Background
As already illustrated in the last two blog posts, social media analytics is about making and assessing information framework or tool to extract hidden key information from a large amount of semi-structured and unstructured data collected in social media services in order to develop meaningful and significant decision making (IEEE Intelligent Systems,2010) and one of UN’s SDG1 targets is to eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere, currently measured as people living on less than $1.25 a day by 2030(UN SDG1 target 1.1). So in this blog post, I am going to combine the two topics together and try to illustrate why SMA matters in no poverty campaign, how SMA is applied to help realize “End poverty and all its forms” goal and what relationships need to get handled well.
Why SMA Matters?
As illustrated in the last blog, poverty standard can be varied and its causes can also be significantly different in different regions. On account of that, it is necessary to apply data technology in the work of poverty eradication. Combining with the actual situation of poor areas, finding out the relevant factors of poverty from social media can effectively help people in poor areas get rid of poverty and get a good development. Just take China for example, in Sichuan province, government with social media giant, sina weibo, collects data from people’s post in poor area to clearly identify what factors play negative roles in people’s way to better life. What’s more, compared with traditional data collecting method which includes making and passing archives in paper, SMA can be more effective and accurate and avoid such phenomena that finance aid is put onto wrong people’s hands or corruption happens.
How SMA Is Applied?
Before using SMA technique, establishing electronic archives is priority. Just take China for example, department ask people in poor area to upload their related information about annual income, housing conditions, physical health conditions, children education conditions and so on to wechat platform, which is a social media software issued by Tencent company. And then, using SMA technique to collect and analyze the uploaded data in order to identify the real poor family. Based on previous procedures, after information review, the accuracy and effectiveness of poverty alleviation will be improved by establishing a file in the database and modifying the changed data in time. Apart from the SMA’s identifying function, it can also be implemented to supervise whether the poverty alleviation resources are used into the real poor family instead of corrupted officials and to check that the “no poverty” campaign is put into reality. Just imagine, if the campaign goes wrong, people will upload their true status of their lives in the form of texts, pictures or video to the social media platform so that departments, individuals and even UN organizations will get the true information and know that something is wrong with related policy or methods and respond quickly towards it.
What Relationships Need To Get Handled Well?
Three relationships need to be dealt with in order to achieve accurate poverty alleviation by using SMA.
Data opening and security. The database has the characteristics of open sharing. In the acquisition and use of poverty alleviation data, it brings certain security risks to households and poor households involving personal privacy information and government related confidential information, which requires the use of governance methods to ensure that this part of data is not lost and abused in the open sharing of data.
The popularization and improvement of data technology. SMA brings convenience to poverty alleviation work, but at the same time, it puts forward higher requirements for operation technology. On the one hand, it is necessary to increase the technical training for poverty alleviation workers so that they can master the application methods of SMA; on the other hand, it is necessary to build a professional talent team to provide excellent technical support for data development and application.
Online and offline evaluation. It is important to judge the actual effect of poverty alleviation, but frequent assessment will distort the rural work. This requires using SMA instead of traditional methods for assessment and evaluation. For the evaluation indexes such as the accuracy rate of identification and withdrawal of the poor and the satisfaction of the working people, it is difficult to be accurate only by relying on SMA evaluation, and only by combining with the reality investigation and verification of the third party can accurate evaluation be achieved.
References
- UN. “The Sustainable Development Goal1–End poverty in all its forms everywhere”. In: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/poverty/
- D. Zeng, H. Chen, R. Lusch, and S.-H. Li. “Social Media Analytics and Intelligence”, IEEE Intelligent Systems, vol. 25, no. 6, 13-16, 2010.
- Alice (2016) how to perform a social media analysis – in 5 steps.
- Sun. “Using big data to achieve “precision” in poverty alleviation”. In: http://bigdata.idcquan.com/dsjjs/167899.shtml
- Luo. “Application of big data technology in targeted poverty alleviation”. In: http://www.jjykj.com/view.asp?nid=6769
IEMS 5720 Social Networking 
Your post about SMA application in poverty is well-organized! Firstly, your explanation about SMA makes me better understand its meaning- it helps us find the useful information under a large amount of unstructrued data which develops decision-making. Secondly, your examples about social media applications like WeChat are good.These social media services indeed can help the government to identify the real poor person. Accurate poverty alleviation is so important for people in real need.Besides, you mentioned that database is required to collect all the information,so the security of data is also important.Lastly, I agree that the technology of data management should be improved,but I think the popularization of IT technology for the public is also needed so that the poor people can get more information from the Internet and better feed back their difficulties to the government or the society.Do you think so?
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I agree with you on it. But while working on the popularization ,data security is an issue that needs strong taking good care of. Anyway, I would like to appreciate it that you read this post really thoroughly and clearly. Thanks for your commenting！
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What we choose about the goals at SDG is really the ultimate utopia for human, which means that we human get a long way to go to struggle these. Poverty in China is really a big deal, but China has done well in elimination of poverty though the goal hasn’t been achieved for now. Btw, the application about SMA mentioned in your blog reminds me some welfare actions taken by Tencent and Alipay. What they do is to connect each user in their APPs to the remote area and help them handle poverty or starvation. Your article deserves high appreciation!
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Thanks for you reading on my blog. After searching on the internet，what Alipay and Tencent have done to achieve was really remarkable. On the hand ,I do agree with the term “utopia”. But to do something to push the boundaries forward to this SDG is still worthwhile, isn’t it?
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Thank you for posting such valuable and insightful post. Your post is clearly structure and well supported by the references. Firstly you explain the importance of eliminating poverty and introduce how to use the SMA to find useful information for decision making. And the examples of Tencent and Alipay actually give me a quite direct and intuitive expression of how closely we humans are related to these techniques and further inspire our potential power of these social media analytics.
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