Abdul Karim Obeid
Biographic Data
| ID | 4911478 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Abdul Karim Obeid |
| GIVEN NAMES | Abdul Karim |
| FAMILY NAME | Obeid |
| SIGNATURE | OBEID A K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queensland University of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9838-1838 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 12 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 12 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Searching for the truth? search engines and their AI affordances’ responses to conspiratorial search practices
Search engines are a common pathway to conspiracy theories, and producers of conspiratorial narratives actively encourage users to search for particular terms. Understanding how search engines respond to different information-seeking practices is therefore essential for explaining the dynamics of online conspiracy theories. Existing audits of search engines rarely account for systematic variation in query formulation arising from users’ differing…
Unhealthy food advertising on social media
The World Health Organization and public health experts are calling for urgent restrictions on the online marketing of unhealthy food. The harmful effects of exposure to advertising for ‘unhealthy foods’, including discretionary foods high in fat, salt or sugar, particularly for children, has prompted a proposed policy action in Australia to prohibit all online unhealthy food marketing. We used a novel data donation infrastructure, the Australian…
Analysing News Polarisation
Political polarisation – at the level of individual issues or broader ideologies, and expressed through differences of opinion on policies, divergent affective attachments, contrary interpretations of available information, or distinct patterns of interaction with other partisans – is necessarily always closely related to the information that individuals and groups engage with as they form and reinforce their own opinions about a given issue or t…
Computational Methods for Improving the Observability of Platform-Based Advertising
The advertising ecosystem has been progressively reshaped by computational advertising models facilitated and controlled by digital media platforms. Meta and Alphabet, two of the dominant players in this ecosystem, have contributed significantly to industry disintermediation via the design and market dominance of their advertising systems, which in turn are symbiotic with their own business models, and feed on large amounts of consumer data gener…
Why Am I Seeing This Ad? The affordances and limits of automated user-level explanation in Meta’s advertising system
Against the backdrop of calls for greater platform transparency, this exploratory article investigates Meta’s ‘Why Am I Seeing This Ad’ (WAIST) feature, which is positioned as a consumer-level explanation of Meta’s advertising model. Drawing on our own walkthroughs of Facebook and Instagram and data from the Australian Ad Observatory, we find the feature falls short in two ways. First, the explanations do not always align with how the system and …
Mandatory age verification for pornography access
Age verification is currently gaining traction among some western democracies as a means to restrict minors' access to online pornography. In this article we consider the ramifications of applying age estimation software to this task. We analyse a public dataset of 10,139 facial images processed through a commonly used high-performance convolutional neural network approach and find significant inconsistencies in classification performance. Notabl…
Pandemic Politics
One of the effects of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic has been to further accelerate the incorporation of social media activities into political and electoral campaigning. Especially as a result of lockdowns and other restrictions to offline public life, overall social media use has increased in many countries; health concerns have severely curtailed conventional in-person political campaigning activities, from doorknocking to mass rallies (even…
Exploring Facebook’s “Why Am I Seeing This Ad” Feature
For more than a decade, digital advertising has been the primary means of funding online content and services. The evolution of digital advertising towards algorithmically targeted advertising, believed to be highly personalized and tailored to the individual, has presented new challenges for public oversight. Whereas previously, public concern centred on the content of ads and their exposure to audiences, the rise of platform-based advertising m…
Contextuality and context-sensitivity in probabilistic models of cognition
Addressing the accountability gap
This commentary reports on gambling advertisements served to Australians on Facebook in 2021-2022 that we discovered through a research project that uses novel data donation infrastructure to improve the observability of platform-based advertising. Preliminary findings show that advertisements for online casinos appear on social media and are served to people tagged as located in Australia despite laws that prohibit both the operation and adverti…
Soft power, sharp power? Exploring RT ’s dual role in Russia’s diplomatic toolkit
This article examines the multilingual audiences of Russian outlet RT on Facebook. RT is a state media outlet known for spreading strategic Kremlin narratives and disinformation in support of Russia’s domestic and foreign policy objectives to large and multilingual global audiences. RT serves as a central pillar of the Russian information influence apparatus, and an instrument of both ‘soft’ and ‘sharp power’, the latter describing the use of inf…
‘Fake News’ and Other Problematic Information
Encompassed by the disputed term ‘fake news’, a variety of overtly or covertly biased, skewed, or falsified reports claiming to present factual information are now seen to constitute a critical challenge to the effective dissemination of news and information across established and emerging democratic societies. Such content – variously also classifiable as propaganda, selective reporting, conspiracy theory, inadvertent misinformation, and deliber…
Soft power, sharp power? Exploring RT ’s dual role in Russia’s diplomatic toolkit
This article examines the multilingual audiences of Russian outlet RT on Facebook. RT is a state media outlet known for spreading strategic Kremlin narratives and disinformation in support of Russia’s domestic and foreign policy objectives to large and multilingual global audiences. RT serves as a central pillar of the Russian information influence apparatus, and an instrument of both ‘soft’ and ‘sharp power’, the latter describing the use of inf…
Mandatory age verification for pornography access
Age verification is currently gaining traction among some western democracies as a means to restrict minors' access to online pornography. In this article we consider the ramifications of applying age estimation software to this task. We analyse a public dataset of 10,139 facial images processed through a commonly used high-performance convolutional neural network approach and find significant inconsistencies in classification performance. Notabl…
‘Fake News’ and Other Problematic Information
Encompassed by the disputed term ‘fake news’, a variety of overtly or covertly biased, skewed, or falsified reports claiming to present factual information are now seen to constitute a critical challenge to the effective dissemination of news and information across established and emerging democratic societies. Such content – variously also classifiable as propaganda, selective reporting, conspiracy theory, inadvertent misinformation, and deliber…
Soft power, sharp power? Exploring RT ’s dual role in Russia’s diplomatic toolkit
This article examines the multilingual audiences of Russian outlet RT on Facebook. RT is a state media outlet known for spreading strategic Kremlin narratives and disinformation in support of Russia’s domestic and foreign policy objectives to large and multilingual global audiences. RT serves as a central pillar of the Russian information influence apparatus, and an instrument of both ‘soft’ and ‘sharp power’, the latter describing the use of inf…
Pandemic Politics
One of the effects of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic has been to further accelerate the incorporation of social media activities into political and electoral campaigning. Especially as a result of lockdowns and other restrictions to offline public life, overall social media use has increased in many countries; health concerns have severely curtailed conventional in-person political campaigning activities, from doorknocking to mass rallies (even…
Exploring Facebook’s “Why Am I Seeing This Ad” Feature
For more than a decade, digital advertising has been the primary means of funding online content and services. The evolution of digital advertising towards algorithmically targeted advertising, believed to be highly personalized and tailored to the individual, has presented new challenges for public oversight. Whereas previously, public concern centred on the content of ads and their exposure to audiences, the rise of platform-based advertising m…
Contextuality and context-sensitivity in probabilistic models of cognition
Addressing the accountability gap
This commentary reports on gambling advertisements served to Australians on Facebook in 2021-2022 that we discovered through a research project that uses novel data donation infrastructure to improve the observability of platform-based advertising. Preliminary findings show that advertisements for online casinos appear on social media and are served to people tagged as located in Australia despite laws that prohibit both the operation and adverti…
Computational Methods for Improving the Observability of Platform-Based Advertising
The advertising ecosystem has been progressively reshaped by computational advertising models facilitated and controlled by digital media platforms. Meta and Alphabet, two of the dominant players in this ecosystem, have contributed significantly to industry disintermediation via the design and market dominance of their advertising systems, which in turn are symbiotic with their own business models, and feed on large amounts of consumer data gener…
Why Am I Seeing This Ad? The affordances and limits of automated user-level explanation in Meta’s advertising system
Against the backdrop of calls for greater platform transparency, this exploratory article investigates Meta’s ‘Why Am I Seeing This Ad’ (WAIST) feature, which is positioned as a consumer-level explanation of Meta’s advertising model. Drawing on our own walkthroughs of Facebook and Instagram and data from the Australian Ad Observatory, we find the feature falls short in two ways. First, the explanations do not always align with how the system and …
Mandatory age verification for pornography access
Age verification is currently gaining traction among some western democracies as a means to restrict minors' access to online pornography. In this article we consider the ramifications of applying age estimation software to this task. We analyse a public dataset of 10,139 facial images processed through a commonly used high-performance convolutional neural network approach and find significant inconsistencies in classification performance. Notabl…
Unhealthy food advertising on social media
The World Health Organization and public health experts are calling for urgent restrictions on the online marketing of unhealthy food. The harmful effects of exposure to advertising for ‘unhealthy foods’, including discretionary foods high in fat, salt or sugar, particularly for children, has prompted a proposed policy action in Australia to prohibit all online unhealthy food marketing. We used a novel data donation infrastructure, the Australian…
Analysing News Polarisation
Political polarisation – at the level of individual issues or broader ideologies, and expressed through differences of opinion on policies, divergent affective attachments, contrary interpretations of available information, or distinct patterns of interaction with other partisans – is necessarily always closely related to the information that individuals and groups engage with as they form and reinforce their own opinions about a given issue or t…
Searching for the truth? search engines and their AI affordances’ responses to conspiratorial search practices
Search engines are a common pathway to conspiracy theories, and producers of conspiratorial narratives actively encourage users to search for particular terms. Understanding how search engines respond to different information-seeking practices is therefore essential for explaining the dynamics of online conspiracy theories. Existing audits of search engines rarely account for systematic variation in query formulation arising from users’ differing…
Political science (7 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Social media (5 works) · Advertising (4 works) · Business (4 works) · Internet privacy (4 works) · Law (4 works) · The Internet (4 works) · Computer security (3 works)