What you do in your garden to help pollinators work

Peer-Reviewed Publication

LUND UNIVERSITY

Have you made adjustments to your garden to make it more welcoming for pollinators? If so, you have probably made a valuable contribution, according to a new study from Lund University. The researchers evaluated the national ‘Operation: Save the Bees’ campaign, and their results indicate that what private individuals do in their gardens really can make a positive difference.

The fact that pollinating insects are crucial for the functioning of ecosystems and food supply is well known. However, many pollinating species are endangered or in decline.

In 2018, The Swedish Society for Nature Conservation launched a campaign to save bees and other pollinators, aiming to get the public involved by creating more favorable environments in private gardens. The actions that were encouraged were to create a meadow, plant flowers or set up a bee hotel. Around 11,000 Swedes responded to the call, and now researchers from Lund University have evaluated the measures.

“We wanted to investigate measures that the public themselves chose to implement in their garden, and how these can be the most efficient”, says Anna Persson, researcher at Lund University and one of the people behind the study.

Older and species-rich environments best

The result show that the greatest positive effect on the number of pollinating insects was if you had a meadow with a higher number of flowering species in your garden. As for flower plantings, it was favorable if they were older and also covered a larger area. Bee hotels, in turn, were more often inhabited if they were located in flower-rich gardens, if they were older, and if the nest holes were a maximum of one centimeter in diameter.

Anna Persson believes the study is useful when giving the right instructions to those who want to make an effort for pollinators on their own.

“For example, we can show that it will pay off to create large and species-rich meadows and flower plantings, and that it is important not to give up after a few years, because the measures improve over time. This should be emphasized in future campaigns”, she says.

She also hopes that the results can inspire more people to adapt their own green space so that it becomes more favorable for insects. Gardens often cover about thirty percent of the land area in cities and towns, so garden owners as a group have the potential to contribute to urban biodiversity to a relatively high extent.

It is important to invest in the right measures

“However, the right measures must be taken. Our results can be used when giving advice on what actually makes a difference”, says Anna Persson.

The study was carried out through so-called citizen science, where private individuals reported what measures they took in their gardens, and how many insects they saw. 3,758 people responded to the researchers' survey.

A third of Sweden's bee species are currently red-listed, which means they are endangered.

“The situation for bees and other pollinators shows that measures to help them are important. It's great that the campaign has attracted so much attention, and that citizen science can continue to contribute to new knowledge”, says Karin Lexén, Secretary General of The Swedish Society for Nature Conservation.

Citizen research and uncertainty

Since the researchers collected the data via peoples’ own estimates, there is a great deal of uncertainty in each individual data point, says Anna Persson, but adds that one can still be confident in the results given that so many responses were received.

To verify how well the rough estimate of the number of pollinators worked, the researchers also asked the participants to count the number of flower-visiting insects during ten minutes on a sunny day in July. Just over 350 responses were received, and the results were well in line with the estimated quantities.

“Our study could be affected by so-called "expectation bias". This means that people who have taken measures and created more species-rich gardens also expect to see more insects, and thus risk reporting too high a number”, concludes Anna Persson.

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JOURNAL

Frontiers in Sustainable Cities

DOI

10.3389/frsc.2022.1099100 

ARTICLE TITLE

Citizen science initiatives increase pollinator activity in private gardens and green spaces

Fear of public places is common in adults with epilepsy

Peer-Reviewed Publication

ATRIUM HEALTH WAKE FOREST BAPTIST

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – Jan. 26, 2023 – About 5.1 million people in the U.S. have a history of epilepsy, which causes repeated seizures. According to the Epilepsy Foundation, epilepsy is the fourth most common neurological disorder. While current research has shown an increase in anxiety and depression among people with epilepsy, little is known about this population and agoraphobia, an anxiety disorder that involves the fear of being in a public place or in a situation that might cause panic or embarrassment.

However, a recent study from Heidi Munger Clary, M.D., M.P.H., associate professor of neurology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, shows that phobic and agoraphobic symptoms are common and associated with poor quality of life in people with epilepsy.

The study appears online in Epilepsy Research.

“We know that agoraphobia can lead to delays in patient care because of a reluctance to go out in public, which includes appointments with health care providers,” said Munger Clary, the study’s principal investigator. “So, this is an area that needs more attention in clinical practice.”

In the study, researchers conducted a cross-sectional analysis of baseline clinical data from a neuropsychology registry cohort study. Researchers analyzed a diverse sample of 420 adults, ages 18 to 75, with epilepsy who underwent neuropsychological evaluation over a 14-year period at Columbia University Medical Center in New York.

“More than one-third of the participants reported significant phobic/agoraphobic symptoms,” Munger Clary said. “We also found that phobic/agoraphobic symptoms, along with depression symptoms, were independently associated with poor quality of life, but generalized anxiety symptoms were not.”

According to Munger Clary, because phobic/agoraphobic symptoms are not routinely assessed by clinicians, the findings may suggest a need for future studies to develop more comprehensive screeners for psychiatric comorbidity in epilepsy.

“Symptoms of agoraphobia do not fully overlap with generalized anxiety or depression symptoms that are often screened in routine practice,” Munger Clary said. “Providers might want to consider more robust symptom screening methods to identify and better assist these patients. This may be important to improve health equity, given other key study findings that show those with lower education and non-white race/ethnicity had increased odds of significant phobic/agoraphobic symptoms.”

This work was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health under grants R01 NS035140, KM1 CA156709, UL1 TR001420 and 5KL2TR001421-04.

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JOURNAL

Epilepsy Research

DOI

10.1016/j.eplepsyres.2023.107092 

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Afraid to go out: Poor quality of life with phobic anxiety in a large cross-sectional adult epilepsy center sample

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

25-Jan-2023

Deciphering the inner workings of a bacterium

Holistic understanding of metabolism allows prediction of growth of a key environmental microbe

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF OLDENBURG

 

IMAGE: A ROBOT PUNCHES OUT PINHEAD-SIZED PIECES FROM A GEL LAYER. THE NARROW BLUE BANDS CONTAIN PROTEINS FROM A BACTERIAL CULTURE. SUBSEQUENTLY, THE PROTEINS CONTAINED IN THE TINY GEL PIECES WILL BE SORTED IN GREATER DETAIL. view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF OLDENBURG/MOHSSEN ASSANIMOGHADDAM

A team led by University of Oldenburg microbiologist Prof. Dr. Ralf Rabus and his PhD student Patrick Becker has gained deep insights into the cellular mechanisms of a common environmental bacterium. The researchers examined the entire metabolic network of the bacterial strain Aromatoleum aromaticum EbN1T and used the results to develop a metabolic model with which they can predict the growth of these microbes under diverse environmental conditions.

As the researchers report in the science journal mSystems, their analysis revealed certain unexpected mechanisms that apparently enable these bacteria to adapt to rapidly changing environmental conditions. The results of the study are important for ecosystems research, a field where the Aromatoleum strain, as a representative of a key group of environmental bacteria, can serve as a model organism, and could also be of interest in the remediation of contaminated sites and for biotechnological applications.

The studied bacterial strain specialises in the utilisation of organic substances that are difficult to break down and is generally found in soil and in aquatic sediments. The microbes thrive in a variety of conditions including oxygen, low-oxygen and oxygen-free layers, and are also extremely versatile in terms of nutrient intake. They metabolise more than 40 different organic compounds including highly stable, naturally occurring substances such as components of lignin, the main structural material found in wood, and long-lived pollutants and components of petroleum.

A microbe with special abilities

In particular, substances with a benzene ring composed of six carbon atoms, known as aromatic compounds, can be biodegraded by these microbes – with or without the aid of oxygen. Due to these abilities, Aromatoleum plays an important environmental role in the complete degradation of organic compounds in soil and sediments to carbon dioxide – a process which is also useful in biological soil remediation.

The aim of the current study was to gain a holistic understanding of the functioning of this unicellular organism. To this end, the researchers cultivated the microbes under both oxic and anoxic conditions – i.e. with and without oxygen – using five different nutrient substrates. For each of these ten different growth conditions, they grew 25 cultures and then examined the various samples using molecular biology methods (technical term: multi-omics) which enable simultaneous analysis of all the transcribed genes in a cell, all the proteins produced and all its metabolic products.

Systems biology approach

"With this systems biology approach, you gain a deep understanding of all the inner workings of an organism," explains Rabus, who heads the General and Molecular Microbiology research group at the University of Oldenburg's Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment (ICBM). "You break down the bacterium into its individual components and then you can put them back together – in a model that predicts how fast a culture will grow and how much biomass it will produce."

Through their meticulous work, the researchers obtained a comprehensive understanding of the metabolic reactions of this bacterial strain. They found that around 200 genes are involved in the degradation processes and determined which enzymes break down the substances added as nutrients and via which intermediates the various nutrients are decomposed. The scientists incorporated their findings about the metabolic network into a growth model, and demonstrated that the model predictions largely corresponded to the measured data.

"We can now describe the organism with a level of precision that has so far only been possible with very few other bacteria," says Rabus. This holistic view of the bacteria's cellular inner workings forms the basis for a better understanding of the interactions between the analysed strain (and related bacteria) and their biotic and abiotic environment, he adds, and can also help scientists to better predict the activity of these unicellular organisms in polluted soils and thus, for example, determine the optimal conditions for the remediation of a contaminated site.

A surprising waste of energy

By combining different methods, the team was able to uncover unexpected mechanisms in the metabolism of these bacteria. Much to the researchers' surprise, it emerged that the microbe produces several enzymes which they cannot use under the given growth conditions – which at first glance would seem to be a superfluous expenditure of energy. "Usually the bacterial cells detect whether oxygen is present in their environment and then, via specific mechanisms, activate only the nutrient-specific metabolic pathway with the corresponding enzymes," Rabus explains.

But with some substrates, the microbe produced all the enzymes for aerobic and anaerobic degradation pathways regardless of oxygen levels – even though some of these enzymes were entirely superfluous. Rabus suspects that this apparent waste is in fact a strategy for surviving in an unstable environment: "Even if oxygen levels suddenly fluctuate – which is often the case in natural environments – Aromatoleum remains flexible and can utilise this nutrient and produce energy as required," the microbiologist explains, adding that so far, no other bacteria are known to use such a mechanism.

The study was conducted by a large interdisciplinary team which included researchers from the University of Oldenburg as well as scientists from a team led by Prof. Dr Dietmar Schomburg at the Technische Universität Braunschweig and a team led by PD Dr Meina Neumann-Schaal at the Leibniz Institute DSMZ in Braunschweig. The lead authors were Patrick Becker and Dr Daniel Wünsch from the University of Oldenburg and Dr Sarah Kirstein from the TU Braunschweig.

The bacterium Aromatoleum aromaticum EbN1T (outlined in black, at the bottom) interacts with the biotic and abiotic environment in many ways: anthropogenic input, the activity of other microorganisms and processes in nature generate different organic substances (different colored dots), which the bacterium uses as food. At the same time, these substances are also utilized by other microorganisms (food competition). The metabolic network within the bacterial cell converts and degrades the substances via different pathways (left). The cell in turn produces building materials such as DNA, proteins, sugar compounds or lipids (right), which it needs for growth. Depending on environmental conditions, the cell obtains energy with the help of oxygen or nitrate (NO3-) - shown on the far left of the image.

CREDIT

Ralf Rabus and Patrick Becker/University of OldenburgJOURNAL

mSystems

DOI

10.1128/msystems.00685-22 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Cells

ARTICLE TITLE

Systems Biology of Aromatic Compound Catabolism in Facultative Anaerobic Aromatoleum aromaticum EbN1T

Health impact of chemicals in plastics is handed down two generations

UC Riverside mouse study finds paternal exposure to phthalates increases risk of metabolic diseases in progeny

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - RIVERSIDE

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- Fathers exposed to chemicals in plastics can affect the metabolic health of their offspring for two generations, a University of California, Riverside, mouse study reports.

Plastics, which are now ubiquitous, contain endocrine disrupting chemicals, or EDCs, that have been linked to increased risk of many chronic diseases; parental exposure to EDCs, for example, has been shown to cause metabolic disorders, including obesity and diabetes, in the offspring.

Most studies have focused on the impact of maternal EDC exposure on the offspring’s health. The current study, published in the journal Environment International, focused on the effects of paternal EDC exposure.

Led by Changcheng Zhou, a professor of biomedical sciences in the School of Medicine, the researchers investigated the impact of paternal exposure to a phthalate called dicyclohexyl phthalate, or DCHP, on the metabolic health of first generation (F1) and second generation (F2) offspring in mice. Phthalates are chemicals used to make plastics more durable.

The researchers found that paternal DCHP exposure for four weeks led to high insulin resistance and impaired insulin signaling in F1 offspring. The same effect, but weaker, was seen in F2 offspring.

“We found paternal exposure to endocrine disrupting phthalates may have intergenerational and transgenerational adverse effects on the metabolic health of their offspring,” Zhou said. “To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to demonstrate this.”

In the case of paternal exposure in the study, intergenerational effects are changes that occur due to direct exposure to a stressor, such as exposure to DCHP of fathers (F0 generation) and his developing sperm (F1 generation). Transgenerational effects are changes passed down to offspring that are not directly exposed to the stressor (for example, F2 generation).

Zhou’s team focused on sperm, specifically, its small-RNA molecules that are responsible for passing information down generations. The researchers used “PANDORA-seq method,” an innovative method that showed DCHP exposure can lead to small-RNA changes in sperm. These changes are undetected by traditional RNA-sequencing methods, which lack the comprehensive overview of the small-RNA profile that PANDORA-seq provides. 

The study used only F1 males to breed with unexposed female mice to generate F2 offspring. The team found that paternal DCHP exposure induced metabolic disorders, such as impaired glucose tolerance, in both male and female F1 offspring, but these disorders were seen only in female F2 offspring. The study did not examine F3 offspring.

“This suggests that paternal DCHP exposure can lead to sex-specific transgenerational effects on the metabolic health of their progenies,” Zhou said. “At this time, we do not know why the disorders are not seen in male F2 offspring.”

Zhou stressed that the impact of exposure to DCHP on human health is not well understood, even though DCHP is widely used in a variety of plastic products and has been detected in food, water, and indoor particulate matter. DCHP has also been found in human urinary and blood samples. Indeed, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently designated DCHP as one of 20 high-priority substances for risk evaluation.

“It’s best to minimize our use of plastic products,” Zhou said. “This can also help reduce plastic pollution, one of our most pressing environmental issues.”

Zhou, whose earlier mouse study showed exposure to DCHP leads to increased plasma cholesterol levels, was joined in the current study by Jingwei Liu, Junchao Shi, Rebecca Hernandez, Xiuchun Li, Pranav Konchadi, Yuma Miyake, and Qi Chen of UCR; and Tong Zhou of University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine.

The study was partially supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and American Heart Association. Hernandez was supported by a National Institutes of Health training grant and an American Heart Association predoctoral fellowship.

The title of the paper is “Paternal phthalate exposure-elicited offspring metabolic disorders are associated with altered sperm small RNAs in mice.”

The University of California, Riverside is a doctoral research university, a living laboratory for groundbreaking exploration of issues critical to Inland Southern California, the state and communities around the world. Reflecting California's diverse culture, UCR's enrollment is more than 26,000 students. The campus opened a medical school in 2013 and has reached the heart of the Coachella Valley by way of the UCR Palm Desert Center. The campus has an annual impact of more than $2.7 billion on the U.S. economy. To learn more, visit www.ucr.edu.

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JOURNAL

Environment International

DOI

10.1016/j.envint.2023.107769 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Paternal phthalate exposure-elicited offspring metabolic disorders are associated with altered sperm small RNAs in mice

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

23-Jan-2023

EU consumers ‘export’ environment damage to Eastern neighbours

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM

European Union (EU) consumers are ‘exporting’ negative environmental impacts to their Eastern European neighbours, whilst keeping the bulk of economic benefits linked to consuming goods and services, a new study reveals.

Although the environmental impacts of EU consumption are felt around the world, countries in Eastern Europe have experienced the highest environmental pressures and impacts associated with EU citizens’ consumption.

Large shares of 10 major environmental pressures and impacts are ‘outsourced’ to countries and regions outside the EU while more than 85% of the economic benefits remain within member countries – albeit with uneven distribution of costs and benefits within the EU.

Publishing their findings today in Nature Sustainability, an international group of researchers studied the environmental indicators between 1995 and 2019.

These indicators included greenhouse gas emissions, material consumption, land use, consumption of surface and ground water, particulate matter formation, photochemical oxidation and biodiversity loss due to land coverage, as well as freshwater, marine and terrestrial ecotoxicity.

Researchers found that seven analysed pressures and impacts – ecotoxicity indicators, greenhouse gas emissions, particulate matter formation, photochemical oxidation and material consumption – increased notably outside the EU, while decreasing within the bloc.

Researchers at the Universities of Birmingham (UK), Groningen (NL) and Maryland (US), as well as Chinese Academy of Sciences, also also analysed value added by consumption of goods and services within the current 27 EU member countries to economies between 1995 and 2019..

Corresponding author Yuli Shan, associate Professor in Sustainable Transitions at the University of Birmingham, commented: “For the sake of our planet, environmental pressures and impacts from EU consumption need to decrease substantially – reducing the export of environmental damage beyond the borders of the wealthy EU states to poorer regions.

“The benefits of EU consumption are greater for most member countries than those outside the Union, whilst inducing higher environmental pressures and impacts for the EU’s eastern neighbours such as Albania, Montenegro, Serbia, Ukraine and Moldova.”

Eastern Europe consistently ranked as the region receiving the lowest share of economic value added compared to environmental pressures and impacts associated with EU consumption.

Pressures and impacts induced by EU consumption dropped in most of its member states - for the Netherlands and Sweden, indicators in all ten categories dropped from 1995 to 2019. Austria, Czechia, Italy, Poland, Romania and Slovenia all saw decreases in nine of ten analysed environmental pressures and impacts.

In contrast, all analysed impacts and pressures associated with EU consumption increased in Brazil, China, India, Japan, as well as in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

First author Benedikt Bruckner, from the University of Groningen, commented: “As many super-affluent consumers contributing disproportionally to global environmental damage and resource use live in the EU, we must focus mitigation efforts on overconsumption.” 

The other corresponding author Klaus Hubacek, Professor at the University of Groningen, said: “We can reduce environmental pressures and impacts associated with EU over-consumption in a number of ways, including changing how people travel or their dietary choices, and creating new EU trade policies that lower environmental pressures and impacts associated with goods and services.”

ENDS

 

For more information, interviews or an embargoed copy of the paper please contact Tony Moran, International Communications Manager, on +44 (0)782 783 2312 or t.moran@bham.ac.uk. For out-of-hours enquiries, please call +44 (0) 7789 921 165.

Notes for editors

• The University of Birmingham is ranked amongst the world’s top 100 institutions, its work brings people from across the world to Birmingham, including researchers and teachers and more than 6,500 international students from over 150 countries
• ‘Ecologically unequal exchanges driven by EU consumption’ - Benedikt Bruckner, Yuli Shan, Christina Prell, Yannan Zhou, Honglin Zhong, Kuishuang Feng and Klaus Hubacek is published in Nature Sustainability.

Greenpeace Germany provided support with the initial data analysis, modelling and discussions as part of the project ‘Outsourced Environmental Degradation of the EU’. The research was also supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Shandong Natural Science Foundation of, and the Major Program of the National Social Science Foundation of China.

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JOURNAL

Nature Sustainability

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Ecologically unequal exchanges driven by EU consumption

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

26-Jan-2023

Benefits of big city life – only for the elite

Urban scaling laws arise from within-city inequalities

Peer-Reviewed Publication

LINKÖPING UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: MARC KEUSCHNIGG, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AT THE INSTITUTE FOR ANALYTICAL SOCIOLOGY, LINKÖPING UNIVERSITY AND PROFESSOR AT THE INSTITUTE OF SOCIOLOGY, LEIPZIG UNIVERSITY. view more 

CREDIT: KEUSCHNIGG

Urban inequality in Europe and the United States is so severe that urban elites claim most of the benefits from the agglomeration effects that big cities provide, while large parts of urban populations get little to nothing. In a study published in Nature Human Behaviour, researchers at Linköping University show that the higher-than-expected outputs of larger cities critically depend on the extreme outcomes of the successful few.

In recent years, researchers from across disciplines have identified striking and seemingly universal relationships between the size of cities and their socioeconomic activity. Cities create more interconnectivity, wealth, and inventions per resident as they grow larger. However, what may be true for city populations on average, may not hold for the individual resident.  

“The higher-than-expected economic outputs of larger cities critically depend on the extreme outcomes of the successful few. Ignoring this dependency, policy makers risk overestimating the stability of urban growth, particularly in the light of the high spatial mobility among urban elites and their movement to where the money is“, says Marc Keuschnigg, associate professor at the Institute for Analytical Sociology at Linköping University and professor at the Institute of Sociology at Leipzig University.

In a study published in Nature Human Behaviour, the researchers analyze geocoded micro-data on social interactions and economic output in Sweden, Russia, and the United States. It shows that inequality is rampant in earnings and innovation, as well as in measures of urban interconnectivity.

An individual’s productivity depends on the local social environments in which they find themselves in. Because of the greater diversity in larger cities, skilled and specialized people are more likely to find others whose skills are complementary to their own. This allows for higher levels of productivity and greater learning opportunities in larger cities. 

But, not everyone can access the productive social environments that larger cities provide. Different returns from context accumulate over time which gives rise to substantial inequality.

The researchers traced 1.4 million Swedish wage earners over time and find that those who were initially successful in large cities flourished to a greater extent than the successful in smaller cities. By contrast, the typical individuals in both smaller and larger cities experienced almost identical wage trajectories. 

Consequently, the initially successful individuals in the bigger cities increasingly distanced themselves from both the typical individual in their own city, creating inequality within the big cities, and the most successful individuals in smaller cities, creating inequality between cities. 

The study also finds that top earners are more likely to leave smaller city than larger ones, and that these overperformers tend overwhelmingly to move to the largest cities. The disproportionate out-migration of the most successful individuals from smaller cities results in a reinforcement process that takes away many of the most promising people in less populous regions while adding them to larger cities. 

The biggest cities are buzzing because they also host the most innovative, sociable, and skilled people. These outliers add disproportionately to city outputs---a “rich get richer” process that brings cumulative advantage to the biggest cities.

From a policy perspective, the study considers the sustainability of city life against the backdrop of rising urban inequality. 

“Urban science has largely focused on city averages. The established approach just looked at one datapoint per city, for example average income. With their focus on averages, prior studies overlooked the stark inequalities that exist within cities when making predictions about how urban growth affects the life experiences of city dwellers”, says Marc Keuschnigg.

With respect to urban inequality, the study draws attention to the partial exclusion of most city dwellers from the socioeconomic benefits of growing cities. Their lifestyle, different than among the urban elite, benefits less from geographical location. When accounting for the cost of living in larger cities, many big-city dwellers will in fact be worse off as compared to similar people living in smaller places. 

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JOURNAL

Nature Human Behaviour

DOI

10.1038/s41562-022-01509-1 

ARTICLE TITLE

Urban scaling laws arise from within-city inequalities

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

26-Jan-2023

23 years of WHO Disease Outbreak News reports reveal how global threats posed by disease outbreaks have shifted over time

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

 

IMAGE: THE DISTRIBUTION OF OUTBREAKS THROUGH TIME. (TOP) NUMBER OF REPORTS PER YEAR, BROKEN DOWN TO HIGHLIGHT THE TOP FOUR DISEASES, WHICH ARE REPORTED SUBSTANTIALLY MORE OFTEN THAN ALL OTHERS (SEE TABLE 1). (BOTTOM) THE PROPORTION OF TOTAL REPORTS OF A DISEASE, ACROSS YEARS, THAT OCCUR IN A GIVEN YEAR, FOR THE TOP 25 REPORTED DISEASES IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER. view more 

CREDIT: CARLSON ET AL., 2023, PLOS GLOBAL PUBLIC HEALTH, CC-BY 4.0 (HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/4.0/)

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Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/globalpublichealth/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgph.0001083

Article Title: The world health organization’s disease outbreak news: A retrospective database

Author Countries: United Kingdom, USA

Funding: This work was funded by the Open Philanthropy Project to RK. CJC and ALP were additionally supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York (Grant G-21-58414). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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JOURNAL

PLOS Global Public Health

DOI

10.1371/journal.pgph.0001083 

ARTICLE TITLE

The world health organization’s disease outbreak news: A retrospective database

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

25-Jan-2023

COI STATEMENT

Tracking online hate speech that follows real-world events

Some spikes in hate speech target groups that appear uninvolved in triggering events

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

 

IMAGE: LEVELS ARE NORMALIZED TO 100 A FEW DAYS BEFORE THE MURDER. ONLINE RACIST HATE SPEECH INCREASED BY 250% IN THE DAYS AFTER MURDER AND REMAINED ELEVATED WELL AFTER THESE EVENTS. OTHER TYPES OF ONLINE HATE SPEECH, INCLUDING ANTI-LGBT, ANTI-ETHNIC, GENDER-RELATED, AND ANTI-SEMITISM ALL INCREASED BY ABOUT 50% OR MORE DURING THESE EVENTS. view more 

CREDIT: LUPU ET AL., CC-BY 4.0 (HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/4.0/)

A machine-learning analysis has revealed patterns in online hate speech that suggest complex—and sometimes counterintuitive—links between real-world events and different types of hate speech. Yonatan Lupu of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on January 25.

Prior research has uncovered key insights into hate speech posted publicly by users of online communities. Real-world events can trigger increases in online hate speech, and spikes in online hate speech have been linked to spikes in real-world violent hate crimes. However, most earlier studies have focused on a limited number of communities from moderated platforms that have policies against hate speech.

Lupu and colleagues combined manual methods with a computational strategy known as supervised machine learning to analyze seven kinds of online hate speech in 59 million posts published between June 2019 and December 2020 by users of 1,150 online hate communities. Some communities were on the moderated platforms Facebook, Instagram, or VKontakte, and others on the less-moderated platforms Gab, Telegram, and 4Chan.

This analysis revealed spikes in online hate speech rates that appeared associated with certain real-world events. For instance, after a crisis involving Syrian refugees, anti-immigration hate speech spiked significantly.

Following the November 2020 U.S. election, more sustained waves of increased online hate speech occurred. For example, there was an increase in the use of anti-LGBTQ slurs to describe various political targets, and Vice President Kamala Harris was a prominent target of increased gender-related hate speech.

Within the study period, the murder of George Floyd and subsequent protests were associated with the biggest spike in hate speech rates, including racially-based hate speech. However, other types of hate speech also spiked significantly, including hate speech targeting gender identity and sexual orientation—a topic with little intuitive connection to the murder and protests.

While the research cannot provide causal conclusions, the findings suggest a complex relationship between triggering events and online hate speech, with potential implications for strategies to mitigate such speech. The authors call for additional research to further examine this relationship, especially given users’ tendency to migrate to unmoderated communities.

The authors add: “Hate speech continues to be a persistent and pervasive problem across the social media landscape, and can rise in dramatic and sometimes unexpected ways following offline events.”

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In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS ONE: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0278511

Citation: Lupu Y, Sear R, Velásquez N, Leahy R, Restrepo NJ, Goldberg B, et al. (2023) Offline events and online hate. PLoS ONE 18(1): e0278511. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278511

Author Countries: USA

Funding: YL and NFJ received funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (FA9550-20-1-0382 and FA9550-20-1-0383) and National Science Foundation (SES-2030694). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0278511 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Offline events and online hate

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

25-Jan-2023