Introduction

Social media and networking platforms have billions of active users and leverage significant impacts on society. New types of social media and networking platforms or new features of existing platforms continue to be developed to meet users’ demands. With an increasingly large amount of unstructured social data on these platforms, social media and networking analytics research has the following scientific challenges:

  1. difficult to analytically assess collective impact of social media and networking on societal polarization and other social phenomenon due to fragmentation of debates and discussions in the existing social media and networking platforms
  2. lack of a central social media and networking platform for debate and discussions on important issues at national and international levels
  3. hard to detect mis/dis-information, how it disseminates, and assess its impact
  4. mining and using social media/networking data for logistics planning for disaster response
  5. content-based indexing of unstructured and multimedia data on social media platforms and towards an integration with decision-making systems through deep learning methods
  6. arduous to visualize large social network data