ABSTRACT
It is well documented that, in the United States (U.S.), the availability of Internet access is related to several demographic attributes. Data collected through end user network diagnostic tools, such as the one provided by the Measurement Lab (M-Lab) Speed Test, allows the extension of prior work by exploring the relationship between the quality, as opposed to only the availability, of Internet access and demographic attributes of users of the platform. In this study, we use network measurements collected from the users of Speed Test by M-Lab and demographic data to characterize the relationship between the quality-of-service (QoS) metric download speed, and various critical demographic attributes, such as income, education level, and poverty. For brevity, we limit our focus to the state of California. For users of the M-Lab Speed Test, our study has the following key takeaways: (1) geographic type (urban/rural) and income level in an area have the most significant relationship to download speed;(2) average download speed in rural areas is 2.5 times lower than urban areas;(3) the COVID-19 pandemic had a varied impact on download speeds for different demographic attributes;and (4) the U.S. Federal Communication Commission's (FCC's) broadband speed data significantly over-represents the download speed for rural and low-income communities compared to what is recorded through Speed Test. © 2022 Owner/Author.
ABSTRACT
A graph analysis on the tweets and users networks from a set of curated news was done to study the existing difference in communication patterns between legitimate and misinformation news. Our findings suggest there is no difference in the influence of misinformation and legitimate news but misinformation news tend to be more shared and present than legitimate news, meaning that while misinformation tweets do not have more influence, their authors are more prolific. Misinformation reach wider audience even if the tweets, individually, are not more influential. A subsequent qualitative analysis on the users reveal that there is also influence of misinformation spreading in Spain from other Spanish speaking countries. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.