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Background: social media consistsof many applications like Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube and many more through which people communicate with each other. Over the past few years, the use of social media has increased tremendously. Apart from its advantages in our lives, increased use of social media has many health-related adverse effects like vision problems, sleep problems, depression and anxiety. This study aims to find the relationship between increased use of social media and its various health related adverse effects on the students of Khyber Medical College. Study type,settings & duration: This cross-sectional study conducted atKhyber Medical College, PeshawarfromJanuary to June 2020. Methodology: A sample size of 412 calculated using the WHO calculator for sample size and the sampling technique employed was a random sampling technique. The tool used to collect the data was questionnaire based; representative of each class group from first year to final year. SPSS Microsoft for Windows was used to analyze the data quantitatively. Results: Each variable was quantitatively weighed with a total of 63.8% of the study population exceeding 2 hours of recommended screen time. Of the various variables evaluated; depression, anxiety, disturbed sleep and vision problems showed a positive relationship with prolonged social media usage whereas use of sleep-inducing drugs were not related to prolonged social media usage. Conclusion: We were able to conclude from the comparison with previously conducted studies that health related problems have been on the rise due to increased utilization of social media apps which should be addressed.

According to media systems dependency theory, the more dependent a person is on the media for satisfying their needs, the more important the media will be to that person. This is particularly true in times of uncertainty such as health crises or natural disasters. While several studies have examined how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted international students' mental health in Canada and Australia, no study has looked at how international students studying in the United States used media and interpersonal channels during this global crisis. Therefore, we surveyed 194 US-based international students from four continents, representing 54 countries to answer this question. Results revealed that of all types of media, international students mostly relied on social media in English to meet information, orientation, and play needs during the pandemic. Cultural differences emerged in the reliance on friends for surveillance, relaxation, and orientation, with European students reporting contact with American friends more than international students from other continents. African students, on the other hand, reported significantly higher reliance on social media and their friends back home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arif Jameel,1 Sania Khan,2 Wadi B Alonazi,3 Ali Ahmed Khan4 1School of Management, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, 212013, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Human Resource Management, College of Business Administration, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, Al Kharj, 11942, Saudi Arabia; 3Health Administration Department, College of Business Administration, King Saud University, Riyadh, 11587, Saudi Arabia; 4Department of Management Information Systems, College of Business Administration, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, Al Kharj, 11942, Saudi ArabiaCorrespondence: Sania Khan, Email sa.khan@psau.edu.saPurpose: This study aims to examine the influence of social media sites and television advertisements on compulsive shopping behavior, and whether this influence is mediated by materialism in the university students of Saudi Arabia.Methods: Data was collected from 487 students at Saudi universities. AMOS and Structural equation modeling (SEM) were utilized to examine the data. The research supports the Hypothesis that adolescents who are more materialistic are more prone than less materialistic adolescents to engage in compulsive shopping behavior.Results: The findings were consistent with other research, suggesting that the same remains true in the culture of Saudi Arabia. The research’s findings show that television advertisements and the use of social media sites positively related to compulsive shopping behavior among university students, and materialism mediated the relationship between television advertisements and social media sites.Conclusion: The research emphasizes the significance of comprehending the materialistic attitude and consumption choices of adolescents and offers crucial information for scholars, decision-makers, and management of top companies.Keywords: social media sites, materialism, compulsive behavior, internet use, university students

Background: social media consists of many applications like Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube and many more through which people communicate with each other. Over the past few years, the use of social media has increased tremendously. Apart from its advantages in our lives, increased use of social media has many health-related adverse effects like vision problems, sleep problems, depression and anxiety. This study aims to find the relationship between increased use of social media and its various health related adverse effects on the students of Khyber Medical College. Study type, settings & duration: This cross-sectional study conducted at Khyber Medical College, Peshawar from January to June 2020. Methodology: A sample size of 412 calculated using the WHO calculator for sample size and the sampling technique employed was a random sampling technique. The tool used to collect the data was questionnaire based; representative of each class group from first year to final year. SPSS Microsoft for Windows was used to analyze the data quantitatively. Results: Each variable was quantitatively weighed with a total of 63.8% of the study population exceeding 2 hours of recommended screen time. Of the various variables evaluated; depression, anxiety, disturbed sleep and vision problems showed a positive relationship with prolonged social media usage whereas use of sleep-inducing drugs were not related to prolonged social media usage. Conclusion: We were able to conclude from the comparison with previously conducted studies that health related problems have been on the rise due to increased utilization of social media apps which should be addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to investigate the formation of tourist-based destination brand brilliance as a differential advantage for a destination according to Alderson’s differential theory. This will be done via content generated on social media sites by both destination management organizations and tourists, and through the mediating role of three dimensions of Aaker’s brand equity model: awareness, image and perceived quality. Alderson’s differential theory in a tourism context, and investigating the brilliance aspect of a brand, are both new research areas. Data was collected by electronically distributing questionnaires to 398 WhatsApp and Telegram users in Iran. This study confirms the relationship between tourist-generated content and destination brand brilliance through the mediating roles of awareness, image and perceived quality, but the content generated by the destination management organization to make a destination brand brilliant is only possible through the mediating roles of image and perceived quality. There is also a significant positive relationship between the perceived quality of a destination and the formation of destination brand brilliance. The findings of this research will help destination management organizations to better think about, and better manage, content generated on social media sites by organizations and tourists to form brilliance for their destination brand.

The affordance concept has been widely used in communication studies to theorize and examine social media use beyond specific features and practices. However, its implementation is characterized by an inconsistent use of terms and a neglect of the concept’s relationality. The present article demonstrates and addresses these shortcomings. First, it briefly reviews the affordance perspective’s origins and its further development in communication literature. Second, it outlines the perspective’s diverse but inconsistent application in social media research. Third, it introduces an integrated framework that contributes to a better understanding of affordances and supports a more precise use of the underlying concepts and terms in social media research. The framework a) emphasizes the relational nature of affordances as opportunities for action that occur in various technological and social contexts and are contingent on designed and cognitive mechanisms, b) it highlights the abstract nature of individual, relational, and collective affordances that are distinct from outcomes such as practices and structures, and c) it encompasses effects and dynamics that impact both technology and actors. Drawing on the framework, the article concludes with conceptional, empirical and terminological implications for future research approaching technology and social media use from an affordance perspective.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the formation of tourist-based destination brand brilliance as a differential advantage for a destination according to Alderson's differential theory. This will be done via content generated on social media sites by both destination management organizations and tourists, and through the mediating role of three dimensions of Aaker's brand equity model: awareness, image and perceived quality. Alderson's differential theory in a tourism context, and investigating the brilliance aspect of a brand, are both new research areas. Data was collected by electronically distributing questionnaires to 398 WhatsApp and Telegram users in Iran. This study confirms the relationship between tourist-generated content and destination brand brilliance through the mediating roles of awareness, image and perceived quality, but the content generated by the destination management organization to make a destination brand brilliant is only possible through the mediating roles of image and perceived quality. There is also a significant positive relationship between the perceived quality of a destination and the formation of destination brand brilliance. The findings of this research will help destination management organizations to better think about, and better manage, content generated on social media sites by organizations and tourists to form brilliance for their destination brand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to elaborate the different factors which attract users to use social media sites. These main factors are subjective norms, image, efficiency and satisfaction along with the mediating role of perceived usefulness. Survey method was used to collect data from B2B fashion brands in Pakistan. Convenient sampling technique was used to collect data from targeted respondents. Collected data was analyzed using SmartPLS 3.3 version. Results express that subjective norms, image, efficiency and satisfaction have positive and significant impact on perceived usefulness and intention to use social media sites in B2B context within Pakistani fashion brands. Results further reveal that perceived usefulness partially mediates the relationship between subjective norms, image, efficiency, satisfaction and intention to use social media sites. This study will enhance the available literature in the area of technology acceptance model (TAM) and will provide useful insights to B2B managers to use efficiently use social media sites for the promotion of their brands. This study is limited to fashion brands, future researchers can expand this model to other area of business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to elaborate the different factors which attract users to use social media sites. These main factors are subjective norms, image, efficiency and satisfaction along with the mediating role of perceived usefulness. Survey method was used to collect data from B2B fashion brands in Pakistan. Convenient sampling technique was used to collect data from targeted respondents. Collected data was analyzed using Smart-PLS 3.3 version. Results express that subjective norms, image, efficiency and satisfaction have positive and significant impact on perceived usefulness and intention to use social media sites in B2B context within Pakistani fashion brands. Results further reveal that perceived usefulness partially mediates the relationship between subjective norms, image, efficiency, satisfaction and intention to use social media sites. This study will enhance the available literature in the area of technology acceptance model (TAM) and will provide useful insights to B2B managers to use efficiently use social media sites for the promotion of their brands. This study is limited to fashion brands, future researchers can expand this model to other area of business.

Business organizations are continually searching for new ways to reach out to their consumers. Before, television, radio, and print are usually used by businesses to advertise their products. The coming of social media has shifted the way organizations interacting with their targeted audience. It has made social media an important tool for maintaining and creating a competitive advantage. Businesses today embrace the use of social media without paying adequate attention to silent issues concerning the usage of sites that can influence consumer buying behavior. The research aimed to examine the influence of social media sites on consumer buying behavior in Shoprite Nigeria Limited. The examined social media sites included Twitter, Facebook, Google+, blogs, and YouTube. The research was a descriptive design. The population was made up of consumers of Shoprite Nigeria Limited in Ibadan and Lagos. The sample size was 384 using Cochran's 1977 sample size formula for the infinite population. However, only 321 respondents filled and returned the questionnaires. A structured questionnaire was designed using a five-point Likert scale of agreement. Then, a hypothesis was tested using multiple regression analysis. The result shows that the null hypothesis is rejected. It implies that social media sites influence consumer buying behavior in Shoprite Nigeria Limited. It concludes that social media sites are important tools that can influence consumer buying behavior. It is recommended that the organization should invest more in social media sites to get in touch with their targeted audience.

The growing number of ageing consumers and their increasingly active engagement in social media platforms present a great opportunity for digital marketing to the grey market. However, the potential of this segment has been underrated by both marketers and marketing scholars. The empirical belief of senior consumers' technological illiteracy somewhat discourages industrial and academic approaches to seeking the answer to some critical questions such as what older consumers think about social media‐based advertising, influencers, or peer communications. Thus, this study aims to explore and explain older consumers' social media‐related behaviour through (a) delving into motives behind their frequently used social media site(s), (b) investigating older consumers' purchase behaviour aspects (i.e., determinant(s) to purchase decisions, favoured shopping modes), (c) discovering what senior consumers think about social media‐based advertising, influencers, and peer communications, and (d) evaluating the impact of social media on older consumers' purchase behaviour. Five key themes emerging from the adopted qualitative approach are (1) Facebook predominance, (2) Scepticism, (3) Price sensitivity, (4) Asymmetric social influences, and (5) Favoured physical store shopping. Each finding is demonstrated in a detailed causal explanation. Academic contributions and implications for social media marketers are highlighted and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) have been increasingly utilizing social media outlets to target Millennials for donations of time and money. These organizations, however, do not always take advantage of the hedonic, social, and normative factors that can influence engagement with and monetary donation to these organizations. Based on motivational theories, U&G and TAM, a hybrid approach is proposed to examine how three motivations—entertainment, interpersonal utility, and subjective norms—predict Millennials' engagement with and donation to NPOs. The analysis shows that engagement intention fully mediates the relationship between interpersonal utility and donation intention; and it partially mediates the engagement–donation relationship. Thus, the intention to engage with nonprofits is important for Millennials to increase their need for entertainment and social interaction, and motivates them to donate to nonprofits. In addition, the proposed hybrid model is used to compare two cultures, Western (U.S.) and Middle Eastern (Palestinian), using a partial least square structural equation model (PLS-SEM). The results indicate that the model performs similarly in both cultures, except for two relationships. In Western culture, engagement with NPOs does not lead to monetary donations. In Middle Eastern culture, the hedonic motive does not predict donation intention. Implications for practitioners are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract According to the large development in the use of social media sites and its wide spread among segments of society and large groups of people, especially young people, many extremist groups have used these sites to recruit terrorists and push them to carry out terrorist activities within their countries. This growing phenomenon is known as the phenomenon of lone wolves through social media sites. Hence, this paper aims to identify and investigate the methods for global collaboration in a particular territory of cybersecurity, specifically countering the recruitment of lone wolves through social media sites. As international regulation is still limited to the development of a set of rules, regulations and agreements against the recruitment of lone wolves. Indeed, this study, through using of analytical qualitative approach, concluded that the phenomenon of the recruitment of lone wolves is a transnational phenomenon that cannot be contained without creating agreed rules of international action; in order to combat the spread of this phenomenon through social networking sites. The study also found out that the capabilities of many countriesin the field of combating the recruitment of lone wolves is relatively weak due to the weakness of the expertise and technological capabilities of cybersecurity in its security firms, which are usually expensive, complex and intertwined. The study recommended the importance of establishing an "electronic army" by state and not only technical units, which is equipped with the latest technology and equipment and able to monitor SPAM and recruitment of terrorists.

This study aimed to identify the motives for social media sites use in the general population and determine what personality traits (normal and maladaptive) predict different motives for social media sites use. Another objective was to analyze which motives for SMSs use are related to well-being. The sample consisted of 420 subjects (211 men, 209 women), mean age 40.29 years (SD = 14.93). Data were gathered using the Big Five Inventory, the Personality Inventory for DSM-5-Brief Form -Adult, the Mental Health Continuum-Short Form, and a scale designed ad hoc to evaluate the motives for social media sites use. The results showed that the most frequent motives were Personal relationship maintenance/Search for information, Pastime/Exhibitionism, and Search for companionship. In addition, it was found that normal and, especially, maladaptive personality traits increased the explained variance for the three motives for social media sites use, beyond age and gender. Predictors of relationship initiation and pastime/exhibitionism motives were related to more negative features (e.g., antagonism and disinhibition) than predictors of personal relationship maintenance/search for information. Finally, personal relationship maintenance/search for information was positively related to all the components of well-being, while the other motives for social media sites use were negatively associated with well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the description of an algorithm of a statement sentiment evaluation is done for the users' of social media language. We underline that statements of the natural language can be contradictory, emotionally complicated, ambiguous. It is the additional research task to detect the adequate formal criterion of the natural language statements ranging on t he scale "posit vi e - negative". In the article the original decision of this problem on the base of the theory of the semantic field is described. The technique was tested in the All- Russian Scientific Research Institute of Labor of the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection of the Russian Federation for investigation of population opinion to the new forms of employment. Empirical base is more than 100 000 messages of users of thematical groups in VKontakte. Analysis with the accent on the parameters: subject of tonality, object of tonality, message tonality was done. The technique of research assumes the detection of words-markers that indicate the general message tonality.

Social media has become an indispensable part of human life as a result of digitalization, and the promotional activities on these platforms have gradually increased. Influencer marketing through Instagram, which is an application for photo and video sharing, has been one of the popular tools for product promotion, especially in recent years. In this context, it is aimed to make a content analysis of influencer marketing on Instagram in this article. Between October and December 2019, 601 posts shared by two Turkish and two foreign influencers in the fashion industry with the most brand interaction and product promotion were analyzed according to 10 criteria. Criterion sampling method was used in the research. Results showed that more than %64 of mostly high fashion posting influencers‟ posts includes fashion product promotion in accordance with their profession the fashion sector. Influencers tend to do product promotions via photos rather than videos and mostly promote clothes and foreign brands. They also prefer to put the products to forefront. Moreover, it is observed that the influencers prefer distant shots, simplicity in visual density and central positioning for the products in their promotions. The brands promoted by influencers who mostly prefer advertisement in their promotions as a form of displaying products are listed in the results section of this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to assess the impact of university students’ social media use on their dietary habits and physical activity. In total, 57.7% of the participating students used social media platforms to post about their food, and 46.4% used these platforms to plan activities related to their health. Snapchat and Facebook were the platforms most used by the students to post about food, dietary habits, and physical activity. Students who posted about their physical activity were more committed to doing moderate to vigorous physical activity. Students who posted about their physical activity and fitness goals on social media perceived themselves to be more active than their counterparts and were less likely to describe their health as poor. Faculty members and university administrators can promote social media benefits to enhance the students’ health behaviors by disseminating different health-related messages.

Nowadays, social media sites and applications such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and blogs gained much attention, because organizations use this huge information to monitor the user opinions. Therefore, the researchers focused on sentiment analysis to help organizations for better production. But, the existing studies concentrated only on document-level in the analysis, where the details of the sentiments are not considered. In order to perform a fine-grained analysis, this research study uses the aspect-based sentiment analysis on Twitter data for finding the opinions of users. In general, a raw tweet contains stop words, Uniform Resource Locator (URL), emoji that are reduced in the stage of pre-processing. The polarities of pre-processed tweets are identified, then two important feature extraction techniques are used to extract the useful information. The specific sentiments with various aspects of services are extracted by using aspect-based feature extraction, which are given as an input for Bi-directional Gated Recurrent Unit (BGRU)for classification. The learning rate of BGRU is further improved by incorporating the self-attention layers. To test the efficiency of the proposed method, the experiments are conducted on real-time collected tweets in terms of accuracy, precision, recall and f-score. The results showed that the developed method achieved 80.4% accuracy, 81% precision, 80% of recall and f-score for 1000 dataset length when compared with traditional techniques: Long-short term Memory (LSTM)and standard GRU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies suggest that users' preferences of social media use differ according to their individual differences and use motives, and that these factors can lead to problematic social media use (PSMU) among a minority of users. The objectives of the present study were to investigate the influences of (i) demographics and Big Five personality dimensions on social media use motives; (ii) demographics and use motives on social media site preferences; and (iii) demographics, personality, popular social media sites, and social media use motives on PSMU. The sample comprised 1008 undergraduate students, aged between 17 and 32 years (M = 20.49, SD = 1.73; 60.5% women). The participants completed a questionnaire comprising the Social Media Use Questionnaire, Social Media Usage Aims Scale, and Ten-Item Personality Inventory. Multiple linear and hierarchical regression analyses showed that social media use motives of (i) meeting new people and socializing, (ii) expressing or presenting a more popular self, and (iii) passing time and entertainment were associated with problematic social media use. Moreover, participants that preferred Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook reported higher scores of problematic social media use. Finally, being female, introverted, conscientious, agreeable, and neurotic were associated with PSMU. The findings offer empirical evidence for uses and gratifications theory because the findings demonstrated that (i) different personality traits predict different motives, (ii) different motives predict preference of different platforms, and (iii) different individual differences such as personality, preference of platform, and specific use motives predict PSMU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social Media (SM) have been established as multifunctional networking tools that tend to offer an increasingly wider variety of services, making it difficult to determine their core purpose and mission, therefore, their type. This paper assesses this evolution of Social Media Types (SMTs), presents, and evaluates a novel hypothesis-based data driven methodology for analyzing Social Media Platforms (SMPs) and categorizing SMTs. We review and update literature regarding the categorization of SMPs, based on their services. We develop a methodology to propose and evaluate a new taxonomy, comprising: (i) the hypothesis that the number of SMTs is smaller than what current literature suggests, (ii) observations on data regarding SM usage and (iii) experimentation using association rules and clustering algorithms. As a result, we propose three (3) SMTs, namely Social, Entertainment and Profiling networks, typically capturing emerging SMP services. Our results show that our hypothesis is validated by implementing our methodology and we discuss threats to validity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flashbulb memories are at the intersection of public and private event memory. We investigated whether the source of news (traditional media, social media, or another person) shaped how people remembered learning of an event. Individuals were asked how they learned of Osama bin Laden's assassination immediately after the event and 7, 42, 224, or 365 days later. Initial memory reports from those who learned from traditional media showed enhanced phenomenological features (i.e., a sense of recollection and vividness) relative to those who learned from social media or from another person. Both phenomenological and metacognitive (i.e., belief in the memory's accuracy) features of memory reports decreased over time; however, there were no differences as a function of source. Consistency of the memory reports did not differ as a function of time or source. Although sources differed as a function of social group salience, these differences did not seem to influence memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to investigate South African travel agencies and tour operators’ social media marketing performance using the Digital Marketing Framework (DMF). Data used in the analysis was collected from 150 small travel agencies and tour operators using a structured questionnaire. The data was analysed using descriptive statistics and factor scores. The results revealed that travel agencies and tour operators are performing well in the first stage of the framework, which is to attract customers to their social media site. The performance of the travel agencies and tour operators in the second stage (engage customers), third stage (retain customers) and fifth stage (relate back to customers) was relatively poor. The performance of the companies in the fourth stage (learn about customers) was very poor as very few companies performed the marketing activities associated with these stages. Lack of time to sustain social media marketing activities and a lack of skills in using social media for marketing were identified as the major challenges faced by travel agencies and tour operators. This study contributes to a better understanding of the performance of small tourism businesses and their challenges in using social media marketing. Managers can use the findings in this study to develop their social media marketing strategies and/or assess their company performance.

This article will explore the triangle of contemporary political colonization, increased American militarization, and the continued denial of Indigenous rights interlinked in the Marianas Archipelago. The 15-island chain is politically constructed as two separate insular areas of the United States: Guåhan (Guam), an unincorporated territory, and the remaining 14 islands are the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas. Through its "Asia-Pacific pivot" foreign policy strategy, the US Department of Defense is expanding across the region, including the Marianas Archipelago. The environmental impact statement documents that describe the proposed military activities violate international and federal laws and neither invite nor require the consent of the Indigenous peoples. Chamoru (Chamorro) activists are utilizing social media sites to create solidarity across and beyond the archipelago. This article incorporates trending #hashtags used within the resistance campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and aims: The potential link between social casino gaming and online gambling has raised considerable concerns among clinicians, researchers and policy makers. Unfortunately, however, there is a paucity of research examining this potential link, especially among young adults. This represents a significant gap given young adults are frequently exposed to and are players of social casino games. Methods: To better understand the potential link between social casino games and online gambling, we conducted three focus groups (N = 30) at two large Canadian Universities with college students who were avid social media users (who are regularly exposed to social casino games). Results: Many participants spontaneously mentioned that social casino games were a great opportunity to build gambling skills before playing for real money. Importantly, some participants expressed a belief that there is a direct progression from social casino gaming to online gambling. Conversely, others believed the transition to online gambling depended on a person's personality, rather than mere exposure to social casino games. While many young adults in our focus groups felt immune to the effects of social casino games, there was a general consensus that social casino games may facilitate the transition to online gambling among younger teenagers (i.e., 12-14 yr olds), due to the ease of accessibility and early exposure. Discussion: The results of the present research point to the need for more study on the effects of social casino gambling as well as a discussion concerning regulation of social casino games in order to minimize their potential risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media is increasingly important in daily life and is an especially important social interaction mechanism for young people. Although research has been conducted evaluating user types based on motives for using social media, no such framework has been extended to social media websites. We extend previous research by evaluating the underlying structure of social media website usage motivations using a 13 item survey and evaluations from 19 different social media websites administered to 1686 young Americans. Using a multidimensional scaling approach, we uncover 2 major motive dimensions underlying social media website use: fun-related and content-specific. Based on the derived dimensions, we generate a graphical "quadrant" system for classifying social media websites and depict all 19 social media sites based on their quadrant. We propose that our quadrant system can be used by other researchers to further refine understanding of social media website usage motives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Introduces social media involvement and social media satisfaction to TAM 3. [•] Provides insights into the underpinning of the process of social media usage. [•] Determines that involvement and satisfaction are dual mediators on usage intention. [•] Social media satisfaction shows a significant effect on usage intention. [•] The strength of the path coefficients in the model varies by the country data set. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper, we present Forum Crawler Under Supervision (FoCUS), a supervised web-scale forum crawler. The goal of FoCUS is to crawl relevant forum content from the web with minimal overhead. Forum threads contain information content that is the target of forum crawlers. Although forums have different layouts or styles and are powered by different forum software packages, they always have similar implicit navigation paths connected by specific URL types to lead users from entry pages to thread pages. Based on this observation, we reduce the web forum crawling problem to a URL-type recognition problem. And we show how to learn accurate and effective regular expression patterns of implicit navigation paths from automatically created training sets using aggregated results from weak page type classifiers. Robust page type classifiers can be trained from as few as five annotated forums and applied to a large set of unseen forums. Our test results show that FoCUS achieved over 98 percent effectiveness and 97 percent coverage on a large set of test forums powered by over 150 different forum software packages. In addition, the results of applying FoCUS on more than 100 community Question and Answer sites and Blog sites demonstrated that the concept of implicit navigation path could apply to other social media sites. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With the advent and popularity of social networking sites, the boundaries of the relationship between the employer and employee/prospective employee have stretched well beyond the workplace and working hours. Predictably, this relationship expansion has led to uncharted adversarial scenarios between the respective parties. Unfortunately, in this new, vibrant cyber world, employment law is struggling for deference and attention. Notwithstanding this ostensible indifference, each phase of the relationship is heavily impacted by social network media. Applicant recruitment, information gathering and applicant selection stand to be impacted by the social network communications made by employees or prospective employees. This article examines whether present and proposed law protects job applicants from potential, unlawful discrimination resulting from the employer’s use of social media in its applicant recruitment, information-gathering and applicant selection processes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay reviews some of the recent research on operational uses of Social Media Sites (SMS) in state and local governments throughout the world. Also, it assesses the recent research on the employment of SMS for the tasks of governance at the state and local level as distinguished from service delivery. Finally, it discusses the opportunity and need for further research in this latter area and concludes with a call for research in four areas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many theoretical accounts of addictive behaviors, including models of Internet use disorders, implicate cognitive biases in the formation and maintenance of excessive behaviors. Yet, little empirical evidence regarding the role of such biases, including implicit attitude, in the development and maintenance of excessive use of social media exists. We seek to bridge this gap in this study. To this end, we present the development of the Facebook Implicit Association Test (FIAT) and employ it in a sample of 220 Facebook users. The results (1) confirm the validity of the concept of implicit attitude and its measure in the context of social media, (2) demonstrate that implicit attitude is significantly positively associated with excessive use scores, in a magnitude similar to that observed for associations with substance use, and (3) show that implicit attitude is sheltered against social desirability bias, unlike self-reported and explicit measures, such as excessive use. Overall, this study builds theoretical and methodological foundations for further inquiries into the role of implicit attitude in research on the excessive use of social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]