School of Humanities and Social Science Division of Social Science 232 Political Astroturfing Worldwide: How to Manipulate Public Opinion on Twitter Supervisor: KELLER Franziska / SOSC Student: MOON Kyoungin / QSA Course: UROP1100, Summer This project investigates the South Korean Embassies’ Twitter accounts and other related accounts in an attempt to trace any suspicious patterns that might indicate the presence of political astroturfing. Political astroturfing is often used by political power in an attempt to influence public opinion on social media by mimicking ordinary users. This report looks at when the embassy accounts were created and their activity status, what the accounts are talking about, and who they might be influencing to identify any suspicious patterns using the dataset provided by Twitter. All findings are analyzed through R studio and put into different charts and tables. State Visits and International Get-Togethers: Studying the Meetings of State Leaders Worldwide Supervisor: KELLER Franziska / SOSC Student: LI Jiting / MAEC QIAO Tianyi / GCS YEUNG Wing Ching Vinnci / IS Course: UROP1100, Fall UROP1100, Fall UROP2100, Fall When it comes to state visits, the media tend to sensationalize the influence and significance of themeeting, believing that state visits indicate turning points or major milestones in bilateral relations. Yet, little was known in terms of the “unspoken” rules behind each state visit, like who should make the visit and who should receive the visit, where should the visit take place, or what do we expect from each state meeting (Keller,2019). Thus, this project seeks to record and gather ground truth data that will help with the study of general social rules behind state meetings by utilizing data fromWikipedia, Nexis Uni and other mass media. We will also come up with primary assumptions and conclusions on this topic for future references. The Socioeconomic Impacts of Environmental Issues in Hong Kong Supervisor: LIU Tong / SOSC Student: LEUNG Ho Long / MAEC Course: UROP1100, Fall Pre-existing studies have not reached consent on the effects of public transport on the housing market (e.g., Mulley and Tsai, 2015; Zhang and Liu, 2015). Moreover, most of them only consider the direct effect of increasing convenience but not the indirect health risk caused by air pollution from public transport (e.g., Tian et al. 2017). This study aims to understand both the capitalization effect of increasing bus accessibility and the effect of air pollution created by buses. The project is in progress, and the cleaning of housing data is partly completed. With the previous bus stop data and air quality data, it is expected to combine all three in the future to estimate the willingness to pay for bus accessibility and minimizing health risks. Hedonic pricing and difference-in-differences will be performed to compare houses within a certain range and provide a well-round analysis of the benefits and costs of public transportation.
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