Massive and diverse web data are increasingly vital for government disaster response, as demonstrated by the 2022 floods in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. This study examines how X (formerly Twitter) and public inquiry submissions provide insights into public behaviour during crises. We analyse more than 55,000 flood-related tweets and 1,450 submissions to identify behavioural patterns during extreme weather events. While social media posts are short and fragmented, inquiry submissions are detailed, multi-page documents offering structured insights. Our methodology integrates Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for topic modelling with Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance semantic understanding. LDA reveals distinct opinions and geographic patterns, while LLMs improve filtering by identifying flood-relevant tweets using public submissions as a reference. This Relevance Index method reduces noise and prioritizes actionable content, improving situ-ational awareness for emergency responders. By combining these complementary data streams, our approach introduces a novel AI-driven method to refine crisis-related social media content, improve real-time disaster response, and inform long-term resilience planning.

News media has been utilized as a political tool to stray from facts, presenting biased claims without evidence. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, politically biased news (PBN) has significantly undermined public trust in vaccines, despite strong medical evidence supporting their efficacy. In this paper, we analyze: (i) how inherent vaccine stances subtly influence individuals' selection of news sources and participation in social media discussions; and (ii) the impact of exposure to PBN on users' attitudes toward vaccines. In doing so, we first curate a comprehensive dataset that connects PBN with related social media discourse. Utilizing advanced deep learning and causal inference techniques, we reveal distinct user behaviors between social media groups with various vaccine stances. Moreover, we observe that individuals with moderate stances, particularly the vaccine-hesitant majority, are more vulnerable to the influence of PBN compared to those with extreme views. Our findings provide critical insights to foster this line of research.

Keeping'an ear to the ground' through social media to follow and join in conversations regarding the impact and potential of AI in radiology applications is increasing gaining new'followers'. In a study published in the Current Problems in Diagnostic Radiology, researchers present an overview of using Twitter to characterise public perspectives regarding AI and radiology. The report states that while there remain to be challenges, the discussions analysed were overwhelmingly positive toward the transformative impact of AI on radiology. In addition, the overall consensus showed perspectives were against the argument that AI may be replacing radiologists. The researchers suggest that radiologists should engage more in this online social media dialog.

Discourse on social media platforms is often plagued by acute polarization, with different camps promoting different perspectives on the issue at hand—compare, for example, the differences in the liberal and conservative discourse on the U.S. immigration debate. A large body of research has studied this phenomenon by focusing on the affiliation of groups and individuals. We propose a new finer-grained perspective: studying the impartiality of individual messages. While the notion of message impartiality is quite intuitive, the lack of an objective definition and of a way to measure it directly has largely obstructed scientific examination. In this work we operationalize message impartiality in terms of how discernible the affiliation of its author is, and introduce a methodology for quantifying it automatically. Unlike a supervised machine learning approach, our method can be used in the context of emerging events where impartiality labels are not immediately available. Our framework enables us to study the effects of (im)partiality on social media discussions at scale. We show that this phenomenon is highly consequential, with partial messages being twice more likely to spread than impartial ones, even after controlling for author and topic. By taking this fine-grained approach to polarization, we also provide new insights into the temporal evolution of online discussions centered around major political and sporting events.