>> Eric Horvitz: We're honored to have returned to visit us with
this week Munmun De Choudhury. Munmun was with us as a post doc,
and we had a blast working with her on a number of projects. We
had some fun collaborations. Some are continuing. She's here
this week visiting. Munmun had a full time job or from Microsoft
Research, and we all thought, including she, that she'd be here
this fall. But at the last minute, Georgia Tech came through
with an offer and brought her closer to her husband. So romance
beats intellectual vibrance.
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
Come on!
>> Eric Horvitz: No. Georgia Tech is a wonderful place, and we
have wonderful colleagues there so I shouldn't be joking on
camera here. So Munmun is currently an assistant professor at
the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. Her
research combines computer science and social science. She's
worked on a number of techniques to help us better understand
human behavior online and how it relates to offline states of
mind.
She's been a recipient of the Grace Hopper Scholarship. She's
had an IBM Emergent Leaders in Multimedia award, and she's been
she's had other awards. A best paper award at the SIGCHI
conference coming up. I think on the work you'll be talking
about.
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
Yes.
>> Eric Horvitz: Looking forward to that. And some background.
She was a post doc tomorrow researcher here, as I mentioned, a
research fellow at Rutgers, and she did her Ph.D. work in
computer science at Arizona State University just two or three
years ago. Today, she'll be talking about communities in trauma,
disclosure, disinhibition, and desensitization on social media.
Munmun.
>> Munmun De Choudhury: Thank you, Eric. And good to see
everyone again. I'm very excited to be back here, although time
flies. Tomorrow is the end of the week. So like Eric mentioned,
I'm going to talk about two different projects here. One is
something that is coming up at Kai this year, and the other one
is more ongoing stuff, which I'm very excited about and would
love to hear what you guys think about that.
So broadly, we are talking about communities suffering from some
kind of trauma, and different aspects of how their behavior
manifests on social media websites. So trauma is a very broad
term, and it can be a personal trauma, like death of a loved one,
losing a job suddenly, or it could even be something which is
because of things beyond your control, a disruption in the
environment that someone is exposed to. So that could be an
example of that is the Boston Marathon, the number of different
shooting events that have been happening at different places, the
different regions of the world that are facing armed conflicts
and so forth.
So trauma, whether it is collective or is it a personal trauma in
someone's life, it definitely affects us in a negative way. It
affects different attributes for behavior and our lives in
general. And what we conjecture, and this builds on our prior
work, especially the work I was doing while I was at Microsoft,
is to use social media as a lens or a window that can be used to
understand how people cope with these trauma events and what are
the different manifestations of their behavior around this trauma
experiences.
And in this talk, we are going to look at three particular
aspects of that behavioral manifestation around traumatic
experiences, which spans the kind of disclosure that people
engage in after these traumatic experiences. The kind of
disinhibition that social tools and online tools allows people to
do and various kind of interesting aspect of negative traumatic
events in life that is desensitization. So we will talk more
about that in a bit.
So why is social media a good place to look at? So I guess a lot
of you already are aware of these
the importance aspects of it
so maybe I'll quickly go over it. So it gives us a way to
measure people's behavior across these different traumatic
experiences. And the benefit of understanding people's behavior
is that over a long course of time, if you're doing a
longitudinal study of behavior of people or communities, it
provides us with a way to understand what their baseline behavior
is and which, in turn, can tell us about any kind of behavioral
concerns that may arise in that whole time frame of our analysis.
So in a way, it could be like a fairly non intrusive way of
figuring out the risk of certain individuals or communities to
different kinds of concerns that they experience around trauma.
And another interesting aspect of these social tools is that
people
I mean, this is excluding Facebook, where people often
have their original id ties listed. A lot of these other social
tools allow people to be pseudononymous or even anonymous. And
that provides them with an excellent platform they can used to
share
to engage in self disclosure, to share how they're
feeling and what they're going through because of the trauma with
a much larger audience.
So the first study is going to be about a collective trauma event
and how a community of people we will study begins to show signs
of desensitization through the kind of disclosure that they're
engaging in. In particular, I would like to highlight some prior
work in that light. I mean, there's a lot of work in psychology
and mostly clinical psychology and a little bit of psychiatry in
which people have examined how prolonged exposure to a traumatic
experience, such as an armed conflict or, you know, even the
Boston Marathon effect persisted for a reasonable amount of time.
How exposure to these kinds of experiences over time makes people
numb in the kind of feelings that they experience and they
express. Because in certain sense, it becomes the new normal to
them. That all these kind of violent events that are happening,
it's just part of their lives. And actually, if you think about
from a civic participation point of view, this is a severe threat
because one of the foundations of society is that people are
sensitive to each other. We care for each other. So
desensitization kind of takes people away from that social
feeling.
So in particular, the particular trauma that we are going to look
at here, it's going to be the drug war situation in Mexico that
has been persistent since at least ten years. So it's kind of a
fight that occurs between different drug cartels in different
parts of Mexico. And unfortunately, a lot of innocent people are
subject to the cartel
the violence that happens because of the
cartels fighting with each other. So this is going to be a case
study. Broadly, we are interested in understanding the kinds of
affective reactions that people, that communities have in
response to trauma, and the trauma that we are examining, it's
the Mexican drug war.
So to give you some a little bit of more sense of the drug war,
over the last four or five years, there has been a rapid increase
in the number of shootings and a lot of innocent people have
either lost their lives or people have lost the near and dear
ones or have been affected in certain way or the other. There
has been an increase in extortions, kidnappings, disappearances
of people and sort and so forth. So these are some of the
numbers. This is still almost three years ago. More than 60,000
people were reported to be dead, and it's usually an
underestimate of the actual situation, and those are people who
were displaced, disappeared and so forth.
So, you know, talking about the Mexican drug war, I mean, of
course it has taken a huge toll on lives of people. But there
has been something which was beyond these numbers and these
camps. And that is the effect on the psychology of people. So,
you know, from almost four years ago, there have been a lot of
discussion and reports in the media that how exposure to this
kind of a traumatic experience is creating increased stress and
anxiety in people in Mexico.
There is a term for that, it's called PTSD. So there have been a
lot of media which have used phrases like numb to carnage and,
you know, even like people and people, like younger kids and
younger adults, they think that this is normal and this is cool
and so they are being exposed to this kind of environment and
they're thinking that that is how everything is.
So this kind of motivates our work, and what we thought about is
that, you know, if you're looking at social media over the course
of time, we will be able to gauge people's behavior and their
affective reactions to these violent events and actually see if
people underwent this kind of numbness or lack of feeling over
the course of time.
So an interesting attribute of the drug war is that unlike a lot
of other situations where social media was just in part used by a
small set of people, in this context, actually social media was
very widely adopted by people to report on the different updates
about where violence is happening and generally sharing
information about which places to avoid and so forth. So in a
sense, it is also helped by the fact that the news media itself,
the traditional news media was censored. Part of it is because
there was political influence, and the other aspect of that was
the reporters and journalists were actually afraid to do an
honest reporting because some of the journalists actually lost
their life in that process.
So a lot of people became pseudononymous and went on to Twitter
to share information about these drug war violences just like in
an altruistic manner or because they really cared for their
neighborhood or they just felt very deeply about this issue, and
they would use social media to talk about situations relating to
the drug war violence.
So that is what we thought that Twitter was a good place to look
at for this particular case study, and here are some other
numbers that also speak in favor of general social media and
internet adoption in Mexico.
So, you know, the goal of this work is basically we want to study
affective reactions of people who are exposed to a traumatic
experience which persisted now for a long period of time, and
then if the analysis of those affective reaction tells us about
any signs or evidence which can point to desensitization. So
this work is a part of, you know, you can think of it to be the
part of the broad body of work around crisis informatics, where
there has been a lot of work around understanding how people
experience crisis and trauma, disruptions in the environment that
they are a part of, and, you know, using social media as a lens
to understand how people cope with those events over time.
So the first research question that we tackled in this paper was
around negative affect or the negative sentiment that people
share. So we were interested over a period of time, what were
the patterns of negative affect that people were sharing, you
know, around these drug war related events. And then, you know,
if there are patterns in those negative affect expression that
can tell us something about desensitization. So just going back
a little, you know, there has been a lot of research and
psychology which has said that desensitization is actually
associated with elimination of, you know, emotional responses
over time. So that's why we thought that looking at negative
affect and how people
whether or not people show declines in
negative affect expression over time can tell us
give us some
evidence about desensitization.
We had two other research questions around understanding the
affective reactions of people and whether they can indicate
desensitization. So this again comes from prior work, where we
have
we find that exposure to violence, especially, it can
create a sense of aggressiveness in people. There has been
evidence around that, so it could be like media violence, TV
report on the news about violence going on in the society and so
forth. And what this can do is that people can become habituated
with that sense of aggression over time.
So to measure that, we used two different attributes of emotion.
One is the arousal or the activation dimension, which measures
the intensity of emotion, and then the other one was dominance,
which is the controlling power of an emotion. So, like, anger
has a lower controlling power than, like, sadness. So basically,
these two research questions were around how we can measure
people's emotion through these two attributes, activation and
dominance, and whether the trends of these measures over time can
tell us anything about a possible desensitization in people.
So this is our method, so there were two main parts. The first
part was that we needed to measure the extent of violence, or to
what extent the trauma was persistent in parts of Mexico. So we
focused on an almost two and a half year long period, starting
from 2010 to 2012 and focused on four major cities in Mexico
which have good social media penetration and which are also
severely affected by the drug war violence. And we relied on
basically using various different sources of data external to
social media to understand to what extent violence was persistent
in those cities. So I will soon go into the different data
sources we used, but these range from web search interests to
official statistics on homicides and also a couple of things
which are more specific to the drug war violence. And I'll get
to that very quickly in a bit.
As a second step, we operationalized how affective reactions
could be manifested on social media, and we used Twitter data
from people in these four different cities in Mexico. So talking
about Twitter data first, we basically focused on
we looked
for mentions of the four cities as hashtags and tweets in the
Firehose stream, and idea here was that this would
people who
would use these city names as hashtags are probably people who
either live there or really care about that particular city and
are generally talking about the city and the different things
about it. And not specifically about the drug war. And the
reason was that, you know, we wanted to focus not just on drug
war, because we wanted to get the general sense of affect in the
larger population. So we used that approach, and then used the
retweets and the summary statistics are on that slide.
So we also did a manual validation of, you know, to what extent
those people
people who use the city hashtags also live in the
city. So about close to 80 to 85 percent people, we found that
were also living in that particular city.
So let us move on to how we collected the violence data on these
four cities. So the first one was official statistics. The
unfortunate reality is it sounds pretty simple that you get like
monthly numbers of how many people died, were killed. But then
it was actually fairly difficult to get that. And that is
because only until actually 2011 we could get it from the, you
know, that website which is the official website of the
government, but then the government stopped report those things
after 2011 because they were concerned that it's showing them in
a negative light.
So we actually had to adopt a pretty long winding route in which
we worked with some local people in Mexico, so Andreas has a lot
of contacts. Andreas is a co author here. So he could manage to
get some contacts and basically scrape that data from various
places for the 2012 year.
The second one was basically a sense of search interests around
different violence related terms, and we conveniently used Google
search trends, although we admit we should have used the Bing
ones. But it basically helped us just focus on Spanish as the
chosen language and for a certain different time intervals, it
gave us monthly aggregates on different violent
violence
related terms. So how we arrived at that violence lexicon is we
started from the death category in the sociolinguistic lexicon
Luke and then Google trends also gives like core search terms
when you go to their website, so starting from that set of death
terms, we expanded our lexicon in a snow balling fashion into
also including these core search terms on Google.
So that gave us a general motion of how much people were curious
about these events or, in general, about violence when they're
using search engines.
Our third source of data was from this very interesting source
called the blog Narco. So like I said, basically the
conventional media was absent in this context. And what happened
is that not only did some of the people go to social media to
report on these happenings around them, but some people who felt
really passionately about this issue, a set of people, no one
knows who they are, but they started this particular blog.
And this blog was an interesting one, because it would report,
like, pretty gory details about different happenings of what is
going on, where, who got killed and so forth. So it wasn't a lot
of controversy for that matter, because it was reporting like
explicit violent content, but the interesting thing was that it
was super popular. So it was almost like a news media to the
people of different drug war violence affected regions.
So what we did was we managed to scrape that blog and we got like
tons of postings of different postings on the blog so we had,
like volumes of activity on that blog and because a lot of people
read it, we thought that it would be good to have a sense of the
audience that reads that blog so we went to their Twitter account
and over a course of time, longitudinally in monthly aggregates,
we grabbed a number of followers over time.
So like here are some of the statistics that come from different
news articles that reported this blog to be very popular. Yeah?
>>: Was there a way that you could validate that the news that
was being posted on the blog was accurate? Or where a group of
people were posting, someone was verifying that this was correct,
these were genuine pictures?
>> Munmun De Choudhury: Yeah, that's a have good point. We did
not do that. We didn't test for the credibility of that, but
given that it was so popular, there must be some truth to it.
And also, because it seems that it was a team of people and
actually the [indiscernible] became really concerned about these
people and they could hunt one of them down. And apparently, the
mother, the husband and then the wife stopped posting. So
there's no activity on that post anymore. So the wife basically
is
no one knows where she is.
So this must be some truth to it, otherwise, the [indiscernible]
probably wouldn't come after that. I know that's not the right
way to validate something, but that's a very good point.
>>: It's understandable. I mean, my question was based on the
fact that sometimes on social media, it's easy to post whatever
you think you want to propagate.
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
Yeah, absolutely.
>>: I've seen people kind of like conjure up images. I'm not
saying that this isn't correct or anything, but I'm just like
I was wondering if there's a way that the source could be
validated.
>> Munmun De Choudhury: Yeah. It's very difficult when you
don't really know the identities of the people. But yeah.
>>:
Also, there's only one [indiscernible].
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
>>
It's one of our
[indiscernible].
>> Munmun De Choudhury: The basic I'd of these other non
government signals was that we new that probably the government
numbers are underreported and to kind of maybe compensate for
them to look at, like, what kind of signals we get from elsewhere
was just a way for us to, you know, get a more comprehensive
picture of what is going on.
So the fourth category was also very interesting. So what the
drug war, you know, this kind of trauma did in Mexico was that do
too a certain section of people, it became a cool thing, like
especially the younger adults and kids. And they came one this
whole thing about Narco language. And the funny thing was that a
lot of these words actually describe, like, pretty explicit
details about violence. So I don't know how to pronounce them.
So this word, these two words actually mean a body, which is
wrapped in a blanket, and put in the trunk of a car.
And then these were like.
>>: [indiscernible] names for snow. I guess it's really
violent, it's like [indiscernible]. Wow, it's really, that sort
of sad to see.
>> Munmun De Choudhury: It is. It is a little disturbing as
well. So and these were increasingly being used by people. Part
of it was a set of people thought it was cool and the other part
was that it was an easy way for them to use, like, code language
to report something. Although it's not code anymore, because
everyone knows the meaning of these words. But over the course
of time, that was the purpose of the evolution of this language.
So it gave us an additional kind of complementary signal to
understand, like, you know, people's exposure to violence in a
sense, because only then people will probably use these kind of
terms.
>>:
What do the words without asterisks mean?
>> Munmun De Choudhury: Well, it just means a regular
expression. There could be like other parts of the word.
for example, sit. Sit could be sitting, sits.
>>:
The other ones with asterisks are only used in that
Like,
>> Munmun De Choudhury: It's the regular expression format.
Okay. So I guess I'm going to talk a little bit about the
different Narco word containing content we derived from Twitter.
So these are some of the numbers. Basically, Narco are
containing postings per city so we focused on four cities. And
as you can see, it's not a small number. And these are some of
the examples which we have translated. So that's helpful.
So as you can see that people are actually using these terms to
report about things that are going on around them. So we'll
start by, you know, looking at the baseline, which is the
persistence of violence in these cities and in Mexico.
So on the top, you have the blog Dell Narco that I described, the
number of postings on that blog shown in green. And in violet,
we have the number of followers on the Twitter account of that
blog. And over time, from August 2010, to December 2012, there
is an increasing trend. So there are the linear trend fits as
well.
On the bottom, we have the number of posts in each city that
mentioned one or more Narco words. And you can see the general
pattern is increasing.
So if you look at
now we'll look at the affective reactions of
people. We will be able to measure whether, you know, the
context that all these
the violence exposure is increasing,
what are the patterns of affective reactions and if there is any
evidence of desensitization. So in this picture, we have the
measurement of negative affect for the different
for the four
different cities. So we have the number of homicides the
government reported statistics for each city shown in the blue
bars. And then we have, in solid red, the negative affect trend
for each city. And, of course, we have the linear fits to each
of them. So if you see
you'll generally see that either
negative affect has remained
either homicides have remained
stable or have increased in the four cities. On the other hand,
there is a slight decrease over time for negative affect.
If you look at activation and dominance, so our hypothesis was
that the increase in these two measures showed increased
aggression, which is known to be a correlate of desensitization.
So here also, compared to the homicides we see that in yellow and
in red, dominance and activation show general increase. I'll
come to the
>>: When you did the analysis, did you
one can imagine that,
like, Luke was not trained to be robust in the face of these kind
of, the Narco [indiscernible]. And any time a tweet was about
one of these things, get big spikes in some of the ways the words
are used per potentially a tool like Luke was initially
formulated. My reaction is it might be useful to make sure you
remove the actual tweets about events and looked at other tweets
to see if some of the mode of content was reflected in non event
pointing tweets.
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
Oh, I see what you mean.
>>: Might say just if people were saying, oh, my God, another
murder. And murder is a word in Luke that was trained on, God
knows nice, you know, average off people in Austin, you refer to
Narco killings here, might have an artifact. I was wondering one
way to test for the artifact would be to remove all the event
related reference and look at, else.
>> Munmun De Choudhury: Right, right. That's a very good point
and honestly, we didn't do that separation. But we did
so
there were a couple of
one problem there is also to detect
event related
I mean, that's a research challenge on its own.
But given that, there was a slightly simple simpler way to do it,
which is that at least a few of these cities had a Narco, like
drug war specific hashtag. So we separately, I think, at least
for Monterrey, because it a big city, it's hash MTY follow,
that's the Narco hashtag. We looked at the trend and, of course,
the volumes are much lesser, but we did see a similar trend. So
I guess it doesn't answer the question that you are raising.
You're raising the complement of that.
>>: In other words, I would be more impressed with the result
that said there are signs of these various measures increasing or
decreasing for non event related. If you could do that
maybe
follow on paper. For non event related communications, this is
amped up in general. They're not talking about the murder.
They're not talking about the people [indiscernible] and so on.
>> Munmun De Choudhury: Great point, yeah. The other thing that
I would have come to that in a bit, but the other thing we then
look a here is also, you know, new users joining the community
and kind of they might have a different perspective on how they
want to report because they just came to social media. So it was
not very clean data to, you know
and then this project was
halfway through being here and being away. So we didn't get to
do that part. But that is another thing we would like to do, to
see, like, maybe this is just the consistent set of people who
are expressing these kind of emotional reactions and there are
these, like the newcomers which have a different set of
expectations.
So we didn't do that, but that is also something that we would
like to look at.
>>: Can you give an example of what words in English were
categorized as activation versus dominance or like how did you
categorize them?
>> Munmun De Choudhury: So I gave an example, like anger, for
example is, is a high dominance word, but sad is a low dominance
word, although both are negative. So it's an additional
like
you can think of emotions as a three dimensional space. So
typically, we only think about positive and negative. So, like,
yeah, like fear, anger, angry
fear, anger, sad, all of them
are negative. And then like happy, excited, friendly are all
positive. But then there are differences in these
in along
the intensity. So like fear
anger has a higher intensity as
well than fear or sadness. And on the positive side, maybe like
being ecstatic is like super high intensity than like being
friendly or something.
So those are like additional dimensions you can use to
characterize emotions of people. Does that make sense?
>>: I mean, it makes sense for the dominance. What does
activation measure, though? Is it like how many times you're
using the words?
>> Munmun De Choudhury: No, it's more like
it comes from
psychology, like they have had like numerous studies to, you
know, figure out the intensity of an emotion. So like
>>: Okay. Ecstatic and happy are both positive things, but
ecstatic would have higher activation?
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
>>:
Yes.
Okay.
>> Munmun De Choudhury: So I mean, I will quickly talk about the
significance tests. So here we did the Fisher's R to Z test, and
basically we show that, you know, over time for the four cities,
negative affect actually showed a decrease. So if you compare
2010, '11 and 2012, and then also for activation and dominance,
we see an increase.
So basically, like, you know, what are the implications of this
work? So, you know, if you go back to where I started from, that
using social media as a lens to understand people's experiences
of trauma and how to choose these platforms to engage in
discourse. So this was an example of how people are doing that.
And it also additionally gives us an opportunity to find things
of behavioral help. Trauma and crisis are very unique
situations, because there is also
I mean, there is a lot of
like government efforts and NGOs and so forth who are going out
and trying to help people. But a lot of that is kind of focused
on the public health side of things, I mean, which is of course
the way it should be, because people are probably dying
somewhere. But then something that gets often neglected is the
effect of the trauma in the long term. And that could include
things like post traumatic stress and anxiety and so forth. So
that gets ignored somewhere. So the hope with this search that
is we don't have any causal signal here. It's merely
correlational. But the hope is that with tools like social
media, where we can identify these patterns, it can be used by
some of these agencies, governmental or non governmental, in
trying to identify communities which are at greater risk of these
kind of things at a later point in time.
So I'm going to go to the second study. I'm running out of time
so I'm going to quickly talk about it. So here also we're
talking about trauma again, but here we are talking about traumas
a general term. So it could be a person trauma, it could be a
collective trauma. And what we are interested in looking here is
that how people are using a social media called Reddit in
engaging in self disclosure and how some of the attributes of
this kind of social media is providing ways to be more
disinhibited. And when people are given an opportunity to be
disinhibiting, what kind of things do they talk about.
So, you know, there's a lot of big body of work in kind of
understanding how, like, online forums and support groups, they
are, you know, usually a very useful, like, support system for
people suffering from these kind of traumatic experiences because
it provides them with an audience of sort of strangers that
they're not worried about, you know, revealing stigmatic
information too. And it provides them with a support system that
they can fall back upon when they need.
And also, the ability to hide one's identity in a sense. It
allows people to be more disinhibiting and more open in their
conversations. So and then there's this whole body of work
around how people suffering from different kinds of health
challenges actually go online. In fact, Eric has a lot of work
on, like, you know, looking at online activities in a range of
different things and trying to understand people's health
behaviors.
So in this particular paper, we were very curious about
we
always most of the times looked at Twitter. But we were very
interested in this social media Reddit. The interesting thing
about Reddit is that it sort of falls in an interesting place
between something like Twitter and Facebook, which are more like
it has a sense of a social network. People
whether or not you
know that social network, that's a different matter. But it's
like people, you know, the mundane ongoings of life, you know. I
had coffee, I went there, and so forth. And then on the other
hand, you have like these super like depression or trauma
experience specific like forums where people go with like
specific questions that I just experienced so and so, and this is
the treatment I'm getting. I'm not sure if this is the right
one. What has been your experience. So people are very specific
there.
So Reddit is interesting because it falls in between. It sort of
has a notion of a social network, not quite strong, you know, you
don't really see a network. You just interact with people. So
you do end up talking a lot about mundane ongoings of life, but
then you sometimes go with specific questions too.
So we had three different questions. I don't think I'll go
through all of them. I guess I'll quickly skip to the third
research question, which is the ability to be anonymous on Reddit
and how that allows people who are suffering from trauma to share
different kinds of information about their condition.
So the way people can be anonymous on Reddit is if you guys are
aware, is through throwaway accounts. Throwaway acts is a
feature that's provided on very few sites, and it's a very
interesting way in which you can create an account and not
provide any email.
So you create an account anywhere on the web, usually they will
ask you for a valid email and they would ask you to authenticate
and so forth. The good thing
good or bad, thing about
throwaway accounts is that you can create an account without
providing any phone number, any email, any piece of a personally
identifiable information.
So, you know, people often use these throwaway accounts to
as
a one time thing where they want to say something and they are
like active Reddit users elsewhere so, you know, someone can
potentially look at their postings and even if they're not saying
where they live or, you know, what age group or what job they do
and so forth, you can figure out quite a bit about them.
So if someone is using throwaway accounts, it's practically
trailless. They just make this one posting and that's it. So
there is no way for someone to track back who that person is. So
people feel if there is something that they want to talk about,
they don't want anyone else to know, that's what they use.
So we focused on mental health sub communities. Mental health
issues concerning sub communities on Reddit. And we collected
over a two month period all of the postings that appeared in
those sub communities and all of the comments that each post got.
So the comments are actually very rich in Reddit. People
actually give meaningful feedback. They write long comments and
people can also, like, up vote or down vote each post. So, you
know, that is known as karma. So everyone wants to get more up
votes than down votes. That's usually the practice.
So what we did here in this particular part of the project was to
look at in what ways are these people who on mental health
forums, because they are essentially sharing sensitive
information. And one of the sub Reddits we looked at was
actually suicide watch, which it turns out is a sub community
people use to post things before they are actually seriously
thinking of hurting themselves.
It's very
it's all very scary. I mean, at some point I was
like concerned that am I even supposed to read all these things.
And now that I can basically look at all the postings in that sub
Reddit, what are my ethical responsibilities, like, you know. So
anyway, I'm not revealing any, you know, any kind of personal
identifying information here. So just in a macro scale, what we
are looking at here is that how these people who are trying to be
anonymous different from the anonymous one.
So these are different, some of the most distinguishing Luke
language categories here. So as you can see, anonymous people
are less inhibiting in their postings. They talk a little bit
more about their friends and family. Also, more about death
related words. They're more
you know, they're more talking
about themselves and then they're being like less interactive.
If you're seeing a second person pronoun used and also if you
look at negative emotion, they're being more negative and if you
see the breakdown in terms of anger, anxiety and sadness, they
are also expressing more of those feelings and they're also being
less positive.
But the interesting thing here is that you would imagine that
mental health is such a stigmatic concern that if there is an
option to be anonymous, then everyone who would hang out on those
forums would be anonymous. But turns out that that's not the
case. In fact, when we looked at the percentages, it turns out
that only about ten percent of the people in those forums chose
to be anonymous versus others.
So what was interesting is that although we noted that it was
like striking difference in the linguistic attributes that these
people used, it was probably only when
there was sort of
probably like a threshold that if it is extreme, beyond a certain
level, that's when people would take the effort to create a throw
away account and use it to post what they want to say on Reddit.
And finally, here we looked at the kind of social support that
these anonymous and non anonymous people got on these forums. So
karma is the difference of upwards and downwards. So as you will
see that anonymous people are getting lesser karma. So they're
getting lesser upwards than downwards. But however, if you
notice that in terms of comments, people are being more
anonymous, they are getting more comments. So in a sense that
they're getting more feet pack, whether or not it's critical from
the community of Reddit.
So here is a categorization of what is the different content of
the comments. And this is
we trained a topic model on these
four different kind of information, and these are the
our
proportion of different categories between anonymous and non
anonymous. So you'll notice that for the anonymous folks, a lot
of the support they're getting is it's more emotional than the
non anonymous one. They're getting less information and
prescriptive feedback, compared to the non anonymous ones. So
that's probably because when people are non anonymous, they are
like asking that, okay, I have depression. I'm taking so and so
medication. So some kind of like more objective support that the
one from the community and people are responding more to those
kind of information than the case with anonymous folks.
So I guess, you know, putting the two studies together, it gives
us a way to use social media of different types to understand
what happens when an unusual, unfortunate experiences happen in
people's lives. So it could be collective trauma that we saw in
the earlier example, or it could be some other kind of trauma,
personal or otherwise. And then log how people are using these
tools to maybe receive feedback from others and how the
interesting attributes of these websites are providing people
with mechanisms to engage in discourse with a broader community.
And also, the impact of those things on behavioral health of
people.
So that is going to be it.
Thank you for coming.
>> Eric Horvitz:
Any additional questions for reflections?
>>: So I thought that your point on the threshold between the
anonymous and non anonymous was interesting because if someone is
non anonymous and they're posting something, it almost seems like
they want people to acknowledge and they're kind of like trying
out for help in some sense. But the anonymous person, if they're
anonymous, it's more difficult to help them.
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
Yeah.
>>: And I'm thinking if you could
even if this is possible to
look at the complementary Facebook postings, because Facebook is
not anonymous. So when people post on Facebook, obviously,
they're asking for help or they're expecting that people would
help. And if you could kind of like connect these two and see
whether people are dwindling their presence on Facebook and
moving on to the more anonymous posting, whether that's something
that could help determine that, okay, this is where they kind of
>> Munmun De Choudhury: I see, yeah. That's kind of where the
change happens. That's very interesting point. I mean, I think
the one concern there would be that people usually don't talk
much about these kind of issues on Facebook. I mean, that's what
yeah, that's what we saw in our postpartum study. But the
interesting thing, although you technically cannot be anonymous
on Facebook, but you can create private groups. And that
actually happens, because at some point, I thought that I'd look
at depression specific pages on Facebook, and it turned out that
I cannot
I mean, when I go to them, I cannot, like, access
them because there is a moderator and someone has to approve me
to be part of that group.
>>: It's still not anonymous because you're selecting a group of
people that you want to share your feelings with.
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
Exactly, yeah.
>>: I wondered that, the sudden silence. And I think I remember
this from your postpartum studies too, that a sudden silence
might indicate that a person
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
>>:
Right, right, right.
they're shutting themselves off.
>> Munmun De Choudhury: Yeah, so even when we did the impact, we
found in the last study that we did on that, we found that
negative affect was not a good predictor, like we found for
Twitter. And then we went back to the mothers, we did some
interviews and checked back, you know, okay, why do you think
that was the case. They said that's because we wanted to portray
us to be as normal as possible and too why we were not expressing
any kind of emotional content.
So yeah, but definitely, it will be
I mean, if there were no
if
like, you know, Tim Burns always says that if this were no,
like, wild gardens, so if everything was open, I would have liked
to do looking at people's behavior across different social media
sites and because that would give a more complete picture. Yeah.
>>: Just a question, but there's a lot of work on PTSD and
[indiscernible] people.
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
>>:
Because that seems like also like
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
>>:
Yes.
Yeah, absolutely.
Very important.
>> Munmun De Choudhury: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I
well, now that
I'm in the academic world, I'm finding out from people that it's
one of the top things in DOD's list of things that I think
hopefully social media can enable is that people who are, say,
coming back from Afghanistan and stuff, because they are using
social media, like they're using Facebook even when they're
deployed. So, you know, if we can find out what people's
predisposition to some of these stress and anxiety things, it
will be super beneficial.
>>:
I think Mike was asking about prior work in that space.
>> Munmun De Choudhury: Oh, I see. Not using social media, but
in general, in psychology and stuff, there is some work there.
>>: I was just wondering if anybody es sort of looking at social
media
(Multiple people speaking.)
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
>>:
Identified service people.
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
>>
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I think
By location and by what they're saying and profiles.
>> Munmun De Choudhury: I have a lot of anecdotal evidence on
that, like, from friends whose significant others have gone, were
deployed and when they were back it was difficult. So yeah.
>>: The second study that you presented about the
[indiscernible], can you somehow
you might have selection
buttons for the people that tend to use
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
>>:
Absolutely.
somehow compensate for that?
>> Munmun De Choudhury: No, we did not, but that's kind of a
concern that runs in almost any social media study, because it is
after all someone is self selecting themselves to use social
media in general. I'm not even talking about being anonymous or
health concerns and stuff. And there might be a bias there in
some which people are more vulnerable to disclosing more about
themselves than others.
We haven't, but then at least, you know, a lot of our work in the
past have kind of looked at the baseline trends of people or
communities like what is their baseline and then see the changes
from there. So that kind of
that kind of relative change
gives us an idea of even if someone is super vulnerable to
disclosing a lot about themselves, if those people change in a
significant way, then it does probably say something important
about their behavioral change.
>>: I was wondering in the second study to what extent, like,
these kind of communities where people talk about committing
suicide and things like that, can also have the negative effect
on people who are part of those communities. So, for example,
you are exposed to all these potentially negative affect things
that are being talked about in this community in the sense you
call foreign to an extent to that.
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
researchers?
>>:
Hike you mean how it affects us as
No, the participants.
>> Munmun De Choudhury: Yeah, I mean, I actually don't know. I
would like to do some kind of interview study on that. I mean,
that's kind of on my list of things to do. Because, I mean, it
was
while I was very shocked to read about those postings, it
seemed that people responded to those postings in a very rational
way, and it's good and bad. I guess if everyone starts to panic
and being like, you know, my God what to do, then that's bad. So
people who are being very rational when they said, you know, I'm
going to do manage and stuff. They came up and said hey, this is
a hotline suicide 800 number. You should call them. They will
come out and help you. And they were like, you know, they were
even saying that hey, by the way, this is my Skype id. If you
feel that you have no one to talk to, I'm here. Feel free to
give me a call on Skype. So people were being very supportive.
And in a sense, they were being rational. That's how it should
be. If someone says they want to harm themselves, the best thing
you can do if you're not there, right then and there, you give
them a hotline number instead of panicking. But I would like to
know what kind of experience they had.
>>: A sense depending on where you ask for help and other people
provide help.
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
It sounds like that, sort of.
>>: Also thinking in relation to the first study where you have
people exposed to violence and over time you, get to this
desensitization. Like what's the effect over time of being
>> Munmun De Choudhury: Absolutely, yeah. And that's very smart
of you to spot that connection. It might also be that there are
all these kind of like consistent members of these communities.
They're seeing, like, five suicide posts every day. And in a
sense, they're desensitization to it.
>>: A complement to that is that these communities attract
helper types.
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
That's true.
>>: Who also hover and are attracted to helping and getting
stack numbers and things. That's their thing.
>>: [indiscernible].
someone
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
Because you cannot intervene in a case,
That's right.
>>:
[indiscernible].
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
Absolutely, yeah.
>>: We all know ethics goes when the culpability of access goes
low. If you assume we have universal access, it's easy to get
people to both afford and to pay for and to actually take the
initiative to go someplace and sit in a fancy clinical
environment that's a great ethical
>>: I find this debate silly because if someone, you know, it's
not as if you can either [indiscernible] in office or via Skype.
It's [indiscernible] but it's not this
>>: I can see it applying to like, you know, new, you know,
offsite assistance line versus coming in. No, I'm staying home.
It's cheaper for us.
>>: Are there things relating to contagion.
there's suicide, there are more suicides?
>>:
Like was when
[indiscernible].
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
Oh, is it?
>>: He's talking about the contagion of good.
there's contagion of
But I can imagine
>> Munmun De Choudhury: Yeah. I /PRER not to make any claims
about contagion unless I can actually manipulate data.
>>: There are stories of these clusters of like, you know,
teenage suicides in a school district because it gets to be the
cool thing to do.
>>:
[indiscernible].
>>: [indiscernible] paper is about, I think they sent it to
[indiscernible] and they showed actually causality of affect
traveling through Facebook.
>>:
This is Adam Kramer's study.
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
>>:
This was probably Adam Kramer.
He just presented it.
>>: It could be. So they seemed to show that the rain in
Seattle affects the mood of people in Seattle via Facebook.
>>: Yeah, they've been looking at like two degrees out. And
they're trying to make an assumption. Forgot to the correct for
the fact that there's a geo link in the weather across
just
kidding.
>>: Related, for example, I used to live with undergrads and
when they had a suicide at the university, they were, like, very
concerned being, like, very
they [indiscernible] to everyone
because they were afraid that
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
thing.
That other people would could the same
>>:
[indiscernible].
>>:
Among the grads themselves.
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
right?
>>:
I guess we can do a study in Cornell,
Cornell?
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
They have the highest suicide rate.
>>: I think that's actually a myth.
most
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
>>:
I think they just have the
Dangerous life style.
A pretty way to do it.
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
everybody knows about.
Because they have that cliff that
>>: We have an account for the [indiscernible]. It's really
lower there. It's normal, just famous because of the gorge?
>>:
I believe so.
Feel free to look it up.
>> Munmun De Choudhury: But we were very curious about, in the
first study, that's something we wanted to look at is are there
like
is desensitization a thing that is contagious. Or maybe
there isn't social influence aspect of it or maybe it's just
[indiscernible] that people who are friends with other people who
are like them in a certain way, they tend to be more predisposed
to be desensitized than others.
>>: [indiscernible] sort of permeates the whole culture, because
there's like a separate [indiscernible].
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
Right.
>>: And it seems to be, from what I know, very popular.
going through all kinds of cultural areas.
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
>>:
Channels, yeah.
Interesting to see if that wears off.
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
Hopefully soon, yeah.
So it's
>>: I have one last question. So in your affective domination
activation thing for the Mexico drug wars, do you look at any
specific words like fearful versus annoyed and how their usage
trended over time, like maybe in the beginning of this, everybody
was afraid like they were going to die and eventually they got
used to it and it's so common place?
>> Munmun De Choudhury: No, we didn't look at individual word,
but then we had like aggravated
we did take into account the
differences across different emotions, because we looked at the
measures of activation other time. So basically, like, you know,
they were less intense emotions early on and more intense
emotions later on. But yeah, we didn't particularly see which
particular high intensity ones were more
>>:
I would be interested to know.
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
>>:
Right.
A specific word that has growth other time.
>> Munmun De Choudhury: Right. That would be good to look at.
We have more examples of, like, actual tweets and stuff in the
paper. So feel free. It's online. So that gives a little more
context in what people are sharing.
>> Eric Horvitz:
Thanks a lot again.
>> Munmun De Choudhury:
Thank you.