ABSTRACT
Online social networks are at the limelight of the public debate, where antagonistic groups compete to impose conflicting narratives and polarize the discussions. This article proposes an approach for measuring network polarization and political sectarianism in Twitter based on user interaction networks. Centrality metrics identify a small group of influential users (polarizers and unpolarizers) who influence a larger group of users (polarizees and unpolarizees) according to their ideological stance (left, right, and undefined). This network polarization is computed by the Bayesian probability using typical actions such as following, tweeting, retweeting, and replying. The measurement of political sectarianism also uses Bayesian probability and words extracted from the tweets to quantify the intensity of othering, aversion, and moralization in the debate. We collected Twitter data from 33 conflicted political events in Brazil during 2020, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on our methodology and polarization score, our results reveal that the approach based on user interaction networks leads to an increasing understanding of polarized conflicts in Twitter. Also, a small number of polarizers is enough to represent the polarization and sectarianism of Twitter events. © 2014 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I examine the vaccination debate, by revisiting what I refer to as the epistemics of rights and duties in relation to the debate. In alluding to this, I show, in the first part of the chapter, that the state has the right, which I infer from its obligation to ensure an enabling environment for individuals to achieve their good, to mandate vaccination. I ground my argument on the 'social contract' between the state and the citizen. My position in this regard is however nuanced by what may be referred to as the 'default condition,' which is that the state may exercise this right on the grounds that there are no conditions it has brought about that may cause political distrust on the part of the citizenry. In the second part of the chapter, I show that governments' handling of information and information-sharing regarding the COVID-19 health pandemic as a public good, particularly at its onset, creates occasions for political distrust. And as I result, I argue that governments lost some of its contractual right to mandate vaccination. The analysis in this chapter draws on my lived experience in Nigeria. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 "pivot” created challenges for instructors in adapting their teaching strategies to the various forms of technology available for virtual delivery. One positive outcome discovered for teaching an introduction to debate class was the use of Blackboard's discussion board feature to assess student learning regarding understanding and application of concepts of evidence and reasoning for an introduction to debate class. This essay provides an account of how I adapted my teaching strategies, the assignment for student participation created to assess student learning, and positive outcomes for students needing time to process arguments and respond in a virtual forum.
ABSTRACT
The release of COVID-19 contact tracing apps was accompanied by a heated public debate with much focus on privacy concerns, e.g., possible government surveillance. Many papers studied people's intended behavior to research potential features and uptake of the apps. Studies in Germany conducted before the app's release, such as that by Häring et al., showed that privacy was an important factor in the intention to install the app. We conducted a follow-up study two months post-release to investigate the intention-behavior-gap, see how attitudes changed after the release, and capture reported behavior. Analyzing a quota sample (n=837) for Germany, we found that fewer participants mentioned privacy concerns post-release, whereas utility now plays a greater role. We provide further evidence that the results of intention-based studies should be handled with care when used for prediction purposes. © 2023 ACM.
ABSTRACT
The crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has led to the decree of the State of Alarm in Spain and a severe home confinement that was softened in phases of de-escalation. During this period, social networks were used as a discussion tool. With this research we intend to find out if artificial intelligence tools were used in the political debate on Twitter. To achieve this, algorithms that determine the presence of bots in the conversation, their communicative roles and their relationship with the main political parties, were applied. The results show that disinformation campaigns were created by bots with the aim of manipulating public opinion. © 2023 Centro de Investigaciones Sociologicas. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused both a widespread public health crisis and a global economic crisis, disrupting every aspect of our lives, health, education, jobs, and social life. To provide the public with trustworthy and continuously updated information and stories during uncertain times, newsrooms have made pandemic coverage a priority. Conducting a content analysis of Norwegian news and debate programs on radio and television throughout 2020, we found that the frames most dominant in news broadcasts were the least used frames in debate programs, and vice versa. Overall, the five most common frames were societal consequences, economic consequences, medical risk, government measures, social behaviour, and risk. This suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic was contextualized as an economic and social crisis as well as a health crisis. However, the lack of politicization, conflict and responsibility frames, suggests media coverage missed a critical perspective. © 2023 The authors.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic affected healthcare systems worldwide, including the National Health Service (NHS). It drastically changed the practice and delivery of healthcare and laid bare longstanding structural flaws. It also brought a time of innovation and digitalisation and renewed appreciation of the role of public health. This paper offers a thematic summary of a debate held in December 2021 by the University of Edinburgh School of Medicine. It featured a multi-specialty panel of doctors and patient representative discussing the likely impact of the pandemic on the future of NHS. It serves as a reflection point on the pressures the NHS has faced since and their likely genesis at a time when the impact of the pandemic on staff risks being forgotten.
ABSTRACT
The systemic inadequacies of models of health systems propagated by the advocates of global health policies (GHPs) have fragmented health service systems, particularly in middle- and lower-income countries. GHPs are underpinned by economic interests and the need for control by the global elite, irrespective of people's health needs. The COVID-19 pandemic challenged the advocates of GHPs, leading to calls for a movement for "decolonisation” of global health. Much of this narrative on the "decolonisation” of GHPs critiques its northern knowledge base, and the power derived from it at individual, institutional and national levels. This, it argues, has led to an unequal exchange of knowledge, making it impossible to end decades of oppressive hegemony and to prevent inappropriate decision-making on GHPs. Despite these legitimate concerns, little in the literature on the decolonisation of GHPs extends beyond epistemological critiques. This article offers a radically different perspective. It is based on an understanding of the role of transnational capital in extracting wealth from the economies of low- and middle-income countries resulting in influencing and shaping public health policy and practice, including interactions between the environment and health. It mobilises historical evidence of distorted priorities underpinning GHPs and the damaging consequences for health services throughout the world.
ABSTRACT
There is evidence that specific segments of the population were hit particularly hard by the Covid-19 pandemic (e.g., people with a migration background). In this context, the impact and role played by online platforms in facilitating the integration or fragmentation of public debates and social groups is a recurring topic of discussion. This is where our study ties in, we ask: How is the topic of vaccination discussed and evaluated in different language communities in Germany on Twitter during the Covid-19 pandemic? We collected all tweets in German, Russian, Turkish, and Polish (i.e., the largest migrant groups in Germany) in March 2021 that included the most important keywords related to Covid-19 vaccination. All users were automatically geocoded. The data was limited to tweets from Germany. Our results show that the multilingual debate on Covid-19 vaccination in Germany does not have many structural connections. However, in terms of actors, arguments, and positions towards Covid-19 vaccination, the discussion in the different language communities is similar. This indicates that there is a parallelism of the debates but no social-discursive integration. © 2023 by the author(s);licensee Cogitatio Press (Lisbon, Portugal).
ABSTRACT
Rooted in the Greek tradition of Socrates and Aristotle, debate pedagogy utilizes the interpersonal 'heat' that comes with a clash in opinions to engage students in learning. Well-structured classroom debates can engage students, give them agency in their learning, and challenge them to view the layered perspectives that lie under the surface of topics across the curriculum. The proliferation of on-demand and asynchronous learning approaches presents a challenge for instructors who wish to hold live, synchronous, debates. It is frequently not possible to utilize traditional debate pedagogical techniques when students are not temporally or physically in a classroom space. Disruptions to traditional classroom learning caused by the COVID-19 epidemic only exacerbate the need to re-invent pedagogies for today's dynamic higher education learning environments. Emerging tools and approaches show promise in rekindling debate pedagogy, however, relatively little scholarship exists to orient instructors who wish to deploy evidenced-based debate pedagogy in blended and online courses. This paper presents the results of an investigation of one technology-facilitated approach to deploying asynchronous and online debates. Findings from the present investigation help to illuminate a path forward for instructors who wish to deploy structured classroom debates in online and asynchronous formats. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of College Teaching is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)
ABSTRACT
The algorithmic detection of disinformation online is currently based on two strategies: on the one hand, research focuses on automated fact-checking;on the other hand, models are being developed to assess the trustworthiness of information sources, including both empirical and theoretical research on credibility and content quality. For debates among experts, in particular, it might be hard to discern (less) reliable information, as all actors by definition are qualified. In these cases, the use of trustworthiness metrics on sources is a useful proxy for establishing the truthfulness of contents. We introduce an algorithmic model for automatically generating a dynamic trustworthiness hierarchy among information sources based on several parameters, including fact-checking. The method is novel and significant, especially in two respects: first, the generated hierarchy represents a helpful tool for laypeople to navigate experts' debates;second, it also allows to identify and overcome biases generated by intuitive rankings held by agents at the beginning of the debates. We provide an experimental analysis of our algorithmic model applied to the debate on the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which took place among Italian medical specialists between 2020 and 2021. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
ABSTRACT
Coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB) is a manipulative communication tactic that uses a mix of authentic, fake, and duplicated social media accounts to operate as an adversarial network (AN) across multiple social media platforms. The article aims to clarify how CIB's emerging communication tactic "secretly" exploits technology to massively harass, harm, or mislead the online debate around crucial issues for society, like the COVID-19 vaccination. CIB's manipulative operations could be one of the greatest threats to freedom of expression and democracy in our society. CIB campaigns mislead others by acting with pre-arranged exceptional similarity and "secret" operations. Previous theoretical frameworks failed to evaluate the role of CIB on vaccination attitudes and behavior. In light of recent international and interdisciplinary CIB research, this study critically analyzes the case of a COVID-19 anti-vaccine adversarial network removed from Meta at the end of 2021 for brigading. A violent and harmful attempt to tactically manipulate the COVID-19 vaccine debate in Italy, France, and Germany. The following focal issues are discussed: (1) CIB manipulative operations, (2) their extensions, and (3) challenges in CIB's identification. The article shows that CIB acts in three domains: (i) structuring inauthentic online communities, (ii) exploiting social media technology, and (iii) deceiving algorithms to extend communication outreach to unaware social media users, a matter of concern for the general audience of CIB-illiterates. Upcoming threats, open issues, and future research directions are discussed.
ABSTRACT
In this paper we developed a digital methods mapping of the controversy arises from the adoption of the so-called "Green Pass" in Italy Adopting an "agnostic" approach to our object of study, we used a well-established research design: namely, to collect all the tweets that contain words related to conversations about the green pass in Italy (e.g.: green pass, #greenpass). In this way, the sample collected amounts to 4.307.487 tweets, published between June 15, 2021, and December 15, 2021. To bring out the "voices" of the different actors involved in the controversy we adopted a quali-quantitative approach: on the one hand, by means of computational techniques, we reconstructed the structural relations in which the actors are involved and its evolution over time;on the other hand, by means of content analysis we enriched our map with an interpretation of the discourse surrounding the controversy. Finally, these cartographic results are discussed considering the Italian media system functioning, in order to understand how its conformation may have influenced the public debate concerning the green pass.
ABSTRACT
Background: Student-pharmacists forced into remote-learning by the COVID-19 pandemic participated in a Virtual Mock Trial (VMT). Objective(s): Feasibility of VMTs was assessed by evaluating student VMT performance, student perceptions on technology and overall experiences. Method(s): The VMT was implemented via video conferencing technology in April 2020. Faculty-judges and student-jurors observed/rated student performance using pre-established rubrics. A post-VMT survey was administered electronically. Descriptive analyses were performed, and Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney tests were conducted to compare programmes. Result(s): Forty-six students from Programme A (East Coast, USA) and 89 from Programme B (West Coast, USA) participated in the VMTs. The faculty-judges' evaluation scores for student performance ranged from 85.0% to 96.7%, while the student-jurors' evaluation scores ranged from 68.3% to 100%. Student perceptions on the four categories regarding technology use all had means > 5 on a 7-Point Likert Scale. More than 79.0% of students rated their VMT experience positively (i.e. 6 or 7). Conclusion(s): VMT is feasible for the current pandemic remote-learning environment, and it could be replicated in other pharmacy or healthcare programmes to enrich students' active learning in virtual education. Copyright © 2021 FIP.
ABSTRACT
Political discourse is considered the application of a professional use of the language whose main purpose is the adherence of the listeners. To achieve this, they put to work, among other resources, that of the polyphony "of saying”, with which one's own point of view is supported or the opposite is criticized. To see how it develops, this work is focused on the intervention made by the President of the Government in the Congress of Deputies to explain the declaration of the state of alarm during the Covid-19 pandemic. The analysis of the polyphonic structures used by him to explain, justify and legitimize the authorization of the royal decree of 03/14/20 has been carried out. This work shows how the president used reinforcing, legitimizing and courteous polyphonic uses in his intervention to manage to project unity and the need to make such a decision. © 2022 Universidad de Cadiz. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has led to the decree of the State of Alarm in Spain and a severe home confinement that was softened in phases of de-escalation. During this period, social networks were used as a discussion tool. With this research we intend to find out if artificial intelligence tools were used in the political debate on Twitter. To achieve this, algorithms that determine the presence of bots in the conversation, their communicative roles and their relationship with the main political parties were applied. The results show that disinformation campaigns were created by bots with the aim of manipulating public opinion. (English) [ FROM AUTHOR]
ABSTRACT
This paper describes the process of acquisition, cleaning, interpretation, coding and linguistic annotation of a collection of parliamentary debates from the Senate of the Italian Republic covering the COVID-19 pandemic emergency period and a former period for reference and comparison according to the CLARIN ParlaMint prescriptions. The corpus contains 1199 sessions and 79,373 speeches for a total of about 31 million words, and was encoded according to the ParlaCLARIN TEI XML format. It includes extensive metadata about the speakers, sessions, political parties and parliamentary groups. As required by the ParlaMint initiative, the corpus was also linguistically annotated for sentences, tokens, POS tags, lemmas and dependency syntax according to the universal dependencies guidelines. Named entity annotation and classification is also included. All linguistic annotation was performed automatically using state-of-the-art NLP technology with no manual revision. The Italian dataset is freely available as part of the larger ParlaMint 2.1 corpus deposited and archived in CLARIN repository together with all other national corpora. It is also available for direct analysis and inspection via various CLARIN services and has already been used both for research and educational purposes. © European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
ABSTRACT
The emergence of COVID-19 has led to numerous controversies over COVID-related knowledge and policy. To counter the perceived threat from doctors and scientists who challenge the official position of governmental and intergovernmental health authorities, some supporters of this orthodoxy have moved to censor those who promote dissenting views. The aim of the present study is to explore the experiences and responses of highly accomplished doctors and research scientists from different countries who have been targets of suppression and/or censorship following their publications and statements in relation to COVID-19 that challenge official views. Our findings point to the central role played by media organizations, and especially by information technology companies, in attempting to stifle debate over COVID-19 policy and measures. In the effort to silence alternative voices, widespread use was made not only of censorship, but of tactics of suppression that damaged the reputations and careers of dissenting doctors and scientists, regardless of their academic or medical status and regardless of their stature prior to expressing a contrary position. In place of open and fair discussion, censorship and suppression of scientific dissent has deleterious and far-reaching implications for medicine, science, and public health.
ABSTRACT
Hashtag research has established itself as a relevant research field, with various studies having analysed this polysemic collector in crisis and media events. Hashtags are used in social media, most specifically on Twitter. Further, between 2020 and 2021, hashtag studies linked to the COVID-19 pandemic have emerged. Accordingly, this study aimed to analyse the content of tweets during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic (March 4-11, 2020) that included the hashtag #Covid-19 in three different languages: Italian, Spanish, and French. For these analyses, we used emotional text mining. The goal of this study was to reconstruct the representation of the pandemic, of containment measures, and of Europe in tweets. We discussed the prevailing attitude towards Europe in times of crisis.
ABSTRACT
Several media reports have highlighted how various sections of India’s population have been coping with the pandemic. Extending this debate, many academic articles have focussed on how the pandemic has led to multiple challenges for medical professionals and impacted rising unemployment rates and low female labour force participation in India. But India’s elderly who have been grappling with significant problems as a result of COVID-19 appear to be missing from both academic research as well as the policy narrative. Based on qualitative interviews, this article demonstrates how the elderly in an urban city of India dealt with the pandemic as well as the nationwide lockdown. Additionally, this article will also discuss the policies that should be put into place to address the needs of the elderly population in the country. In this regard, this article will discuss the impact of vaccine policies on the elderly and illustrate intersections between later life experiences and a global disaster such as a pandemic in urban India.