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In the era of rising populist sentiment, deep social and political polarisations, and a growing crisis of online harms, numerous scholars share concern about the impact of such uncivil populist forces on the health of liberal democracy. This article argues that we should first normatively distinguish between incivility and intolerance. We contend that the core problem of uncivil society is intolerance, not incivility. We then empirically analyse incivility and intolerance during the 2018 Irish abortion referendum and its discussions on Twitter by conducting a content analysis and qualitative textual analysis of 3,000 tweets posted between April and June 2018. The results show that despite selecting a highly emotive and polarised issue, incivility and intolerance do not dominate the Twittersphere. Furthermore, gender and political position of users were found to be associated with use of incivility and intolerance, which increased as the referendum approached. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Receiving a diagnosis that leads to severe disability in childhood can cause a traumatic experience with long-lasting emotional stress for patients and family members. In recent decades, emerging digital technologies have transformed how patients or caregivers of persons with disabilities manage their health conditions. As a result, information (eg, on treatment and resources) has become widely available to patients and their families. Parents and other caregivers can use digital platforms such as websites or social media to derive social support, usually from other patients and caregivers who share their lived experiences, challenges, and successes on these platforms. However, gaps remain in our understanding of platforms that are most frequently used or preferred among parents and caregivers of children with disabilities. In particular, it is not clear what factors primarily drive or discourage engagement with these digital tools and what the main ethical considerations are in relation to these tools.Objective: We aimed to (1) identify prominent digital platforms used by parents or caregivers of children with disabilities; (2) explore the theoretical contexts and reasons for digital platform use, as well as the experiences made with using these platforms reported in the included studies; and (3) identify any privacy and ethical concerns emerging in the available literature in relation to the use of these platforms.Methods: We conducted a scoping review of 5 academic databases of English-language articles published within the last 10 years for diseases with childhood onset disability and self-help or parent/caregiver-led digital platforms.Results: We identified 17 papers in which digital platforms used by parents of affected children predominantly included social media elements but also search engines, health-related apps, and medical websites. Information retrieval and social support were the main reasons for their utilization. Nearly all studies were exploratory and applied either quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods. The main ethical concerns for digital platform users included hampered access due to language barriers, privacy issues, and perceived suboptimal advice (eg, due to missing empathy of medical professionals). Older and non-college-educated individuals and ethnic minorities appeared less likely to access information online.Conclusions: This review showed that limited scientifically sound knowledge exists on digital platform use and needs in the context of disabling conditions in children, as the evidence consists mostly of exploratory studies. We could highlight that affected families seek information and support from digital platforms, as health care systems seem to be insufficient for satisfying knowledge and support needs through traditional channels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the uptake of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, there is now a vast amount of new user generated content on a daily basis, much of it in the form of short, informal free-form text. Businesses, institutions, governments and law enforcement organisations are now actively seeking ways to monitor and more generally analyse public response to various events, products and services. Our primary aim in this project was the development of an approach for capturing a wide and comprehensive range of emotions from sparse, text based messages in social-media, such as Twitter, to help monitor emotional responses to events. Prior work has focused mostly on negative / positive sentiment classification tasks, and although numerous approaches employ highly elaborate and effective techniques with some success, the sentiment or emotion granularity is generally limiting and arguably not always most appropriate for real-world problems. In this paper we employ an ontology engineering approach to the problem of fine-grained emotion detection in sparse messages. Messages are also processed using a custom NLP pipeline, which is appropriate for the sparse and informal nature of text encountered on micro-blogs. Our approach detects a range of eight high-level emotions; anger, confusion, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, shame and surprise. We report f-measures (recall and precision) and compare our approach to two related approaches from recent literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]