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“Hello, Fellow Villager!”: Perceptions and Impact of Displaying Users’ Locations on Weibo

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Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2023 (INTERACT 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14144))

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Abstract

In April 2022, Sina Weibo began to display users’ coarse location for the stated purpose of regulating their online community. However, this raised concerns about location privacy. Through sentiment analysis and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), we analysed the users’ attitudes and opinions on this topic across 20,162 related posts and comments. We labelled 300 users as either supportive, critical, or neutral towards the feature, and captured their posting behaviour two months prior and two months post the launch. Our analysis elicits three major themes in the public discussion: online community atmosphere, privacy issues, and equity in the application of the feature, and shows that most people expressed a negative attitude. We find a drop in activity by objectors during the first month after the launch of the feature before gradually resuming. This work provides a large-scale firsthand account of people’s attitudes and opinions towards online location privacy on social media platforms.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2022-global-overview-report.

  2. 2.

    https://open.weibo.com/wiki/API/en.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/Python3Spiders/WeiboSuperSpider.

  4. 4.

    https://github.com/fxsjy/jieba.

  5. 5.

    https://github.com/goto456/stopwords/blob/master/baidu_stopwords.txt.

  6. 6.

    https://github.com/isnowfy/snownlp.

  7. 7.

    https://github.com/bmabey/pyLDAvis.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

    Ying Ma, Qiushi Zhou, Jarrod Knibbe & Jorge Goncalves

  2. Department of Human Centred Computing, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

    Benjamin Tag

  3. School of Computer Science, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

    Zhanna Sarsenbayeva

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  1. Ying Ma
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  2. Qiushi Zhou
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  6. Jorge Goncalves
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Correspondence to Ying Ma .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of West London, London, UK

    José Abdelnour Nocera

  2. Reykjavik University, Reykjavik, Iceland

    Marta Kristín Lárusdóttir

  3. University of York, York, UK

    Helen Petrie

  4. University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Antonio Piccinno

  5. Université Côte d’Azur, Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

    Marco Winckler

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Ma, Y., Zhou, Q., Tag, B., Sarsenbayeva, Z., Knibbe, J., Goncalves, J. (2023). “Hello, Fellow Villager!”: Perceptions and Impact of Displaying Users’ Locations on Weibo. In: Abdelnour Nocera, J., Kristín Lárusdóttir, M., Petrie, H., Piccinno, A., Winckler, M. (eds) Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2023. INTERACT 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14144. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42286-7_29

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