.
Este artículo es la traducción al español del documento original en inglés, titulado: “The Sydney Declaration – Revisiting the essence of forensic science through its fundamental principles”, escrito por Claude Roux, Rebecca Bucht, Frank Crispino, Peter De Forest, Chris Lennard, Pierre Margot, Michelle D. Miranda, Niamh NicDaeid, Olivier Ribaux, Alastair Ross y Sheila Willis, y publicado en la revista Forensic Science International, volumen 332, año 2022, cuyo original está disponible en: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forsciint.2022.111182
La traducción fue realizada en marzo del 2024 por Luis Jiro Suzuri Hernández y Alexa Villavicencio Queijeiro, de la Escuela Nacional de Ciencias Forenses de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, y fue revisado, editado y corregido por la Licda. Valeria Alexandra Alonzo Matamoros egresada de la carrera de lenguas extranjeras, de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras.
Se agradece a Claude Roux, por brindarnos su autorización para publicar la traducción al español en nuestra revista.
Social divide and polarization have become significant societal issues. To understand the mechanisms behind these phenomena, social media analysis offers research opportunities in computational social science, where developing effective user embedding methods is essential for subsequent analysis. Traditionally, researchers have used predefined network-based user features (e.g., network size, degree, and centrality measures). However, because such measures may not capture the complex characteristics of social media users, in our study we developed a method for embedding users based on a URL domain co-occurrence network. This approach effectively represents social media users involved in competing events such as political campaigns and public health crises. We assessed the method's performance using binary classification tasks and datasets that covered topics associated with the COVID-19 infodemic, such as QAnon, Biden, and Ivermectin, among Twitter users. Our results revealed that user embeddings generated directly from the retweet network and/or based on language performed below expectations, whereas our domain-based embeddings outperformed those methods while reducing computation time. Therefore, domain-based embedding offers an accessible and effective method for characterizing social media users in competing events.
Ghazal Kalhor, Hannah Gardner, Ingmar Weber
et al.
Online professional social networking platforms provide opportunities to expand networks strategically for job opportunities and career advancement. A large body of research shows that women's offline networks are less advantageous than men's. How online platforms such as LinkedIn may reflect or reproduce gendered networking behaviours, or how online social connectivity may affect outcomes differentially by gender is not well understood. This paper analyses aggregate, anonymised data from almost 10 million LinkedIn users in the UK and US information technology (IT) sector collected from the site's advertising platform to explore how being connected to Big Tech companies ('social connectivity') varies by gender, and how gender, age, seniority and social connectivity shape the propensity to report job promotions or relocations. Consistent with previous studies, we find there are fewer women compared to men on LinkedIn in IT. Furthermore, female users are less likely to be connected to Big Tech companies than men. However, when we further analyse recent promotion or relocation reports, we find women are more likely than men to have reported a recent promotion at work, suggesting high-achieving women may be self-selecting onto LinkedIn. Even among this positively selected group, though, we find men are more likely to report a recent relocation. Social connectivity emerges as a significant predictor of promotion and relocation reports, with an interaction effect between gender and social connectivity indicating the payoffs to social connectivity for promotion and relocation reports are larger for women. This suggests that online networking has the potential for larger impacts for women, who experience greater disadvantage in traditional networking contexts, and calls for further research to understand differential impacts of online networking for socially disadvantaged groups.
This article is devoted to the problems of formation and systematisation of labour legislation in key areas such as social partnership and labour protection. Based on the comparative legal characteristics of the regulatory legal acts of different regions in the field of labour, the conclusion is made about the need for a unified approach to the development of legislation in this area, the inadmissibility of duplication of federal normative acts, taking into account the specifics of the regions and the adoption of new legislative acts. The authors have developed the main directions for the systematisation of labour law and lawmaking in the regions, taking into account the current situation.
In the modern criminal law doctrine, there
is a division of corpus delicti into material corpus
delicti and formal corpus delicti, depending on the
presence in them of signs of socially dangerous consequences and causal relationship between the act and the consequence. The literal interpretation of the disposition of Article 171 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation allowed most researchers to conclude that corpus delicti of such a crime as illegal entrepreneurship refers, according to this classification, to formal-material corpus delicti. Those who attribute corpus delicti of illegal entrepreneurship to material corpus delicti remain in the minority.
On the one hand, the literal interpretation of the disposition prevents an unambiguous statement of the «materiality» of corpus delicti of illegal entrepreneurship on the basis of extracting a large income. On the other hand, law enforcement practice considers the sign of extracting a large income precisely as a socially dangerous consequence. Taking into account the presence of a similar corpus delicti in the legislation on administrative offenses, as well as the existence of the problem of qualifying an incomplete crime of formal corpus delicti, outwardly a purely doctrinal question about «formality» and «materiality
» of corpus delicti of illegal entrepreneurship in
fact reveals a number of consequences of a purely
practical nature. Purpose: to analyze doctrinal and
law enforcement problems related to the qualification of criminally punishable and administratively punishable illegal entrepreneurship. Methods: general scientific (analysis, synthesis, generalization and comparison), empirical (comparison, description,
interpretation), specific scientific (legal-dogmatic
and intersectoral). Results: the study (on the examples of the problem of distinguishing between administratively punishable and criminally punishable illegal entrepreneurship, as well as qualifying the latter as an incomplete crime) shows that the criminal law norm providing for liability for illegal entrepreneurship is applied to the relevant social relations in such a way that it is necessary to state the «materiality» of corpus delicti contained therein. The conclusions of the supporters of this position, despite the fact that they are in the minority, continue to find practical confirmation. In all analyzed criminal cases, the courts have established the sign of extracting a large income from illegal entrepreneurship in the same way as the consequences are established in the corpus delicti of crimes, the «materiality
» of which no one doubts.
Law in general. Comparative and uniform law. Jurisprudence
Jooyoung Lee, Sarah Rajtmajer, Eesha Srivatsavaya
et al.
We investigate relationships between online self-disclosure and received social feedback during the COVID-19 crisis. We crawl a total of 2,399 posts and 29,851 associated comments from the r/COVID19_support subreddit and manually extract fine-grained personal information categories and types of social support sought from each post. We develop a BERT-based ensemble classifier to automatically identify types of support offered in users' comments. We then analyze the effect of personal information sharing and posts' topical, lexical, and sentiment markers on the acquisition of support and five interaction measures (submission scores, the number of comments, the number of unique commenters, the length and sentiments of comments). Our findings show that: 1) users were more likely to share their age, education, and location information when seeking both informational and emotional support, as opposed to pursuing either one; 2) while personal information sharing was positively correlated with receiving informational support when requested, it did not correlate with emotional support; 3) as the degree of self-disclosure increased, information support seekers obtained higher submission scores and longer comments, whereas emotional support seekers' self-disclosure resulted in lower submission scores, fewer comments, and fewer unique commenters; 4) post characteristics affecting social feedback differed significantly based on types of support sought by post authors. These results provide empirical evidence for the varying effects of self-disclosure on acquiring desired support and user involvement online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, this work can assist support seekers hoping to enhance and prioritize specific types of social feedback.