Can a Tweet Lead to Violence?
Ted Talk, Science Friday Interview, and New Publication Explore.
Can we reliably predict whether or not violence will occur based on social media posts? The team at the SAFE Lab, who seek to understand the mechanisms of violence and how to prevent and intervene in violence that occurs in neighborhoods and social media environments, explore this question. Following are three ways you can learn more about their timely work.
Ted Talk: Can a Tweet Lead to Violence?
William Frey, researcher in the SAFE Lab and incoming CSSW doctoral student, provides an excellent and engaging primer on how researchers can analyze tweets to detect possible violence: and how to avoid misinterpreting these communications in this process.
New Study: Responses to Grief Predict Aggressive Tweets Among Gang-Involved Chicago Youth
The Columbia School of Social Work shared an excellent overview of a new study from the SAFE Lab. An excerpt follows below with a link to the entire post.
Mounting evidence suggests a possible link between threats of violence on social media and real-world retaliations, fights, and shootings. In his research at the Columbia School of Social Work, Assistant Professor Desmond U. Patton has been working in collaboration with Columbia’s Data Science Institute to uncover possible links between social media communication, grief, trauma, and gang violence among youth in Chicago.
Dr. Patton and his research team recently identified two main themes in twitter communications among Chicago’s gang-involved youth: “loss” and “aggression”. They observed that responses to loss on twitter tend to precede aggressive posts.
Can We Predict Urban Gun Homicides?
Science Friday recently interviewed Dr. Desmond Patton, Director of the SAFE Lab, and Dr. Andrew Papachristos, a Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, about their work on predicting gun homicides.
- To learn more about SAFE Lab, visit https://safelab.socialwork.columbia.edu/,
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