Anatoliy Gruzd

Toronto Metropolitan University · Ted Rogers School of Management

The Internet provides many opportunities for learning from static resources to conversational spaces for questions, answers, commentary and exploration of topics of interest to participants, whether organized as Q&A sites such as Reddit, hashtag communities on Twitter, or knowledge-sharing sites such as Stack Overflow. Yet, there is limited researc...

Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine has triggered Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II. In this case study, we investigate the prevalence and types of anti-refugee discourse about Ukrainian refugees on Twitter. Previous studies primarily focused on public discourse and attitudes toward racialized refugees and immigrants; the Ukraini...

The study uses 31 semi-structured interviews to explore users’ motivations for adopting and using blockchain-based social media (BSM) platforms. The objective of the study is twofold—to collect empirical data on early adopters of BSM and to test the applicability of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model for explaining...

As Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, social media was rife with pro-Kremlin disinformation. To effectively tackle the issue of state-sponsored disinformation campaigns, this study examines the underlying reasons why some individuals are susceptible to false claims and explores ways to reduce their susceptibility....

The Special Issue on Trust and Safety on Social Media delves into two pressing and interlinked concerns: the growing prevalence of anti-social behavior and the widespread presence of misinformation within and across various social media platforms. The collection of articles featured in the issue collectively examines factors that contribute to thes...

Background: An infodemic is excess information, including false or misleading information, that spreads in digital and physical environments during a public health emergency. The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by an unprecedented global infodemic that has led to confusion about the benefits of medical and public health interventions, with s...

Background Online anti-social behaviour is on the rise, reducing the perceived benefits of social media in society and causing a number of negative outcomes. This research focuses on the factors associated with young adults being perpetrators of anti-social behaviour when using social media. Method Based on an online survey of university students...

One of the effects of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic has been to further accelerate the incorporation of social media activities into political and electoral campaigning. Especially as a result of lockdowns and other restrictions to offline public life, overall social media use has increased in many countries; health concerns have severely curtai...

This article examines the role of Facebook and YouTube in potentially exposing people to COVID-19 vaccine–related misinformation. Specifically, to study the potential level of exposure, the article models a uni-directional information-sharing pathway beginning when a Facebook user encounters a vaccine-related post with a YouTube video, follows this...

The study contributes to the ongoing debate about the ‘privacy paradox’ in the context of using social media. The presence of a privacy paradox is often declared if there is no relationship between users’ information privacy concerns and their online self-disclosure. However, prior research has produced conflicting results. The novel contribution o...

p> Purpose: The current study explores the spillover effects of offensive commenting in online community from the lens of emotional and behavioral contagion. Specifically, it examines the contagion of swearing –a linguistic mannerism that conveys high arousal emotion –based upon two mechanisms of contagion: mimicry and social interaction effect....

Learning on and through social media is becoming a cornerstone of lifelong learning, creating places not only for accessing information, but also for finding other self-motivated learners. Such is the case for Reddit, the online news sharing site that is also a forum for asking and answering questions. We studied learning practices found in ‘Ask’ s...

p> Purpose: The current study explores the spillover effects of offensive commenting in online community from the lens of emotional and behavioral contagion. Specifically, it examines the contagion of swearing –a linguistic mannerism that conveys high arousal emotion –based upon two mechanisms of contagion: mimicry and social interaction effect....

Journalists increasingly use social media data to infer and report public opinion by quoting social media posts, identifying trending topics, and reporting general sentiment. In contrast to traditional approaches of inferring public opinion, citizens are often unaware of how their publicly available social media data is being used and how public op...

Learning on and through social media is becoming a cornerstone of lifelong learning, creating places not only for accessing information, but also for finding other self-motivated learners. Such is the case for Reddit, the online news sharing site that is also a forum for asking and answering questions. We studied learning practices found in ‘Ask’ s...

This research was motivated by an interest in understanding how social media are applied in teaching in higher education. Data were collected using an online questionnaire, completed by 333 instructors in higher education, that asked about general social media use and specific use in teaching. Education and learning theories suggest three potential...

Journalists increasingly use social media data to infer and report public opinion by quoting social media posts, identifying trending topics, and reporting general sentiment. In contrast to traditional approaches of inferring public opinion, citizens are often unaware of how their publicly available social media data is being used and how public op...

The ready access to and availability of social media has opened up a wealth of data that marketers are leveraging for strategic insight and digital marketing. Yet there is a lack of professional norms regarding the use of social media in marketing and a gap in understanding consumers’ comfort with marketers’ use of their social media data. This stu...

The ready access to and availability of social media has opened up a wealth of data that marketers are leveraging for strategic insight and digital marketing. Yet there is a lack of professional norms regarding the use of social media in marketing and a gap in understanding consumers’ comfort with marketers’ use of their social media data. This stu...

The study contributes to the ongoing debate about the ‘privacy paradox’ in the context of using social media. The presence of a privacy paradox is often declared if there is no relationship between users’ information privacy concerns and their online self-disclosure. However, prior research has produced conflicting results. The novel contribution o...

This research was motivated by an interest in understanding how social media are applied in teaching in higher education. Data were collected using an online questionnaire, completed by 333 instructors in higher education, that asked about general social media use and specific use in teaching. Education and learning theories suggest three potential...

While there is a growing body of literature on information privacy suggesting different mechanisms of how people’s privacy concerns might be impacting their attitudes and behaviour when using social media, recent questionable data use practices by social media platforms and third parties call for a renewed validation of existing information privacy...

BACKGROUND An infodemic is an excess of information of varying quality, including false or misleading information and/or ambiguous information, that spreads in digital and physical environments during a public health emergency. The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by an unprecedented global infodemic that has led to confusion about the benefi...

Background An infodemic is excess information, including false or misleading information, that spreads in digital and physical environments during a public health emergency. The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by an unprecedented global infodemic that has led to confusion about the benefits of medical and public health interventions, with su...

This study examines the presence and role of Coordinated Link Sharing Behavior (CLSB) on Facebook around the “America’s Frontline Doctors” press conference, and the promotion of several unproven conspiracy theories including the false assertion that hydroxychloroquine is a “cure” for COVID-19 by Dr. Stella Immanuel, one of the doctors who took part...

Background: An infodemic is an overflow of information of varying quality that surges across digital and physical environments during an acute public health event. It leads to confusion, risk-taking, and behaviors that can harm health and lead to erosion of trust in health authorities and public health responses. Owing to the global scale and high...

Background: An infodemic is an overflow of information of varying quality that surges across digital and physical environments during an acute public health event. It leads to confusion, risk-taking, and behaviors that can harm health and lead to erosion of trust in health authorities and public health responses. Owing to the global scale and high...

BACKGROUND An infodemic is an overflow of information of varying quality that surges across digital and physical environments during an acute public health event. It leads to confusion, risk-taking and behaviors that can harm health and lead to erosion of trust in health authorities and public health responses. The global scale and high stakes of t...

This special theme issue of Big Data & Society presents leading-edge, interdisciplinary research that focuses on examining how health-related (mis-)information is circulating on social media. In particular, we are focusing on how computational and Big Data approaches can help to provide a better understanding of the ongoing COVID-19 infodemic (over...

Following Miller, who looked at offline performance capital for musicians and discovered important gender and genre impacts, we examined the role of gender and genre in the development of performance capital for YouTube top cover song artists. This case study suggests that online performance capital on YouTube is slightly different than offline per...

The study applies and expands the routine activity theory to examine the dynamics of online harassment and violence against women on Twitter in India. We collected 931,363 public tweets (original posts and replies) over a period of 1 month that mentioned at least one of 101 influential women in India. By undertaking both manual and automated text a...

As social media become a staple for knowledge discovery and sharing, questions arise about how self-organizing communities manage learning outside the domain of organized, authority-led institutions. Yet examination of such communities is challenged by the quantity of posts and variety of media now used for learning. This paper addresses the challe...

In late March of 2020, a new hashtag, #FilmYourHospital, made its first appearance on social media. The hashtag encouraged people to visit local hospitals to take pictures and videos of empty hospitals to help “prove” that the COVID-19 pandemic is an elaborate hoax. Using techniques from Social Network Analysis, this case study examines how this co...

The chapter presents a new social media research tool for studying subreddits (i.e., groups) on Reddit called Communalytic. It is an easy-to-use, web-based tool that can collect, analyze and visualize publicly available data from Reddit. In addition to collecting data, Communalytic can assess the toxicity of Reddit posts and replies using a machine...

The chapter presents a new social media research tool for studying subreddits (i.e., groups) on Reddit called Communalytic. It is an easy-to-use, web-based tool that can collect, analyze and visualize publicly available data from Reddit. In addition to collecting data, Communalytic can assess the toxicity of Reddit posts and replies using a machine...

UNSTRUCTURED An infodemic is an overabundance of information– some accurate and some not – occurring during an epidemic. In a similar manner to an epidemic, it spreads between humans through digital and physical information systems. It makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it. A WHO technical cons...

Background: An infodemic is an overabundance of information - some accurate and some not - that occurs during an epidemic. In a similar manner to an epidemic, it spreads between humans via digital and physical information systems. It makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it. Objective: A WHO te...

With the introduction of new information communication technologies, employers are increasingly engaging in social media screening, also known as cybervetting, as part of their hiring process. Our research, using an online survey with 482 participants, investigates young people’s concerns with their publicly available social media data being used i...

This paper examines the role of hyperpartisanship and polarization on Twitter during the 2018 Brazilian Presidential Election. Based on a mixed-methods approach, we collected and analyzed a dataset of over 8 million tweets about Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right candidate from the Social Liberty Party. Our results show that there is a strong connection b...

Objective This research examines how YouTube recommends vaccination-related videos. Materials and Methods We used a social network analysis to evaluate how YouTube recommends vaccination related videos to its users. Results More pro-vaccine videos (64.75%) than anti-vaccine (19.98%) videos are on YouTube, with 15.27% of videos being neutral in se...

The article examines whether and how the ever-evolving practice of using social media to screen job applicants may undermine people’s trust in the organizations that are engaging in this practice. Using a survey of 429 participants, we assess whether their comfort level with cybervetting can be explained by the factors outlined by Petronio’s commun...

Social media has emerged as a space in which people engage in both formal and informal learning, often as people interact with one another. Some of these interactions form the basis for learning ties and learning networks. In this chapter, we study how learning ties are formed and sustained among users of Reddit, a popular social media site. By usi...

The ready access to and availability of social media has opened up a wealth of data that marketers are leveraging for strategic insight and digital marketing. Yet there is a lack of professional norms regarding the use of social media in marketing and a gap in understanding consumers’ comfort with marketers’ use of their social media data. This stu...

This paper provides an introduction to the Proceedings of the 2019 International Conference on Social Media and Society (#SMSociety). The conference is an annual gathering of leading social media researchers, policy makers, and practitioners from around the world. Now in its 10th year, the 2019 conference is hosted by the Social Media Lab at the Te...

We are witnessing a changing social media environment with new actors, new influencers, and new challenges. Considering the changes on social media platforms, the rise of bots, and the increased participation of state actors, this thematic collection addresses the methodological, topical, and ethical issues of networked influence. The Facebook-Camb...

Resumo O presente artigo busca debater, por meio de estudo de caso, as cascatas das chamadas fake news de cunho político no Twitter. Para tanto, examinam-se fake news que circularam durante dois eventos, o julgamento e a prisão do ex-presidente Lula. Para tal análise, utilizam-se métodos de coleta de dados automatizados, análise de redes e uma anál...

Resumo: O presente artigo busca debater, através de estudo de caso, as cascatas das chamadas "fake news" de cunho político no Twitter. Para tanto, examinam-se "fake news" que circularam durante dois eventos, o julgamento e a prisão do ex-presidente Lula. Para tal análise utilizam-se métodos de coleta de dados automatizados, análise de redes e uma a...

Facebook “likes” are often used as a proxy of users’ attention and an affirmation of what is posted on Facebook (Gerodimos & Justinussen, 2015). To determine what factors predict “likes,” the authors analyzed Facebook posts made by the campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump, the top three candidates from the 2016 US primary...

As governments are increasingly turning to social media as a means of engaging the public, questions remain as to how they are actually using various social media platforms. Do specific platforms engender specific types of messages? If so, what are they, and how do they affect civic engagement, co-participation, and address citizen concerns? In thi...

The amount and complexity of data that can be accessed from social media has been increasing exponentially. We examine the value of using information visualizations as a tool to study people’s attitudes and perceptions regarding their social media data being used by third parties. In the context of using social media to screen job applicants, we in...

Journalists increasingly use social media data to infer and report public opinion by quoting social media posts, identifying trending topics, and reporting general sentiment. In contrast to traditional approaches of inferring public opinion, citizens are often unaware of how their publicly available social media data are being used and how public o...

Learning on and through social media is becoming a cornerstone of lifelong learning, creating places not only for accessing information, but also for finding other self-motivated learners. Such is the case for Reddit, the online news sharing site that is also a forum for asking and answering questions. We studied learning practices found in ‘Ask’ s...

This study aims to identify the factors that might cause a Facebook post to be 'liked' by Facebook users. We analyze all the Facebook posts made by Donald Trump's campaign during the U.S. 2016 primary election. Several possible variables were considered, such as the types of Facebook posts, the use of pronouns and emotions, the inclusion of slogans...

This paper provides an introduction to the 2018 Proceedings of the International Conference on Social Media and Society (#SMSociety). The conference is an annual gathering of leading social media researchers, policy makers, and practitioners from around the world. Now in its 9th year, the 2018 conference is hosted by the Centre for Business Data An...

In the heyday of social media, individuals around the world held high hopes for the democratizing force of social media; however, in light of the recent public outcry of privacy violations, fake news, and Russian troll farms, much of optimism toward social media has waned in favor of skepticism, fear, and outrage. This special issue critically expl...

Social media sites are increasingly being adopted to support teaching practice in higher education. Learning Analytics (LA) dashboards can be used to reveal how students engage with course material and others in the class. However, research on the best practices of designing, developing, and evaluating such dashboards to support teaching and learni...

The theoretical lenses, empirical measures and analytical tools associated with social network analysis comprise a wealth of knowledge that can be used to analyse networked learning. This has popularized the use of the social network analysis approach to understand and visualize structures and dynamics in online learning networks, particularly wher...

The theoretical lenses, empirical measures and analytical tools associated with social network analysis comprise a wealth of knowledge that can be used to analyse networked learning. This has popularized the use of the social network analysis approach to understand and visualize structures and dynamics in online learning networks, particularly wher...

Purpose To provide an overview of altmetrics, including their potential benefits and limitations, how they may be obtained, and their role in assessing pharmacoepidemiologic research impact. Methods Our review was informed by compiling relevant literature identified through searching multiple health research databases (PubMed, Embase, and CIHNAHL)...

Today, billions of people around the world are turning to social media to socialize, conduct business, keep up with the news, as well as discover, discuss, and share information. The significance of this global adoption of a relatively new communication and information technology cannot be overlooked. As a country, Canada has one of the most conn...

This paper introduces a 'learning in the wild' coding schema, an approach developed to support learning analytics researchers interested in understanding the different types of discourse, exploratory talk, and conversational dialogue happening on social media. The research examines how learner-participants ('Redditors') are leveraging subreddit com...

This is an introduction to the Proceedings of the 2017 International Conference on Social Media and Society, an annual gathering of leading social media researchers from around the world. The conference is organized by the Social Media Lab (http://socialmedialab.ca) at Ryerson University. Now, in its 8th year, the 2017 conference in Toronto, Canada...

Vaccine misinformation on social media poses significant drawbacks to the efforts of vaccine coverage rates. This research studies the interlinkages between pro- and anti-vaccine YouTube videos to help public health professionals explore new ways to reach anti-vaccine and vaccine-hesitant audiences. Using YouTube's API, we retrieved 9,489 recommend...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the spillover effects of offensive commenting in online community from the lens of emotional and behavioral contagion. Specifically, it examines the contagion of swearing – a linguistic mannerism that conveys high-arousal emotion – based upon two mechanisms of contagion: mimicry and social interactio...

As a scholarly domain, social media research has come a long way since the term “social media” first appeared in the literature in the early 2000s. Since then, researchers across disciplines have been actively examining the impact of social media on society. According to Web of Science, there are currently over 19,000 academic articles that include...

The amount of data generated in Online Social Networks (OSNs) is increasing every day. Extracting and understanding trending topics and events from the vast amount of data is an important area of research in OSNs. This paper proposes a novel clustering framework to detect the spread of memes in OSNs in real time. The Offline–Online meme clustering...

Existing approaches to social media analysis are deeply limited by the fact that they typically incorporate little or no information about the semantics of the user interactions: they analyze who talked to whom but not what they talked about. In this paper, we present deliberation-centric social network analysis, a "semi-formal" approach that is bu...

This study explores whether aggressive text-based interactions in social media are contagious. In particular, we examine swearing behaviour of YouTube commentators in response to videos and comments posted on the official Donald Trump's campaign channel. Our analysis reveals the presence of mimicry of verbal aggression. Specifically, swearing in a...

Sunbelt conference of the International Network for Social Network Analysis http://insna.org/sunbelt2017