From drug wars to 3-D silhouettes

12 hours ago Volumes of Twitter posts containing narco words.

When violence related to Mexico's drug war erupted in 2006, Andrs Monroy-Hernndez kept in close touch with friends and relatives in the north of the country, where he is from and where much of the violence was concentrated. He soon learned that the local news media were avoiding the topic for fear of reprisals and that citizens were turning to Twitter and other social media to share information and create their own alert networks.

As the years passed and the shootings, kidnappings, and assassinations continued, Monroy-Hernndeza researcher at Microsoft Research's FUSE Labs who specializes in social computingperceived a shift in the citizen reporting on social media.

"I started to notice how the events were still being reported, but in the same way people would complain about traffic," he says.

Panic, shock, and frustration seemed less evident, even as the death toll rose to at least 60,000 by 2012. He wondered if people were becoming desensitized to the violenceand he hoped that wasn't the case.

In 2012, Monroy-Hernndez reached out to his Microsoft Research colleague Munmun De Choudhury, now a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, whose expertise includes emotion analysis. Along with a third collaborator, Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine, they set out to analyze huge data sets from Twitter to determine whether desensitization was in fact happening.

Their study resulted in a paper that will be presented during the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2014) in Toronto, which opens April 26 and is organized by the Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI). It is one of 27 papers accepted for CHI 2014 authored or co-authored by researchers at Microsoft Researchand one of seven best-paper winners from Microsoft Research.

By analyzing and comparing Twitter activity from two periods, August 2010 and December 2012, in four major citiesMonterrey, Reynosa, Saltillo, and VeracruzMonroy-Hernndez and his colleagues found that despite consistent or increasing levels of violence, the Twitter posts exhibited distinct attributes of "affective desensitization," or emotional numbing, over time. These attributes included a lessening of negative emotion in posts that used "narco language"terms that have emerged to describe specific atrocities associated with the drug war and circumstances under which murder victims have been found.

The researchers hope their findings can contribute to theories about socio-psychological responses to crisis, and they see important implications for public health, as well as for the role of civic media during times of crisis. Not only Twitter but also Facebook and other social-media outlets might become important sources of insight into how communities respond to ongoing violence, and they could help determine what public-health interventions would best serve those communities.

Sensing Touch and Gesture

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From drug wars to 3-D silhouettes