ABSTRACT
To evaluate the online presence of wildlife crime and the public's reaction to these crimes, we collected data on species, locations, animal status, and motives of wildlife crime depicted on nine Pakistani Facebook pages and eight groups from January 2016 to May 2021. We categorized reactions to images depicting birds, mammals, and reptiles and applied generalized linear models to the total number of reactions on posts. In 594 relevant posts, we identified 10,644 animals of 138 species. Common Krait (Bungarus caeruleus) had the highest number of posts, followed by Grey Francolin (Ortygornis pondicerianus) and Black Francolin (Francolinus francolinus). The number of posts has generally increased, particularly after the Covid-19 lockdown in March 2020. Almost 66 % of the posts showed animals being killed, 27 % were captured with no visible signs of torture, and the rest showed visible signs of torture in captivity. The most common reason for wildlife crimes was illegal hunting, followed by fear and illegal trade. Most victims of illegal hunting were birds, while reptiles were predominantly killed for fear. However, illegal trade was affecting all three classes of animals. Killed or tortured animals received more reactions than non-tortured animals, as well as more comments both against and in favor of the crime. Crimes against reptiles received more pro-crime comments than birds and mammals. Our results reflect the importance of social media to monitor wildlife crimes. Urgent actions are necessary by the relevant authorities to improve management and strengthen the response of law enforcement to wildlife crime. © 2023 The Authors
ABSTRACT
The massive spread of COVID-19 and the crash of China Eastern Airlines MU5735 have negatively impacted the public's perception of civil aviation safety, which further affects the progress of the civil aviation industry and economic growth. The aim of research is to investigate the public's perception of China's civil aviation safety and give the authorities corresponding suggestions. First, we use online comment collection and sentiment analysis techniques to construct a novel evaluation index system reflecting the public's greatest concern for civil aviation safety. Then, we propose two novel large-scale group decision-making (LSGDM) models for aggregating evaluation: (1) K-means clustering with a novel distance measure for evaluators combined with unsupervised K-means clustering in two-stage, (2) unsupervised K-means clustering for evaluators combined with unsupervised K-means clustering for processing evaluation in two-stage. Finally, we compare the characteristics of different models and use the average of the two models as the final evaluation results. © 2023, The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Taiwan Fuzzy Systems Association.
ABSTRACT
COVID-19 infection has been a major topic of discussion on social media platforms since its pandemic outbreak in the year 2020. From daily activities to direct health consequences, COVID-19 has undeniably affected lives significantly. In this paper, we especially analyze the effect of COVID-19 on education by examining social media statements made via Twitter. We first propose a lexicon related to education. Then, based on the proposed dictionary, we automatically extract the education-related tweets and also the educational parameters of learning and assessment. Afterwards, by analyzing the content of the tweets, we determine the location of each tweet. Then the sentiments of the tweets are analyzed and examined to extract the frequency trends of positive and negative tweets for the whole world, and especially for countries with a significant share of COVID-19 cases. According to the analysis of the trends, individuals were globally concerned about education after the COVID-19 outbreak. By comparing between the years 2020 and 2021, we discovered that due to the sudden shift from traditional to electronic education, people were significantly more concerned about education within the first year of the pandemic. However, these concerns decreased in 2021. The proposed methodology was evaluated using quantitative performance metrics, such as the F1-score, precision, and recall. © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
ABSTRACT
Following international best practice examples, the Romanian government resorted to its social media accounts to disseminate information and unfold an awareness and persuasion campaign to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. The article focuses on the use of the government's YouTube and Facebook accounts to persuade the population to get vaccinated in 2021 via video messages tailored for this purpose. The research quantified the volume of public engagement with the two waves of the persuasive campaign, finding that, while click-based reactions tended to show a positive attitude toward the campaign, the comments mainly denoted frustration, anger, and anxiety on the part of the public. Moreover, the citizens' engagement with the campaign messages was by far lower than the number of subscribers and followers of the analyzed social media accounts. The goal of the COVID-19 public health persuasion campaign was to build support for the governmental policy and minimize the risks of the pandemic while vaccination was being rolled out. The public reaction to the governmental campaign showed that a finer and more adapted approach was necessary. This study offers a qualitative basis for informing health communication strategies of the challenges posed by social media platforms used in crisis times.