The emergence of social media has led scholars to focus on its effects on mass behavior and protest. A key understudied question is what explains the variation in the adoption and use of social media by world leaders? Social media, and in particular Twitter and Facebook, have emerged as important, new channels for political communication. By the end of 2014, over 76% of world leaders had an act...

Looking at the dynamics of news content and social media content can help us understand the increasingly complex dynamics of the relationship between the media and the public surrounding noteworthy news events. Although topic models such as latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) are valuable tools, they are a poor fit for analyses in which some documents, like news articles, tend to incorporate mult...

Accurate event detection in social media is very challenging because user generated contents are extremely noisy and sparse in content. Event indicators are generally words or phrases that act as a trigger that help us understand the semantics of the context they occur in. We present a weakly supervised approach that relies on using a single strong event indicator phrase as a seed to acquire a ...

How does a state’s ethnic composition affect its propensity to engage in diversionary conflicts? Recent empirical work has examined the political conditions under which domestic unrest compels an embattled leader to initiate conflict abroad. We remain largely uncertain, however, of what social or demographic characteristics make states particularly prone to diversionary behavior. This paper tak...

Asia is one of the world’s most rapidly developing regions. Even so, the majority of Asian countries continue to experience slow-moderate rates of economic growth, high inflation, rapid population growth, and comparatively high levels of ethnic tension and civil unrest. Poverty, ill-health, and broad-based maldevelopment also continue to be major features of Asian social development. In general...

In Cognitive Linguistic Critical Discourse Studies (CL-CDS), metaphor is identified as a key index of ideology and an important device in the legitimation of social action. From this perspective, metaphor is a cognitive-semiotic operation, invoked by metaphorical expressions in discourse, in which a source frame is mobilised to provide a template for sense-making inside a target frame, leading ...

Hong Kong is undergoing two overlapping crises: social unrest over anti-government protests, and COVID-19. The media has linked these events in both objective subjective ways. While some liken the to COVID-19, others do opposite. This an intriguing real-world instance of source-target reversibility with interchangeable source target resulting apt variants. paper reports a survey study links bet...