Title
#ISISisNotIslam or #DeportAllMuslims?: predicting unspoken views.
Abstract
This paper examines the effect of online social network interactions on future attitudes. Specifically, we focus on how a person's online content and network dynamics can be used to predict future attitudes and stances in the aftermath of a major event. In this study, we focus on the attitudes of US Twitter users towards Islam and Muslims subsequent to the tragic Paris terrorist attacks that occurred on November 13, 2015. We quantitatively analyze 44K users' network interactions and historical tweets to predict their attitudes. We provide a description of the quantitative results based on the content (hashtags) and network interaction (retweets, replies, and mentions). We analyze two types of data: (1) we use post-event tweets to learn users' stated stances towards Muslims based on sampling methods and crowd-sourced annotations; and (2) we employ pre-event interactions on Twitter to build a classifier to predict post-event stances. We found that pre-event network interactions can predict someone' s attitudes towards Muslims with 82% macro F-measure, even in the absence of prior mentions of Islam, Muslims, or related terms.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1145/2908131.2908150
WebSci
Keywords
Field
DocType
Network analysis, Twitter data analysis, Stance prediction, Paris attacks, Homophily, Social influence
Islam,Social psychology,Network dynamics,Social network,Homophily,Sociology,Terrorism,Social influence,Network analysis,Macro
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
13
0.61
17
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Walid Magdy152040.47
Darwish Kareem261552.39
Norah Abokhodair3667.35
Afshin Rahimi48410.87
Timothy Baldwin523935.56