Social media analysis with a focus on human rights on the internet

This report contains several analyses on social media datasets with a focus on internet technology and human rights. The main part of the report is about identifying trends in discussions on Reddit with a basis on human rights, and additionally it contains several deep dives into different focus areas, which constitute stand-alone smaller parts. The deep dives were chosen to highlight several of the ten key rights and principles of human rights online. They each study a specific case at the interface of human rights and internet technology.

The main aim of this report was to analyze discussions on several social media platforms to identify trends and topics relevant for the next generation internet. A secondary goal was to examine social issues that accompany internet technology. We have analyzed various data sources from the platforms Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook. They have a large number of users and encompass discussions on internet technology, societal issues, news, and everyday life.

In this report, we present our main analysis about detecting upcoming trends of internet technology. The analysis centers on discussions based on human values to incorporate societal aspects instead of a purely technological aspect. Additionally, we describe several deep dives into internet technology related topics and societal issues. The first deep dive is into NGI-related topics, where we identify discussed topics, investigate the emotions of those discussions, and map out the related topics. The second deep dive investigates the societal issue of gender inequality in relation to the discriminatory bias of algorithms. For the third deep dive, we look into the issue of disinformation on social media and the attached sentiments. The fourth deep dive is into privacy and whether topics determine privacy settings. Those deep dives give insight into both current discussions as well as societal issues accompanying internet technology.