Gangbangin on the [Face]Book: Understanding Online Interactions of Chicago Latina/o Gangs

Decision-making approaches in the antagonistic digital communication of the online communities users

The information space is an effective hybrid warfare tool on the web. This study investigated the decision-making process in the antagonistic digital communication of internet services users. Implementation of the proposed methods in this study minimized the negative impact of the spread of destructive content and actions of unfair competitors in the ecosystem of social internet services. The innovativeness of the suggested methods is the ability to make real-time decisions in a situation of antagonistic behavior of online users. The authors presented a model to secure user data, contributing to sustainable communicative interaction for its managers and users. This article presented approaches to decision-making by online community administrators under conditions of antagonistic behavior of the online services, which ensures the increase of efficiency of online communication. Timely and effective decision-making eliminated the negative impact of conflicts between communities and the spread of threats to users' information security. The algorithm of decision-making by users of stable internet services is suggested. This article contains examples of using the examined Wald and Savage criteria for making optimal decisions, confirmed by many experiments. The developed methods are tested on the online community on the social network Facebook.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13278-022-01021-4.

Community implications for gun violence prevention during co-occurring pandemics; a qualitative and computational analysis study

This study provides insight into New York City residents' perceptions about violence after the outbreak of Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) based on information from communities in New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) buildings. In this novel analysis, we used focus group and social media data to confirm or reject findings from qualitative interviews. We first used data from 69 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with low-income residents and community stakeholders to further explore how violence impacts New York City's low-income residents of color, as well as the role of city government in providing tangible support for violence prevention during co-occurring health (COVID-19) and social (anti-Black racism) pandemics. Residents described how COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement impacted safety in their communities while offering direct recommendations to improve safety. Residents also shared recommendations that indirectly improve community safety by addressing long term systemic issues. As the recruitment of interviewees was concluding, researchers facilitated two focus groups with 38 interviewees to discuss similar topics. In order to assess the degree to which the themes discovered in our qualitative interviews were shared by the broader community, we developed an integrative community data science study which leveraged natural language processing and computer vision techniques to study text and images on public social media data of 12 million tweets generated by residents. We joined computational methods with qualitative analysis through a social work lens and design justice principles to most accurately and holistically analyze the community perceptions of gun violence issues and potential prevention strategies. Findings indicate valuable community-based insights that elucidate how the co-occurring pandemics impact residents' experiences of gun violence and provide important implications for gun violence prevention in a digital era.

Social Media and the Variable Impact of Violence Reduction Interventions: Re-Examining Focused Deterrence in Philadelphia

Focused deterrence is a gang violence reduction strategy that relies on a unique mix of strong enforcement messages from law enforcement and judicial officials coupled with the promise of additional services. At the heart of the intervention is a coordinated effort to communicate the costs and consequences of gun violence to identified gang members during face-to-face meetings and additional community messaging. In Philadelphia, focused deterrence was implemented between 2013 and 2016, and although an impact evaluation showed a significant decrease in shootings in targeted areas relative to matched comparison neighborhoods, the effect on targeted gangs was not universal, with some exhibiting no change or an increase in gun-related activity. Here, we employ data on group-level social media usage and content to examine the correlations with gun violence. We find that several factors, including the nature of social media activity by the gang (e.g., extent of activity and who is engaging), are associated with increases in the average rate of gang-attributable shootings during the evaluation period, while content-specific variables (e.g., direct threats towards rivals and law enforcement) were not associated with increases in shootings. Implications for violence reduction policy, including the implementation of focused deterrence, are discussed.