Contribution to the Project: Georgiana Swan (Georgie) researched 4 Chan, Tik Tok, and Mastodon and led documentation on each of those three platforms. In doing so, Georgie examined the platform’s privacy policies, researched the basics of how posting works on the platforms, and found example posts that mentioned COVID-19.
Georgie was also heavily involved in conducting literature reviews for the project. Specifically, she read and provided summaries of articles pertaining to the rise of COVID-19 and its effects on mental health. Georgie also helped with the domestic violence literature review and read articles justifying why researchers should use Twitter. Further, she read articles pertaining to her assigned platforms (Tik Tok, 4 Chan, and Mastodon) to learn more about the user base of the platforms. She also summarized articles that covered the rise in scams and what the most common ones are.
Additional tasks related to data collection included contributing to a collection of information on scams, such as keywords used in social media that were associated with cybercrime. In the Fall of 2020, Georgie presented to our team a website that collected and labeled different types of scams (phishing, malware, etc.). Towards the close of the project, Georgie also assisted with removing sensitive data from the final COPE-ID database.
For the misinformation project, Georgie was the lead on the initial literature search pertaining to misinformation. Georgie was second author on the misinformation project, due to the number of contributions she has made to the project. Finally, for this project, Georgie coded 1,100 posts from the different platforms, and presented the research work at the Undergraduate Research Symposium.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5385-9201