The Age of Social Sensing

TL;DR

The paper surveys the emerging field of social sensing, which uses social media data to infer real-world information, highlighting challenges and future research directions across multiple disciplines.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of social sensing, identifying key research challenges and proposing future avenues for interdisciplinary exploration.

Findings

Social media enables large-scale social sensing of the physical world.

Multiple disciplines are required to address challenges in social sensing.

Open research questions include data extraction, property characterization, and ethical concerns.

Abstract

Online social media, such as Twitter and Instagram, democratized information broadcast, allowing anyone to share information about themselves and their surroundings at an unprecedented scale. The large volume of information thus posted on these media offer a new lens into the physical world through the eyes of the social network. The exploitation of this lens to inspect aspects of world state has recently been termed social sensing. The power of manipulating reality via the use (or intentional misuse) of social media opened concerns with issues ranging from radicalization by terror propaganda to potential manipulation of elections in mature democracies. Many important challenges and open research questions arise in this emerging field that aims to better understand how information can be extracted from the medium and what properties characterize the extracted information and the world it represents. Addressing the above challenges requires multi-disciplinary research at the intersection of computer science and social sciences that combines cyber-physical computing, sociology, sensor networks, social networks, cognition, data mining, estimation theory, data fusion, information theory, linguistics, machine learning, behavioral economics, and possibly others. This paper surveys important directions in social sensing, identifies current research challenges, and outlines avenues for future research.