Feature Channels: Social Media

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Progress pics, before and after selfies and public declarations in virtual communities are helpful for reaching weight loss goals, new study finds.

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On October 24 from 12 to 12:30 p.m. EDT, join DHS S&T on our Facebook page for a Facebook Tech Talk focused on cybersecurity for automobiles.

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The temptation to respond to social media notifications and text messages is keeping more and more teens awake at night. Teens who spend more than two hours a day on their smartphones get fewer than seven hours of sleep each night, according to a new study.

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New University of Washington research finds that for a budget of roughly $1000, it is possible for someone to track your location and app use by purchasing and targeting mobile ads. The team hopes to raise industry awareness about the potential privacy threat.

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Exposure to high rates of conflicting information during an emergency is linked to increased levels of stress, and those who rely on text messages or social media reports from unofficial sources are more frequently exposed to rumors and experience greater distress, according to research led by the University of California, Irvine.

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A University of Washington study of tweets in the months before and after the 2010 passage of Arizona's "show me your papers" law, findings showed that the average tweet about Mexican immigrants and Hispanics, in general, became more negative. Assistant Professor of Sociology Rene Flores said the social media data was useful in determining whether people had changed their attitudes about immigrants as a result of the law or whether they had begun behaving differently.

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A study by the University of Washington is believed to be the first to demonstrate how present-day migration statistics can be obtained by compiling the same data that advertisers use to target their audience on Facebook, and by combining that source with information from the Census Bureau.

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How much positive feedback travelers think they’ll get on social media can predict whether they intend to visit a tourism destination, a new University of Georgia study has found.

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Facebook has inspired the next generation of technology industry leaders in Arkansas with the launch of the “Tech Take Over” campaign at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. “Tech Take Over” is part of the TechStart Partnership between Facebook and the state of Arkansas, which was announced earlier this year to generate student interest in computer science education and careers.

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A University of Arkansas at Little Rock professor has received $230,000 to help defend the United States against the use of social bots. Dr. Nitin Agarwal, Jerry L. Maulden-Entergy Endowed Chair of Information Science, received the grant to develop a socio-computational model for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to detect the online presence of social bots.

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The simplicity of the platform and brevity of posts are key factors in determining how students can become addicted.

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The first code of ethical behavior for sharing videos of plastic surgery on social media -- written by Northwestern Medicine authors -- will be published in the Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Journal Sept. 28 and presented Oct. 6 at the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) annual meeting in Orlando.

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Many parents worry about how much time teenagers spend texting, sharing selfies and engaging in other online activities with their friends. However, according to a recent research synthesis from the University of California, Irvine, many of these digital behaviors serve the same purpose and encompass the same core qualities as face-to-face relationships.

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Trust in the news media is high across the Middle East, but significantly less so on social media, according to the fifth annual survey of media use and public opinion by Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q).

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Despite the pervasive use of the Internet in everyday life, most Americans report they never use it to find religious or spiritual content, and most never use it to share religious views, according to the Baylor Religion Survey.

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Researchers at University of Colorado Boulder and five other institutions are collaborating to explore legal, ethical, and privacy concerns surrounding a field of study so new it lacks ethical standards.

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New Cornell University research offers hope that fake news and false rumors that reverberate around the Internet can be quashed.

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- Twitter is an unreliable witness to the world’s emotions - Conversation on Twitter has its own unique grammar, rules and culture - Online social life doesn’t always reflect offline social reality - Traditional social research methods are still vital when it comes to new media, according to new University of Warwick research published in PLOS ONE, a leading multidisciplinary journal.

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While recent research has shown that loneliness can play a role in early death, psychologists are also concerned with the mechanisms by which social relationships and close personal ties affect health. A special issue of American Psychologist, the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association, offers an overview of the science and makes the case for psychological scientists to work together to make close relationships a public health priority.

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Some Saudi Arabian medical students are using Facebook as both an outlet for social networking and an effective learning tool.

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Benjamin Burroughs spends hours studying children's videos on YouTube. A father of three kids who teaches and researches how technology shapes people's lives, Burroughs is fascinated by the growing number of fun, elaborate entertainment videos aimed at babies, toddlers, and children up to 5 years old. The videos may offer parents a break and provide young minds with stimulating content.

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As you are reporting on various aspects of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, psychologists are available to discuss how white supremacy, racism and prejudice can lead to extremism, how police should handle potentially violent demonstrations and how to help children and adults deal with trauma and grief.

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The American Psychological Association has many resources available for the media and the public in covering and dealing with the aftermath of the recent violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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Each day billions of photographs are uploaded to photo-sharing services and social media platforms, and Cornell University computer science researchers are figuring out ways to analyze this visual treasure trove through deep-learning methods. Kavita Bala, professor of computer science; Noah Snavely, associate professor computer science at Cornell Tech; and Kevin Matzen have released their results in a new paper, “StreetStyle: Exploring world-wide clothing styles from millions of photos.”

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Study finds opinion and emotion in tweets change when you get sick, a method public health workers could use to track health trends.

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With kids using new technology every day, many parents are forced to keep up or get left behind.

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A new study shows that Instagram photos can be examined by a computer to successfully detect depressed people. The computer results are more reliable (70%) than the diagnostic success rate (42%) of general-practice doctors. The approach promises a new method for early screening of mental health problems through social media.

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A recent study out of San Diego State University has found an increase of internet searches for suicide immediately following the release of the popular Netflix show “13 Reasons Why.” Researchers used data from Google Trends and found that suicide-related queries were 19 percent higher than expected following the show’s release in March.

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Why is social media such a hard habit to break? Because it makes us feel good, said Michigan State University's Allison Eden, assistant professor in the Department of Communication. She and researchers from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands, conducted two studies of frequent and less frequent Facebook users.

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A new study by Florida State University researchers examines the impact rising temperatures have on Twitter activity, and how government officials use the social media tool to warn the general public of heatwave conditions.

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Using texts, emails, Skype and other digital communication methods can improve the health care experience of younger patients.

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The impact of excessive smartphone use isn't permanent; used in bed, they may disrupt circadian clocks; researchers explore apps to improve ADHD treatment

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Tweets about political topics that include moral and emotional language are more likely to spread within the ideological networks of the sender, a team of researchers has found. Its study examined Twitter messages related to gun control, climate change, and same-sex marriage.

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Researchers have developed a machine translation system for interpreting sarcastic statements in social media. It could one day help people on the autism spectrum, who often have difficulty interpreting sarcasm, irony and humor.

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Youth cyberbullying is dramatically more likely to occur between current or former friends and dating partners than between students who were never friends or in a romantic relationship.

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People who are phone snubbed – or “phubbed” – by others are, themselves, often turning to their smartphones and social media to find acceptance, according to new research from Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business.

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A DHS Science and Technology Directorate technology aptly named Rapid DNA reduces the 8 to 10 hour processing time for DNA results to 90 minutes.

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The University of Kansas Cancer Center and Children’s Mercy Twitter #NoTobaccoChat focused on changing the way healthcare providers treat tobacco dependence.

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One of the newest entities with the Penn Institute for Biomedical Informatics, the Health Language Processing Lab combines social media content with other sources of health information in a unique way aimed at understanding how people use language to communicate health needs.

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ISPOR recently concluded its 22nd Annual International Meeting in Boston, MA, USA. The conference attracted 4,195 delegates representing 76 countries—the largest attendance to date for the Society’s Annual International Meeting.

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Preliminary data from a new study suggests that NBA players had worse personal statistics in games that followed a late-night tweet between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m.

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Using information gleaned from social media, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a mental health index for the nation’s highest-ranked colleges and universities. Their study looked at five years of data on Reddit, scanning it for comments about issues that included depression, financial and academic anxiety and thoughts of suicide. Schools were given a score based on the frequency of those threads and robustness of the conversations.

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A trending story on Twitter could mean thousands of people care about an issue—or that some computers are doing their jobs.