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Young people exposed to social media posts by celebrities and influencers who endorse nicotine products are more susceptible to smoking or vaping, University of Queensland research has found. Dr Carmen Lim from UQ's National Centre for Youth Substance Use Research led a study which assessed the survey responses of more than 5,600 young people who didn't smoke or vape, and who used social media in the previous month.

An external study of Twitter in 2022 estimated that between a third and two thirds of accounts on the social media site were bots. And many of these automatons flooding social media are dispatched to sow political polarization, hate, misinformation, propaganda and scams. The ability to sift them out of the online crowds is vital for a safer, more humane (or at least more human) internet.

Do you find yourself doom-scrolling, or spending more time than you should consuming negative news on the internet and social media and want to stop? Well, there's now an app for that. Researchers from the University of Waterloo have created Mindful Scroll , a mobile app that helps users transition from doom-scrolling to adding mindfulness into their daily routines.

New research by our Psychology department has found that White Western women are less positive about their bodies and feel greater media pressure to be thin than Black Nigerian and Chinese women. The study looked at how age and culture impacts on women's positivity and pride about their bodies and the sociocultural pressures they experience.

Even though social media is free to use, research found many US university students would pay to quit it - if only they could beat their fear of missing out. Peter Martin Crawford School of Public Policy Social media is a problem for economists. They don't know how to value it. It has long been argued that it ought to be  in the national accounts  as part of gross domestic product.

Job candidates often seek any advantage to secure employment, and a new study investigates a less-than-typical source: retweets from researchers on social media. The University of Michigan study indicates that when prominent economists retweet job market papers-which are doctoral students' main academic work for job applications-with comments, it significantly boosts visibility and recognition for candidates.

Young Australians are being exposed to an alcohol advertisement on social media every 2 minutes and 43 seconds on average, according to University of Queensland research. PhD candidate Brienna Rutherford from UQ's National Centre for Youth Substance Use Research examined the social media accounts of 125 university students aged 17 to 25, and found they had been exposed to almost 800 alcohol advertisements.

According to the United Nations (UN) population projections, the population of Africa will continue to grow strongly in the course of this century, while on other continents population growth will decline in the near future. New research by Jeroen Smits from Radboud University and Lamar Crombach from ETH Zurich suggests that population growth in Africa might slow down faster than predicted by these projections.

Study: Motivating Experts to Contribute to Digital Public Goods: A Personalized Field Experiment on Wikipedia ( doi.org/10. Getting experts to contribute to open content, such as Wikipedia, is not an easy task as experts often have high demands on their time. But one way to increase expert contributions is to understand what motivates them to contribute, a University of Michigan study shows.

A higher proportion of Welsh journalists are considering leaving the profession compared to those from across the UK, new analysis from Cardiff University shows. The study by researchers at the Centre for the Creative Economy, reveals the scale of challenge ahead for the survival and integrity of public interest journalism in Wales.

Wikipedia is the largest platform for open and freely accessible knowledge online yet, in a new study, researchers have found that around 15% of the content is effectively invisible to readers browsing within Wikipedia. They have developed a new tool to help overcome this. With 60 million articles in more than 300 language versions, Wikipedia's available content grows continuously at a rate of around 200 thousand new articles each month.

Almost all'Irish politicians and most of their staff have experience some form of threat, harassment, or violence, according to a new UCD survey. A report by the UCD Centre for Digital Policy found some 94% of politicians and 72% of political staff encountered such abuse during the course of their work.

Study: Feeling misinformed' The role of perceived difficulty in evaluating information online in news avoidance and news fatigue doi.org/10.1080/1461670X. As people have more difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction in the United States, they are more likely to feel news fatigue and avoid news altogether, according to a University of Michigan study.

How big data and AI can help policymakers evaluate mobility projects Following the vehement protests against the Good Move plan, the much-discussed Brussels mobility plan that was implemented in several phases starting in 2019 and shortly thereafter was already discarded by a number of municipalities, scientists from the VUB Data Analytics Lab and the VUB Mobilise research group decided to find out to what extent that negative vibe matched reality.

Report provides up-close look at pro-democracy conservatives In contrast to those who reject the results of the 2020 election, nearly a third of Republicans accept the results, trust institutions, and appreciate diverse political perspectives Pro-democracy conservatives appreciate diverse political ideas, value journalism, and trust institutions including elections, according to a new report that defines this quiet but potentially powerful movement.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research used Facebook data to investigate the influence of cultural similarities on migration flows and found that cultural proximity plays as important a role in the choice of destination country as shared language and history. When people migrate, many factors play a role in their choice of destination: How well do you speak the new country's language?

Study: A Practical Significance Bias in Laypeople's Evaluation of Scientific Findings (DOI: 10. When media coverage doesn't include the numerical magnitude of a scientific study's effect, the risk of people having biases increases significantly, according to a new University of Michigan study. People may incorrectly assume that the findings are of greater importance and impact than they are without the numerical information from media outlets, researchers said.

Jaume Pla and Javier Esparcia, researchers from the University of Valencia (UV), have analysed rural depopulation in the Valencian press between 1996 and 2022, and conclude that this factor or job creation has been subordinated to the construction of parks wind farms, often without paying enough attention to environmental issues.

A new eLetter has called into question the conclusion of a widely reported study , funded by Meta, that suggested Facebook and Instagram algorithms are not major drivers of misinformation based on a claim that the platforms successfully filtered out untrustworthy news surrounding the 2020 election.

A study by María Dolores Bañón, professor at the University of Valencia (UV), concludes that, in the television treatment of information, private channels use the treatment of MENA more than public ones to refer to unaccompanied foreign minors.