Computational Communication Research - Current Issue

The introduction of Transformers, neural networks employing self-attention mechanisms, revolutionized Natural Language Processing, handling long-range dependencies and capturing context effectively. Models like BERT and GPT, trained on massive text data, are at the forefront of Large Language Models and have found widespread use in text classification. Despite their benchmark performance, real-world applications p Read More

During the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing a face mask became politicized in the United States, with politicians and reporters employing competing public safety and civil liberties frames in discussions of masking. In this research, we argue that political candidates’ decisions to speak about and depict mask-wearing in their political advertising were strategic, depending on both the candidate’s party and gender. We examine politi Read More

ammico (AI-based Media and Misinformation Content Analysis Tool) is a publicly available software package written in Python 3, whose purpose is the simultaneous evaluation of the text and graphical content of image files. After describing the software features, we provide an assessment of its performance using a multi-country, multi-language data set containing COVID-19 social media disinformation posts. We conclude by Read More

As media platforms continue to develop content moderation policies, alternative platforms have emerged as safe havens for deplatformed content. As these alternatives to major media platforms grow, the importance of understanding their role in the media ecosystem grows too. In this paper, we perform a longitudinal study of the content dynamics of one such alternative media platform, BitChute. BitChute is an alternative vid Read More

English is the international standard of social research, but scholars are increasingly conscious of their responsibility to meet the need for scholarly insight into communication processes globally. This tension is as true in computational methods as in any other area, with revolutionary advances in the tools for English language texts leaving most other languages far behind. In this paper, we aim to leverage those very advances to d Read More

Misinformation has to be uncovered before it can be used for research purposes. This is a resource intensive process, which is why fact-checks have been a popular data source. They have been used directly as proxy for misinformation and indirectly to identify its sources and analyze its content and spread. However, there is little research on the limitations of fact-checks as a data source. Are there patterns in their topics Read More

This paper introduces CooRTweet, an innovative R package designed for detecting and analyzing coordinated behavior. CooRTweet’s distinctiveness lies in its essential architecture, derived from a minimal definition of coordinated behavior that captures its core elements in an abstract way. This approach makes it possible for the tool to be applied to the widest range of cases, from mono-modal network analysis on a single social Read More

As smartphones become increasingly integral to daily life, their importance for understanding human behavior will only continue to grow. Recognizing the potential of objective data on smartphone usage and the challenges associated with raw Android event log data, this paper provides a foundational guide for extracting meaningful measures of smartphone usage from such data. We describe the characteristic Read More