Yelena Mejova
Yelena Mejova is a Senior Research Scientist at the ISI Foundation in Turin, Italy, working in the area of Data Science for Social Impact and Sustainability. Her research concerns the use of social media in health informatics, especially in lifestyle diseases and mental health, as well as for tracking political speech and other cultural phenomena. Since 2023, she is a co-Editor-in-Chief of EPJ Data Science. Previously as a scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute, Yelena was a part of the Social Computing Group working on computational social science, especially as applied to tracking real-life health signals.
Anti-vaccination Echo Chambers
Despite vaccinations saving uncounted lives, vaccination hesitancy continues to limit the impact of this highly effective intervention. Anti-vaccination views pervade online social media, fueling distrust in scientific expertise and increasing vaccine-hesitant attitudes. Unfortunately, social media discourse has been shown to form “echo chambers” wherein individuals receive the information they are likely to agree with, and surround themselves with like-minded others. In this talk, I will present our efforts to measure and track social media echo chambers around vaccination at a national and international level. We use network analysis to show the clusters of like-minded users, with those sharing anti-vaccination content communicating rarely with those promoting the vaccines, and this separation persists throughout the pandemic. Then, we turn to 28 countries, and show that many display such polarization in their vaccine debates. Moreover, we show that the anti-vaccination clusters tend to be connected across countries, making a kind of international Twitter anti-vaccination echo chamber.
Anatoliy Gruzd
Anatoliy Gruzd is a Professor of Information Technology Management and holds the Canada Research Chair in Privacy-Preserving Digital Technologies at the Ted Rogers School of Management, Toronto Metropolitan University. He is also the Director of Research at the Social Media Lab at the university and a Member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists. The broad aim of Dr. Gruzd’s various research initiatives is to understand how social media data can be used ethically to tackle a wide variety of societal problems from combating dis/misinformation to helping educators navigate social media for teaching and learning.
Studying the COVID-19 Infodemic at Scale
False narratives about COVID-19 have gone global and have been spreading almost as fast as the virus itself. Since January 2020, there have been over 10,000 false and unproven COVID-19-related claims shared via social media and other channels. The talk will discuss how researchers at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Social Media Lab, in partnership with the World Health Organization, spearheaded an international effort to help stem the rise and counter COVID-19 misinformation via the COVID-19 Misinformation Portal.
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