Anonymous Platform Research Articles

Website posts and the voice offrontline healthcare workers: athematic analysis.

With the soaring rise in popularity of social media platforms in recent decades, the use of website posts for the expression of work-related views has also increased. Despite websites being extensively used, there has been no examination of the views and concerns expressed by frontline workers through website posts. The present research aims to contribute to the "voice literature" first by evaluating how frontline workers utilize anonymous media platforms to express their views and work-related concerns and, second, by demonstrating how anonymous voice systems can encourage frontline health workers in providing feedback and dissatisfaction. The study utilizes the thematic analysis method to analyze the content of posts by psychologists on a collaborative consultation website administrated by Israel's Ministry of Health, discussing their perceptions of work-related concerns. The analysis identified three work-related themes through the employees' voices. These include insufficient support from management, conflicts and excessive occupational demands. The workers expressed their apprehension with regard to organizational pressures, deficient budgetallocations, excessive workloads, lack of recognition and work-life imbalances. The application of thematic analysis method to anonymous open-public data should be viewed as an effective, affordable, genuine and unique research method for data analysis. Anonymous platforms can generate unique insights that may not be possible through traditional means. This can provide practitioners with a comprehensive understanding of various issues and challenges and be a useful tool for identifying shortcomings within health settings.

Rancang Bangun Chatbot Pengaduan Kekerasan Perempuan Anak Dengan Metode Fuzzy String Matching Dan Enhanced Confix Stripping Stemmer

Violence against women is a serious issue affecting many individuals in society. In Indonesia, including Kota Probolinggo, the number of cases of violence against women remains high. This research aims to design a chatbot application as a means for reporting violence against women and children (VAWC) in Kota Probolinggo. The application provides an anonymous and safe space for victims to report their complaints without revealing their identities. Additionally, the chatbot delivers information and education about different types of violence against women and preventive measures. The development of the chatbot application utilizes Fuzzy String Matching, Enhanced Confix Stripping Stemmer, and preprocessing methods to enhance data search accuracy and provide appropriate responses to users. The testing results show that the chatbot offers responses with satisfactory accuracy. Leveraging AI technology in the form of a chatbot is expected to provide an effective solution in addressing and preventing violence against women, offering a secure and anonymous platform for victims to report incidents. The application is envisioned to offer better support and assistance to victims of violence.
 The chatbot application implements fuzzy string matching, the Levenshtein distance algorithm, and Enhanced Confix Stripping Stemmer to process user input before matching it with the database. During the Enhanced Confix Stripping Stemmer process, sentences are transformed into an array of basic words, enhancing the accuracy of data matching when using fuzzy string matching and the Levenshtein distance algorithm. Testing results indicate a 4.77% difference between manual calculations and the chatbot system. This difference may be attributed to variations in text processing and other factors.

Legal Protection of Cryptocurrency Users Against Cybercrime Attacks

The medium of exchange can be any object that can be accepted by everyone in society in the process of exchanging goods and services. Long before knowing money, humans had made transactions using barter practices, that is, the exchange of goods and/or services for the desired goods and/or services. In the preparation of this research, a normative juridical approach where approach is carried out based on the main legal material by examining theories, concepts, legal principles, and laws and regulations related to this research. Cryptocurrency assets don't just impact people who mine or trade crypto. It turns out that anonymous platforms that run crypto are also increasingly associated with cybercrime. A recent study from Interisle Consulting Group revealed that phishing attempts related to cryptocurrencies grew 257 percent compared to last year (compared to a 61 percent increase in phishing attacks overall), especially for attacks on wallets and exchanges. The rapid development of information and communication technology makes the journey of the development of crime in the virtual and digital world (cybercrime) sophisticated and complex.

The LSTM-based automated phishing detection driven model for detecting multiple attacks on Tor hidden services

Phishing is a major problem on darknets. Phishing is the practice of attacking an unaware person by pretending to be someone else to steal their digital data. In anonymous platforms such as the dark web or deep web of Tor, detecting the attacker or phishing attacks is a much more complicated practice. Generic phishing attacks can be easy to spot. Today’s challenge is detecting the various attacks in the anonymous network is very hard. The intelligent factor of attacks can bypass traditional detection solutions. To solve the problem of complications in the Tor Network, this work focuses on the development of automated detection of vulnerable attacks in phishing-based Tor hidden services. The proposed model initially divides the attack parameters into three categories into Class A, Class B, and Class C based on technical perspectives and some defined threshold values. Next, the class A attacks (i.e. top level domain and protocol similarity) attacks are detected by a random forest (RF) classifier. Then, the class B attacks can be identified by the convolutional neural network (CNN). Finally, the LSTM model is applied for the accurate classification of multiple attacks in the Tor network. The experimental validation of the proposed model is tested using the CIRCL and AIL datasets. The experimental values highlighted the promising performance of the proposed model over other methods with a maximum overall detection accuracy of 95.60% and 95.77% on CIRCL and AIL datasets respectively. Therefore, the proposed model effectively detects multiple attacks in the Tor network under dynamic and real-time environments.

A Digital Single-Session Intervention Platform for Youth Mental Health: Cultural Adaptation, Evaluation, and Dissemination

Despite the proliferation of evidence-based digital mental health programs for young people, their low uptake and inconsistent implementation preclude them from benefiting youths at scale. Identifying effective implementation strategies for evidence-based supports is especially critical in regions where treatment access is lowest owing to mental health provider shortages. The goal of this academic-community partnership, funded by the City of San Antonio Metropolitan Health District, was to culturally adapt, disseminate, and gauge the acceptability and utility of an evidence-based digital mental health platform-Project Youth Empowerment and Support (YES)-among English- and Spanish-speaking youths living in south Texas. Project YES is an open-access, anonymous platform containing 3 evidence-based, self-guided interventions for youth mental health. Project YES was culturally adapted via focus groups and co-design sessions with San Antonio youths with lived experience of depression and anxiety; translated into Spanish; and disseminated throughout San Antonio, Texas, via community and school partnerships. During the project period (April 2021 to December 2021), 1801 San Antonio youths began and 894 (49.64%) of them completed a 30-minute, single-session intervention within Project YES (aged 11-17 years; n=718, 39.87% male; n=961, 53.36% female; and n=3, 0.17% intersex; n=1477, 82.01% Hispanic; n=77, 4.28% non-Hispanic White; n=113, 6.27% Black; n=28, 1.55% Asian; and n=93, 5.16% other). This completion rate (49.64%) surpassed those previously observed for Project YES (eg, 34% when disseminated via social media). San Antonio youths rated Project YES as highly acceptable across all metrics, both in English and Spanish. In addition, the youths who completed Project YES-ENGLISH reported significant improvements in hopelessness (Cohen d=0.33; P<001), self-hate (Cohen d=0.27; P<001), and perceived agency (Cohen d=0.25; P<001) from before to after the intervention, and the youths who completed Project YES-SPANISH reported significant improvements in self-hate (Cohen d=0.37; P=.049) from before to after the intervention. The results indicate that Project YES-an open-access, free, and anonymous web-based single-session intervention platform-is an acceptable, accessible, and applicable mental health support for English- and Spanish-speaking San Antonio youths.

Perceptions and Barriers Related to Outpatient Management of Low-Risk PE Patients: A Community Center Experience

Introduction: Pulmonary emboli (PEs) exert a significant morbidity and mortality burden worldwide, with an increasing incidence of diagnosis over the past two decades. This has relayed to an increase in hospitalizations for PE, with a mean length of stay of 4 days, and a mean cost of $8674. Despite the increased incidence, the mortality associated with PE has been decreasing over the past two decades, and this has led to the development of many risk prognostication indices to better assess the need of hospitalization versus home management. Patients identified as low-risk using extensively validated prognostication models such as the PE severity index (PESI) or simplified PESI have been found to be safely managed at home. Despite the change in recommendations and guidelines, many low-risk patients continue to be hospitalized. Current literature is sparse on the barriers faced by providers in different specialties involved in the care of patients with PE, and in particular low-risk PEs. We conducted an anonymous survey across our hospital system to identify barriers and perceptions revolving around home management of low-risk PE patients. Methods: A short multiple choice survey was created and distributed to both teaching and non-teaching personnel of our hospital system, using an anonymous platform. The survey included residents and attendings across the specialties of internal medicine, primary care and emergency medicine. 150 invitations to the survey were sent out, and 44 responses were received. Results: 43 of the 44 responses were from teaching attendings or residents, whereas 1 response was recorded from a primary care practitioner in a non-teaching setting. 63.6% of the survey-takers reported being in practice <3 years, while 9.1% of this group reported being in practice >10 years. 81.8% believed that not all patients with PE warrant admission. 33 providers, or 75% were aware of risk-stratification models like the PE Severity Index (PESI) or simplified PESI index, and 31 (70.5%) stated they use these risk stratification models to assess a patient's need for admission, once they are diagnosed with a PE. Lack of social work/case management support to send patients home emerged as the primary barrier to out-patient management (61.4% or n= 27), followed by beliefs about consequences of not admitting patients with PE (45.5%, n=20). Fear of litigation was another prominent reported barrier (31.8%, n=14), followed by lack of knowledge on current guidelines (38.6%, n=17) and finally lack of knowledge regarding anticoagulation options (27.3%, n=12). Of 27 participating physicians that practice in an outpatient setting, 25 (92.6%) reported sending patients to the ED strictly to get immediate definitive testing done, and were comfortable managing the patient once a diagnosis was achieved. Conclusions: Several barriers to outpatient management of low-risk patients diagnosed with PE exist in the community setting. They mainly consist of lack of social work support, false beliefs about consequences of not admitting patients with PE, and fear of litigation. Integrated education for various medicine specialties regarding anticoagulation and management guidelines should be instituted, with emphasis on utilization of risk-prognostication tools like sPESI. In addition, maximum utilization of social work and case management may further mitigate some of the barriers encountered in the community setting.

Reimagining Section 230 and Content Moderation: Regulating Incivility on Anonymous Digital Platforms

This article draws from surveys about the experiences of users with Yik Yak and other anonymous social media platforms to consider how digital intermediaries encourage civility and minimize hateful speech in their communities—given the protections from liability that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) affords them. It then turns to debates over Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act by congressional and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) leadership from 2017 and 2021. In so doing, it considers how hoped-for changes from both the Republican and Democratic parties may conflict with the First Amendment in their proposals to reform Section 230. The article argues that human content moderation is particularly important to maintain as part of the regulatory process on digital platforms given (1) the disconnected discourse emanating from the left and the right about what kind of online expression is problematic, and (2) the parallel disconnected discourse among users of anonymous platforms where online expression wields the least amount of individual accountability.

Abstracts 8th PCNE working symposium ‘Navigating research on pharmaceutical care’. 11–12 February 2022, Lisbon, Portugal

Abstracts 8th PCNE working symposium ‘Navigating research on pharmaceutical care’. 11–12 February 2022, Lisbon, Portugal

“Yakety yak: Don’t talk back”: An autopsy of anonymity gone awry

This article compares the socio-legal factors and challenges contributing to the failure of the deceased anonymous, hyperlocal platform, Yik Yak, with a living anonymous, hyperlocal platform, Jodel. By analysing each platform’s Terms of Service (ToS) statements alongside their guidelines and values, the article traces how anonymous, hyperlocal applications both diverge from and mirror communication law in fashioning their approaches to content moderation and responses to the dark side of communication. The article concludes that in contrast with Yik Yak, which attempted to rely on its ToS and limited community monitoring system to curb cyberbullying and harassment, the case of Jodel—and by extension, the German approach to regulating hate speech and bullying—suggests that surviving hyperlocal, anonymous platforms of U.S. origin should not solely hide behind Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA). Instead, they should aim to combine (1) robust ToS statements with (2) specific community values or guidelines that are fortified by (3) a comprehensive monitoring system in order to curb abusive behaviour on their platforms.

244 Effect of Physician Burnout on Perception of Physician Empathy

Physician burnout is an ongoing health crisis effecting up to 50% of the physicians in the United States. Resident physicians are at a particularly high risk for burnout due to the rigorous demands of resident training. It has been assumed provider empathy could be protective against burnout. We aim to determine the strength and direction of correlation between provider burnout and patient perception of empathy as well as self-perception of empathy. We hypothesize that physician burnout is negatively associated with patient perception and self-perception of physician empathy and communication We conducted a correlational study measuring relationship of provider burnout and perception of empathy. Our participants included emergency medicine residents training at an urban, university-affiliated community hospital. Resident burnout rates were measured by responses to a validated survey administrated through an anonymous platform. Burnout was defined using the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), a 22-item rating scale designed to assess three aspects of the burnout syndrome: emotional exhaustion (EE), depersonalization (DP), and lack of personal accomplishment (PA). A score of greater than 27 in EE, greater than 10 in DP, and less than 33 in PA was considered high risk for burnout. Empathy was self-measured by provider as well as reported by patients they cared for in the emergency department via a survey conducted by research assistants at conclusion of interaction with the provider. Self-empathy scores were measured with an Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) focusing on empathic concern (EC). Patient perception of the resident’s empathy was quantified with the Consultation and Relational Empathy (CARE) Measure. Descriptive statistics and percent of respondents with burnout determined by their scores in each of 3 MBI domains are reported. Results for each domain were compared with self-perception and patient perception of empathy scores using linear and logistic regression analysis. Thirty-two of the 39 eligible residents completed the survey and took care of patients who perceived their empathy during the study period. Logistic regression model demonstrated that for every point increase of self-empathy score, the odds for DP burnout were less likely (Odds 0.69, 95% CI 0.49-0.86, p=0.01). For every point increase of patient perception of empathy, the odds for DP burnout were also less likely (Odds 0.71, 95% CI 0.49-0.95, p=0.04). Residents at high risk for burnout using the DP domain (less than 10 in DP) had lower empathy scores by patients (Effect -.3.30, 95% CI -6.60 to -0.55, p =0.03) and lower self-empathy scores (Effect -5.70, 95% CI -9.09 to -2.21, p < 0.01). Burnout remains a concern for resident physicians in the US. Identifying those at risk and investigating protective characteristics are of crucial importance to combat this epidemic. We found a correlation between residents’ empathy and the level of DP. An increase in empathy decreased the level of DP, making them at less risk for burnout. Our evidence also suggests that higher empathy scores can make DP less likely.

Voice of the Employees Resonated in Online Bamboo Forests

While employee voice has been realized a critical element of organizational success, many employees often remain silent and withdraw useful information and ideas. In this paper,we present how employees utilize existing social media platform in a creative, collective way to anonymously share their voices—a phenomenon called the bamboo forests in Korea. We present the key characteristics of bamboo forests including self-mention and connectivity, and discuss the main topics and sentiments of such bamboo forests. Our analysis indicates that employees find such anonymous platform useful. We provide insights on the potential for utilizing the voice ofthe employees online.

Anxiety levels during COVID 19 pandemic in primary and secondary doctors in UK

AimsThe study aims to examine the severity of anxiety in primary and secondary doctors in the UK during first wave of COVID-19 pandemic.MethodAn online General Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD7) survey was distributed during the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic (April-May 2020) to doctors in primary and secondary care in the UK. Seven closed-ended questions were included in the questionnaire. Respondents were to indicate how frequently they experienced specific issues in the previous fortnight: Feeling nervous, anxious, or on edge; being unable to stop or control worrying; worrying too much generally; trouble relaxing; being so restless that it's hard to sit still; becoming easily annoyed or irritable, feeling afraid of something awful happening. Participants were required to tick one of four choices for each of the seven parameters - not at all (0), several days (1), more than half the days (2) and nearly every day (3). A person with minimal or no anxiety will score less than 5. The survey was anonymous and circulated in professional online doctors' forums. Participation was voluntary and no incentives were given.Result273 completed surveys were received; 120 doctors were in primary care and 153 were in secondary care. Average GAD7 score was 6.4 in primary care and 7.9 in secondary care. 57% of primary care doctors and 66% of secondary care doctors reported score of 5 or more, representing at least mild anxiety symptoms. 22% doctors in primary care and 31% doctors in secondary care reported GAD7 score of 10 or more, indicating moderate to severe anxiety. One in ten doctors in both primary and secondary care reported severe anxiety due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.ConclusionThe finding of more anxiety in secondary care doctors might be because general practitioners could resort early in the pandemic to remote consultations along with inadequacy of resources, greater exposure to suffering/deaths of patients and colleagues in hospital and perceived risk of catching COVID-19 infection.Results are limited due to relatively low numbers and it would be useful to replicate this study on a larger scale. Doctors are less likely to acknowledge their mental health difficulties due to stigma associated with mental health.Many employers have psychological support systems in place for their staff, but it is questionable if affected individuals are willing to receive this support. This paper; therefore, calls for creating open anonymous platforms for professionals to get access to appropriate support to address their anxiety.

Tor’s underworld, ‘onion services’ and child sex abuse material: Submission to the Australian Parliamentary Joint Committee on Law Enforcement inquiry into ‘Law enforcement capabilities in relation to child exploitation’

The Australian Commonwealth Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill 20202, which passed both houses of parliament on August 25, 2021, will assist law enforcement agencies (LEAs) in investigating serious crime including online child sex abuse materials (CSAM). Despite relevant tools such as data disruption, network activity and account takeover warrants, LEAs will nevertheless encounter challenges in the darkweb – notably Tor (formerly known as The Onion Router), the largest of the anonymous platforms. Anonymous Internet services, such as Tor, are designed to evade surveillance and its highly decentralised structure is resilient despite the periodic success of cross-jurisdictional policing operations in disrupting, arresting, and closing both illicit contraband markets and CSAM sites on Tor (Broadhurst, et al., 2021). The deterrent effect of LEA operations tends to be short lived, but can influence the perceptions of risk and deter potential offenders. LEA operations also can stimulate self-regulation (e.g., banning and/or censoring particular products or interests) among some relevant Tor hidden or ‘onion’ service providers. Anonymity also provides opportunities to reach out to existing support ‘communities’ among these online secretive sub-cultures and seek support in crafting relevant online health, education and treatment referral services.This submission considers the capability of Australia’s law enforcement agencies to tackle the growing scourge of child exploitation. In particular, concern about the existence of dedicated CSAM onion services hosted on the Tor network were raised (Terms of Reference [a]). This also required an understanding of the tools used by offenders to access CSAM and the ability of law enforcement to detect CSAM and identify offenders (Terms of Reference [d]). We suggest specific support be provided to develop and evaluate online treatment programs for CSAM offenders using the anonymous format provided by Tor . Finally, we propose a study examining the links between offline and online/contact and non-contact offenders in the context of anonymity (Terms of Reference [f]).

Violence against health personnel before and during the health contingency COVID-19.

Violence against health personnel is an understudied phenomenon in Mexico, which has increased during periods of health contingency. To identify the prevalence and type of violence against health professionals before and during the COVID-19 health contingency and determine the characteristics of the worker with the highest exposure. Cross-sectional descriptive study, carried out during April of 2020, in 562 health workers, who answered a sociodemographic identification card and a questionnaire to know the characteristics, types and consequences of aggression before and during the contingency, through an electronic and anonymous platform. A non-probabilistic sampling (snowball) was used in different states of Mexico. 47.7% of the participants experienced aggressions, 12.8% verbal type and 34.9% verbal/physical aggressions during the last year, where women showed to be more attacked (chi squared = 12.12, p = 0.000). During health contingency, 16.8% perceived aggression, 13.2% verbal type and 3.6% verbal/physical aggression, with nurses being the most attacked (chi squared = 5.57, p = 0.018). A logistic regression model confirmed that being a woman and belonging to nursing profession has, respectively as far as 2.5 and 3 times more risk of suffering violence. Violence against health personnel requires immediate strategies, especially in critical periods in the community, where aggressions occur inside and outside of hospitals, which have an impact on worker's safety and health institutions.

Self-declared Throwaway Accounts on Reddit

Parents can be subjected to scrutiny and judgment for their parenting choices. Much of this scrutiny is experienced online, especially around stigmatized topics such as divorce, custody, postpartum depression, and miscarriage. Prior theory suggests that parents might be able to access greater support online when anonymous, but other evidence suggests that anonymity may increase bad behavior. Drawing from ten years of Reddit parenting boards, we show that parents are more likely to discuss potentially stigmatizing topics using anonymous ("throwaway") accounts. We find that, on average, throwaway comments are more likely to receive a response, receive more responses that are longer, and receive responses that have higher karma scores than topically similar comments posted by non-throwaway accounts. We argue that self-identified throwaway accounts provide a crucial environment for supporting parents with stigmatizing experiences. They also provide a shared platform signal (the throwaway account) which enables other Reddit users to access shared experiences and support. We propose that a hybrid combination of identified and anonymous platforms could provide more supportive online experiences for parents and other users.

Hiding the Rumor Source

Anonymous social media platforms, like Secret, Yik Yak, and Whisper, have emerged as important tools for sharing ideas without the fear of judgment. Such anonymous platforms are also important in nations under authoritarian rule, where freedom of expression and the personal safety of message that authors may depend on anonymity. Whether for fear of judgment or retribution, it is sometimes crucial to hide the identities of users who post sensitive messages. In this paper, we consider a global adversary who wishes to identify the author of a message; it observes either a snapshot of the spread of a message at a certain time or sampled timestamp metadata, or both. Recent advances in rumor source detection show that existing messaging protocols are vulnerable against such an adversary. We introduce a novel messaging protocol, which we call adaptive diffusion, and show that under the snapshot adversarial model, adaptive diffusion spreads content fast and achieves perfect obfuscation of the source when the underlying contact network is an infinite regular tree. That is, all users with the message are nearly equally likely to have been the origin of the message. When the contact network is an irregular tree, we characterize the probability of maximum likelihood detection by proving a concentration result over Galton-Watson trees. Experiments on a sampled Facebook network demonstrate that adaptive diffusion effectively hides the location of the source even when the graph is finite, is irregular, and has cycles.

Did I Cross the Line?: Gender Differences in Adolescents’ Anonymous Digital Self-Reports of Wrongdoing in an Online Anonymous Context

Young people spend substantial and increasing quantities of time communicating on and through digital platforms. Online contexts can be frontiers for communication and disclosure unbounded from offline life. The present study explores how U.S. teens position themselves in anonymous digital posts that pertain to wrongdoing. Do adolescents’ posts reproduce social norms and popular gendered narratives about wrongdoing—or, conversely, do anonymous platforms allow for a departure from gendered scripts? The authors draw on 780 online stories (390 written by self-reported young men, 390 by self-reported young women) about teens’ experiences with wrongdoing to investigate differences in reported rates of victimization and admission of wrongdoing between young male and female posters. Young men are more likely to report instances of their own wrongdoing than are young women, despite the fact that stories of victimization are equally likely to implicate young women and men as culpable of wrongdoing. These findings suggest adolescents internalize and express wrongdoing in gendered ways even in disembodied, anonymous online environments. For practitioners and policymakers interested in questions of school discipline, anti-bullying initiatives, and student accountability for interpersonal relationships, our findings suggest the need for the use of different scripts when setting context for male and female students.

Verbal Venting in the Social Web: Effects of Anonymity and Group Norms on Aggressive Language Use in Online Comments

Scholars often blame the occurrence of aggressive behavior in online discussions on the anonymity of the Internet; however, even on today’s less anonymous platforms, such as social networking sites, users write plenty of aggressive comments, which can elicit a whole wave of negative remarks. Drawing on the social identity and deindividuation effects (SIDE) model, this research conducts a laboratory experiment with a 2 (anonymity vs. no anonymity) × 2 (aggressive norm vs. non-aggressive norm) between-subjects design in order to disentangle the effects of anonymity, social group norms, and their interactions on aggressive language use in online comments. Results reveal that participants used more aggressive expressions in their comments when peer comments on a blog included aggressive wording (i.e., the social group norm was aggressive). Anonymity had no direct effect; however, we found a tendency that users’ conformity to an aggressive social norm of commenting is stronger in an anonymous environment.

Exploring gender and identity issues among female adolescent and young adults who connect in an anonymous platform.

There has been an increased usage of online cancer support groups as a resource for health-related information and social support. This work analyzes message blog posts from an anonymous online support community to better understand issues related to gender and identity among female adolescent and young adults. This work sheds further light into the nuances of gender and identity issues including motherhood and reproductive issues, physical appearance, and romantic relationships. Specifically, findings reveal that female adolescent and young adults experience issues pertaining to infertility, feeling like a bad mom, hair loss, scarring, dating, and intimacy. These findings of this work offer further guidance about how healthcare providers and caregivers can attempt to meet the needs of female adolescent and young adults.

Peer Review in Transplantation.

Peer Review in Transplantation.