Now showing 1 - 10 of 13
  • Publication
    The Kaleidoscope of Privacy: Differences across French, German, UK, and US GDPR Media Discourse
    Conceptions of privacy differ by culture. In the Internet age, digital tools continuously challenge the way users, technologists, and governments define, value, and protect privacy. National and supranational entities attempt to regulate privacy and protect data managed online. The European Union passed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which took effect on 25 May 2018. The research presented here draws on two years of media reporting on GDPR from French, German, UK, and US sources. We use the unsupervised machine learning method of topic modelling to compare the thematic structure of the news articles across time and geographic regions. Our work emphasises the relevance of regional differences regarding valuations of privacy and potential obstacles to the implementation of unilateral data protection regulation such as GDPR. We find that the topics and trends over time in GDPR media coverage of the four countries reflect the differences found across their traditional privacy cultures.
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  • Publication
    Selling sex: what determines rates and popularity? An analysis of 11,500 online profiles
    (Taylor & Francis, 2022) ;
    Sex work, or the exchange of sexual services for money or goods, is ubiquitous across eras and cultures. However, the practice of selling sex is often hidden due to stigma and the varying legal status of sex work. Online platforms that sex workers use to advertise services have become an increasingly important means of studying a market that is largely hidden. Although prior literature has primarily shed light on sex work from a public health or policy perspective (focusing largely on female sex workers), there are few studies that empirically research patterns of service provision in online sex work. This study investigated the determinants of pricing and popularity in the market for commercial sexual services online by using data from the largest UK network of online sexual services, a platform that is the industry-standard for sex workers. While the size of these influences varies across genders, nationality, age and the services provided are shown to be primary drivers of rates and popularity in sex work.
    Scopus© Citations 4  272
  • Publication
    Gender Imbalance and Spatiotemporal Patterns of Contributions to Citizen Science Projects: The Case of Zooniverse
    Citizen Science is research undertaken by professional scientists and members of the public collaboratively. Despite numerous benefits of citizen science for both the advancement of science and the community of the citizen scientists, there is still no comprehensive knowledge of patterns of contributions, and the demography of contributors to citizen science projects. In this paper we provide a first overview of spatiotemporal and gender distribution of citizen science workforce by analyzing 54 million classifications contributed by more than 340 thousand citizen science volunteers from 198 countries to one of the largest online citizen science platforms, Zooniverse. First we report on the uneven geographical distribution of the citizen scientist and model the variations among countries based on the socio-economic conditions as well as the level of research investment in each country. Analyzing the temporal features of contributions, we report on high “burstiness” of participation instances as well as the leisurely nature of participation suggested by the time of the day that the citizen scientists were the most active. Finally, we discuss the gender imbalance among online citizen scientists (about 30% female) and compare it with other collaborative projects as well as the gender distribution in more formal scientific activities. Online citizen science projects need further attention from outside of the academic community, and our findings can help attract the attention of public and private stakeholders, as well as to inform the design of the platforms and science policy making processes.
    Scopus© Citations 11  106
  • Publication
    Emergence of world-stock-market network
    Forty stock market indices of the world with the highest GDP has been studied. We show each market is a part of a global structure, that we call “world-stock-market network”. Where the correlation between two markets is not independent of the correlation between two other markets. Towards this end, we analyze the cross-correlation matrix of the indices of these forty markets using Random Matrix Theory (RMT). We find the degree of collective behavior among the markets and the share of each market in the world global network. This finding together with the results obtained from the same calculation on four stock markets reinforces the idea of a world financial market. Finally, we draw the dendrogram of the cross-correlation matrix to make communities in this abstract global market visible. The results show that the world financial market comprises three communities each of which includes stock markets with geographical proximity.
    Scopus© Citations 17  157
  • Publication
    Detecting weak and strong Islamophobic hate speech on social media
    (Taylor & Francis, 2020) ;
    Islamophobic hate speech on social media is a growing concern in contemporary Western politics and society. It can inflict considerable harm on any victims who are targeted, create a sense of fear and exclusion amongst their communities, toxify public discourse and motivate other forms of extremist and hateful behavior. Accordingly, there is a pressing need for automated tools to detect and classify Islamophobic hate speech robustly and at scale, thereby enabling quantitative analyses of large textual datasets, such as those collected from social media. Previous research has mostly approached the automated detection of hate speech as a binary task. However, the varied nature of Islamophobia means that this is often inappropriate for both theoretically informed social science and effective monitoring of social media platforms. Drawing on in-depth conceptual work we build an automated software tool which distinguishes between non-Islamophobic, weak Islamophobic and strong Islamophobic content. Accuracy is 77.6% and balanced accuracy is 83%. Our tool enables future quantitative research into the drivers, spread, prevalence and effects of Islamophobic hate speech on social media.
    Scopus© Citations 81  542
  • Publication
    Football is becoming more predictable; network analysis of 88 thousand matches in 11 major leagues
    (The Royal Society, 2021-12-15) ;
    In recent years, excessive monetization of football and professionalism among the players have been argued to have affected the quality of the match in different ways. On the one hand, playing football has become a high-income profession and the players are highly motivated; on the other hand, stronger teams have higher incomes and therefore afford better players leading to an even stronger appearance in tournaments that can make the game more imbalanced and hence predictable. To quantify and document this observation, in this work, we take a minimalist network science approach to measure the predictability of football over 26 years in major European leagues. We show that over time, the games in major leagues have indeed become more predictable. We provide further support for this observation by showing that inequality between teams has increased and the home-field advantage has been vanishing ubiquitously. We do not include any direct analysis on the effects of monetization on football’s predictability or therefore, lack of excitement; however, we propose several hypotheses which could be tested in future analyses.
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  • Publication
    What drives passion? An empirical examination on the impact of personality trait interactions and job environments on work passion
    Passionate employees are essential for organisational success as they foster higher performance and exhibit lower turnover or absenteeism. While a large body of research has investigated the consequences of passion, we know only little about its antecedents. Integrating trait interaction theory with trait activation theory, this paper examines how personality traits, i.e. conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism impact passion at work across different job situations. Passion has been conceptualized as a two-dimensional construct, consisting of harmonious work passion (HWP) and obsessive work passion (OWP). Our study is based on a sample of N = 824 participants from the myPersonality project. We find a positive relationship between neuroticism and OWP in enterprising environments. Further, we find a three-way interaction between conscientiousness, agreeableness, and enterprising environment in predicting OWP. Our findings imply that the impact of personality configurations on different forms of passion is contingent on the job environment. Moreover, in line with self-regulation theory, the results reveal agreeableness as a "cool influencer" and neuroticism as a "hot influencer" of the relationship between conscientiousness and work passion. We derive practical implications for organisations on how to foster work passion, particularly HWP, in organisations.
    Scopus© Citations 12  162
  • Publication
    What, when and where of petitions submitted to the UK government during a time of chaos
    (Springer, 2020-07-11) ;
    In times marked by political turbulence and uncertainty, as well as increasing divisiveness and hyperpartisanship, Governments need to use every tool at their disposal to understand and respond to the concerns of their citizens. We study issues raised by the UK public to the Government during 2015–2017 (surrounding the UK EU membership referendum), mining public opinion from a data set of 10,950 petitions, which contain 30.5 million signatures. We extract the main issues with a ground-up natural language processing method, latent Dirichlet allocation topic modelling. We then investigate their temporal dynamics and geographic features. We show that whilst the popularity of some issues is stable across the 2 years, others are highly influenced by external events, such as the referendum in June 2016. We also study the relationship between petitions’ issues and where their signatories are geographically located. We show that some issues receive support from across the whole country, but others are far more local. We then identify six distinct clusters of constituencies based on the issues which constituents sign. Finally, we validate our approach by comparing the petitions’ issues with the top issues reported in Ipsos MORI survey data. These results show the huge power of computationally analysing petitions to understand not only what issues citizens are concerned about but also when and from where.
      207Scopus© Citations 5
  • Publication
    Fooling with facts: quantifying anchoring bias through a large-scale online experiment
    (Springer, 2022-05) ;
    Through a large-scale online field experiment, we provide new empirical evidence for the presence of the anchoring bias in people’s judgement due to irrational reliance on a piece of information that they are initially given. The comparison of the anchoring stimuli and respective responses across different tasks reveals a positive, yet complex relationship between the anchors and the bias in participants’ predictions of the outcomes of events in the future. Participants in the treatment group were equally susceptible to the anchors regardless of their level of engagement, previous performance, or gender. Given the strong and ubiquitous influence of anchors quantified here, we should take great care to closely monitor and regulate the distribution of information online to facilitate less biased decision making.
    Scopus© Citations 4  290
  • Publication
    Can the Wikipedia moderation model rescue the social marketplace of ideas?
    Facebook announced a community review program in December 2019 and Twitter launched a communitybased platform to address misinformation, called Birdwatch, in January 2021. We provide an overview of the potential affordances of such community based approaches to content moderation based on past research. While our analysis generally supports a community-based approach to content moderation, it also warns against potential pitfalls, particularly when the implementation of the new infrastructures does not promote diversity. We call for more multidisciplinary research utilizing methods from complex systems studies, behavioural sociology, and computational social science to advance the research on crowd-based content moderation.
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