Publications

We live life in the network. We check our e-mails regularly, make mobile phone calls from almost any location, swipe transit cards to use public transportation, and make purchases with credit cards. Our movements in public places may be captured by video cameras, and our medical records stored as digital files. We may post blog entries accessible to anyone, or maintain friendships through online social networks. Each of these transactions leaves digital traces that can be compiled into comprehensive pictures of both individual and group behavior, with the potential to transform our understanding of ourlives, organizations, and societies.

Donald Trump might have claimed recently that he won’t tweet anymore if he becomes president. But seven years of his tweets—and particularly the campaign frenzy of the past several months—nonetheless offer a one-of-a-kind window into Trump’s brain.We took the corpus of Trump tweets since the inception of his @realDonaldTrump account, and examined what’s distinctive about Trump’s Twitter behavior. After some filtering and data loss, this amounted to about 15,000 tweets. Some of our findings—including about some of Trump’s favorite and most distinctive words—appear in these graphics. But we wanted to parse the data further: Just how much attention has Trump received on Twitter as a candidate, we wondered? And what is linguistically distinctive about how he tweets and what he tweets about?

The internet has become a popular resource to learn about health and to investigate one's own health condition. However, given the large amount of inaccurate information online, people can easily become misinformed. Individuals have always obtained information from outside the formal health care system, so how has the internet changed people's engagement with health information? This review explores how individuals interact with health misinformation online, whether it be through search, user-generated content, or mobile apps. We discuss whether personal access to information is helping or hindering health outcomes and how the perceived trustworthiness of the institutions communicating health has changed over time. To conclude, we propose several constructive strategies for improving the online information ecosystem. Misinformation concerning health has particularly severe consequences with regard to people's quality of life and even their risk of mortality; therefore, understanding it within today's modern context is an extremely important task.