Advanced analysis technologies for social media

Interest in social media has only increased with time. Social media today represent the main channel to communicate and share personal information. Social media analysis usually combines content-based and network-based analysis. While content-based approaches analyze media using media analysis techniques, network-based approaches analyze static and dynamic network properties with the aim of detecting influencers for marketing purposes. The network-based analysis represents a fundamental process in order to understand the dynamics of these platforms. New techniques and technologies have been proposed in order to enrich the social media analytics field. In particular, decentralized approaches have been proposed in order to face privacy issues, and AI has been applied in order to improve analysis over large sets of data. The main goal of this Special Issue is to collect research contributions, applications, analyses, methodologies, or strategies that strengthen or face the knowledge of social media thanks to advanced analyses or new technologies, such as P2P networks or blockchain. In detail, 5 papers have been published in the Special Issue out of a total of 10 submitted. The next sections provide a brief summary of each of the papers published.