Characterizing the role of bots' in polarized stance on social media.

There is a rising concern with social bots that imitate humans and manipulate opinions on social media. Current studies on assessing the overall effect of bots on social media users mainly focus on evaluating the diffusion of discussions on social networks by bots. Yet, these studies do not confirm the relationship between bots and users' stances. This study fills in the gap by analyzing if these bots are part of the signals that formulated social media users' stances towards controversial topics. We analyze users' online interactions that are predictive to their stances and identify the bots within these interactions. We applied our analysis on a dataset of more than 4000 Twitter users who expressed a stance on seven different topics. We analyzed those users' direct interactions and indirect exposures with more than 19 million accounts. We identify the bot accounts for supporting/against stances, and compare them to other types of accounts, such as the accounts of influential and famous users. Our analysis showed that bot interactions with users who had specific stances were minimal when compared to the influential accounts. Nevertheless, we found that the presence of bots was still connected to users' stances, especially in an indirect manner, as users are exposed to the content of the bots they follow, rather than by directly interacting with them by retweeting, mentioning, or replying.

Readability of written medicine information materials in Arabic language: expert and consumer evaluation.

BACKGROUND: Written Medicine Information (WMI) is one of the sources that patients use to obtain information concerning medicine. This paper aims to assess the readability of two types of WMIs in Arabic language based on vocabulary use and sentence structure using a panel of experts and consumers. METHODS: This is a descriptive study. Two different types of materials, including the online text from King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz Arabic Health Encyclopaedia (KAAHE) and medication leaflets submitted by the manufacturers to the Saudi Food and Drug Authority (SFDA) were evaluated. We selected a group of sentences from each WMI. The readability was assessed by experts (n = 5) and consumers (n = 5). The sentence readability of each measured using a specific criteria and rated as 1 = easy, 2 = intermediate, or 3 = difficult. RESULTS: A total of 4476 sentences (SFDA 2231; KAHEE 2245) extracted from websites or patient information leaflets on 50 medications and evaluated. The majority of the vocabulary and sentence structure was considered easy by both expert (SFDA: 68%; KAAHE: 76%) and consumer (SFDA: 76%; KAAHE: 84%) groups. The sentences with difficult or intermediate vocabulary and sentence structure are derived primarily from the precautions and side effects sections. CONCLUSIONS: The SFDA and KAAHE WMIs are easy to read and understand as judged by our study sample. However; there is room for improvement, especially in sections related to the side effects and precautions.