The Investigation of Social Media Data Thresholds for Opinion Formation

Abstract

The pervasive use of social media has grown to over two billion users to date, and it is commonly utilized as a means to share information and shape world events. Evidence suggests that passive social media usage (i.e., viewing without taking action) has an impact on the users perspective. This empirical influence over perspective could have significant impact on social events. Therefore, it is important to understand how social media contributes to the formation of an individuals perspective. A set of experimental tasks were designed to investigate empirically derived thresholds for opinion formation as a result of passive interactions with different social media data types (i.e., videos, images, and messages). With a better understanding of how humans passively interact with social media information, a paradigm can be developed that allows the exploitation of this interaction and plays a significant role in future military plans and operations.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Aug 13, 2018
Accession Number
AD1057947

Entities

People

  • B Szymanski
  • De Asher
  • E Bowman
  • E Heilman
  • G. Korniss
  • J Caylor
  • Jean L. Richardson
  • M Mittrick

Organizations

  • United States Army Research Laboratory

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Analysis Of Variance
  • Data Analysis
  • Data Mining
  • Data Science
  • Department Of Defense
  • Goodness Of Fit Tests
  • Information Operations
  • Information Science
  • Media
  • Military Research
  • Normal Distribution
  • Public Opinion
  • Social Media
  • Statistics

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Economics