Search

This paper interrogates the informational practices shared between human and computer machine learners as they train to sense the world through lines of order, or vectors. The paper does this by exploring the affective conditions through which vectors draw relations of data over a persistent, colonial image of race. Through analysis of pedagogical practices at the Summer Institute for Computational Social Science in Chicago, and a corresponding year-long machine learning design group, this paper examines how contemporary machine learning practitioners train themselves to sense calculative relationality on the basis of racialized difference. The paper compares this vectorized sensibility with 20th century enumerative practices in the United States by analyzing the racial statistics of W.E.B. Du Bois, Kelly Miller, and Frances Kellor to trace out affective histories of the vector. Ultimately, this paper asks how machine learners – whether algorithms or their human users – often project lines of colonial order upon other forms of life, and how, by questioning the claim of vector relations and their informational objects, we can confront this sense-training and reimagine ourselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Digital Poverty (DP) in England by adopting the DP Alliance's theoretical framework that includes both Individual Determinants (individual capability and motivation) and Circumstantial Determinants (conditions of action). Such a framework is interpreted as an expression of Strong Structuration Theory (SST), by situating the connection between social structure and human agency in an intertwined relationship. We focus on new potential vulnerabilities that are connected to DP in England by drawing on a survey conducted on a randomised stratified sample (n = 1988) of parents aged between 20–55 with children at school. Exploring parents' experience in the COVID-19 era, we identified economic factors and having children with disabilities as important predictors connected to Digital Poverty. Additional socio-demographic traits (such as age and education), parental status, lifestyles and digital behaviours also play a role in predicting some of the determinants linked to Digital Poverty. This paper adds to SST by empirically exploring how individuals use the Internet according to their metabolised embodiment of external determinants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to better understand the processes and procedures adopted by micro-influencers to create 'instagrammable' content. It is based on 17 in-depth interviews with foodie micro-influencers based in London and Barcelona. Interview data was complemented with participant observation in restaurants or cafes. This paper makes three original contributions. Firstly, the study expands the understanding of the concept of 'instagrammability' by approaching it from the perspective of influencers creating content to satisfy and/or grow an audience. Secondly, it illustrates how two dominant factors drive influencers' content creation process: the self/audience focus content branding orientation. The 'audience-focus' content development process varied drastically, with some influencers being very conscious of responding to their audiences' needs whereas others maintained first and foremost a very strong 'self-focus'. However, even for the influencers who were the most responsive to their audiences' perceived wishes, a sense of 'self-focus' was maintained as an anchor point in all developed content, often linked to a passion for a certain type of food. Thirdly, this paper maps and describes the behind-the-scenes content creation process adopted by micro-influencers, including four stages (1) Content Planning, (2) Media Gathering, (3) Editing, and (4) Publishing, which was followed by an engagement phase. This study offers a timely contribution to better comprehend the content creation cycle adopted by micro-influencers by using foodie influencers as a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

News sharing on social media is ubiquitous and extends across demographics, platforms, and political ideologies. Online far-right communities are no exception, with a barrage of embedded news stories populating the social media feeds of far-right users. This has potentially profound implications for liberal democracy, especially given the propensity for far-right communities to spread disinformation via 'fake news'. Yet, we do not know enough about how news content is embedded into far-right discourses, nor the extent to which the practice may contribute to the digital transmission of far-right ideologies. Accordingly, this paper investigates how far-right communities share news media to promulgate illiberalism on social media platforms. The paper aims to uncover the dominant discursive devices deployed to integrate news media reports into far-right discourses. To achieve this aim, this paper applies critical discourse analysis alongside conceptualisations of legitimacy and far-right ideology to an original dataset of social media posts in an Australian context. It finds that news sharing in far-right online circles may legitimise and reify far-right ideology through the juxtaposition of mainstream news media indicating the validity of far-right grievances. The paper also introduces a prototype model of news sharing legitimisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radical-right populist parties will often try to exploit and ride a wave of popular discontent for their own electoral gain. This paper studies the online populist communication of the leaders of the Rassemblement National (RN) in France in the context of the Gilets Jaunes (GJ) protests and the 2019 European election. It analyses the Twitter activity of these leaders to determine whether they temporarily softened their nativist and exclusionary stances to align their communications with the anti-elitist discourse of the protest movement. We explored this question by employing a quantitative text analysis using R Studio tools of their tweets over a 12-month period in combination with a more qualitative analysis of their output on this social media platform. We carried out tests on bigram frequency, network structure, as well as qualitative analysis of posts on the GJ protests and then compared this data with existing works on the GJ, to identify whether and how the RN adapted its social media discourse at strategic times in the election cycle to better suit the Gilets Jaunes' demands and themes. The results provide support for the expectation of a strategic modification and moderation of exclusionary populist discourse online with both politicians returning to nativist themes after the European election campaign was over and the GJ mobilisation lost momentum. We therefore suggest that the change in output is part of a strategic moderation or 'de-demonisation' in order to gain a wider pool of potential voters and in particular those sympathetic to the protest movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do people in the world's largest democracy consume news online? In this paper, I aim to answer this question by conducting a quantitative assessment of the online news consumption behavior of a large sample of Indian internet users (N≈50,000) over a period of 45 months. In doing so, I contribute to theoretical debates about global news media use, by systematically appraising the prominence and trends in audience share of different types of news sources, thereby shedding light on the digital news consumption landscape of a crucial, but understudied context. Theoretically, I engage with the displacement-complementarity hypothesis and find no evidence that digital-born media have contested the hegemony of legacy media in India online. Next, I investigate the regional-national media divide and find that regional, vernacular media have suffered significant declines in their audience shares over time. This begs the question whether the notion of 'polycentrism' – the idea that the Indian media environment is comprised of national and regional media of equivalent weight – is at all applicable online as it is offline. These findings also run counter to claims of 'internet vernacularization' that have been touted in the past. Finally, I propose the concept of audience mobility, and use it to identify qualitatively distinct dynamics in how vernacular audiences in India have migrated to national vis-à-vis international outlets. The findings and their implications are discussed in light of contemporary changes in Indian society that is characterized by rapid digitization and increasing literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Affordances are the perception of what a technical artifact can do. They bridge a technically-determinist perspective with social constructivist theory, acknowledging the material aspects of technology while allowing for user agency. Yet most affordance theory separates out the engagement process into producers and consumers. On one hand, this lens is essential because it considers how an end user interprets, engages, and utilizes technology through their social structure. It highlights how engagement is both constrained and enabled by the creator, but also documents how such engagement might differ from a creator's intention(s) completely. On the other hand, this framework doesn't consider the interactional dimensions of affordances theory. This paper fills this gap, relying on sociotechnical theory to analyze three case studies across three different platforms (Twitter, Google Scholar, and Yandex). In doing so, we explain how pundits, propagandists, and conspiracy theorists 'activate affordances' to validate their claims. When audiences are primed to 'do their own research,' disinformation becomes a more entangled, participatory process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, deepfakes have become part and parcel of contemporary algorithmic culture. It is regularly claimed that they have the potential to introduce novel modes of societal disruption, violence, and harm. Yet, over-emphasising the power of deepfakes risks occluding frictions, struggles, and logics that already persist in the digital landscape. Arguing for a conceptualisation of deepfakes as an assemblage of differential tensions in society, we explore how they represent both a rupture and a continuation of the variegated politics of the image in the social world. The paper analyses the tensions of deepfakes through three distinct case studies: bodies, politics, and ideas of objectivity. Ultimately, we argue that the tensions and ethicopolitical implications of deepfakes are not reducible to a problem that can be solved through a logic of algorithmic detection and verification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the dynamics of peer support and companionship among older adults on a social networking site during the COVID-19 lockdown. Drawing from the authors' five-month experience as volunteer facilitators and a qualitative study involving users, social workers, and managers, the paper examines two modes of online peer support and companionship: one based on voice messages, the other on visual messages. Guided by critical media and data studies, and incorporating concepts from cultural studies of mobile media and information infrastructure studies, the analysis highlights the interplay of relational/emotional and infrastructural work and uncovers intricate gendered and age-related configurations. Our conclusion emphasises, first, the need to comprehend how socio-technical systems shape emotional, relational, and infrastructural work during emergency digital interventions, and second, the importance of examining how specific notions of support and older people's agency and response-ability are embedded in the socio-technical organisation of these digital interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims at creating a bridge between media and migration studies and critical algorithm studies. By adopting a media ecological approach and a mutual shaping of technology and society perspective, in this paper, we explore the factors that lead, especially in Italy, to discriminant and stigmatizing image search results, related to specific groups of immigrants living in the country. We performed a content analysis of Google-Images search results with regard to the largest immigrant communities hosted in France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Results show that the depiction of Romanian, Albanian, Moroccan, and Algerian immigrant communities on Google.it is flattened on a univocal stigmatized representation that shows them as criminals, which is not the case in other countries. Most of these stigmatizing images derive from local online newspapers, which questions the interplay between newsmaking choices and routines, and algorithms logics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores a case of public contention against the censoring of a feature article about a COVID-19 whistleblower on the Chinese social media, WeChat. Moving beyond the normative theory of the public sphere and publics, we draw on Kavada and Poell's theory of 'contentious publicness' which is flexible enough to capture the complexity, diversity and hybridity of digital contention in the context of China. Through a combination of textual analysis and participatory observation, this article analyses how citizens challenged the censorship system and attempted to keep Dr Fen's story online through what we call 'relay activism'. Informed by the three dimensions of 'contentious publicness', we analyse the materiality of the communication infrastructure of WeChat and the temporal and spatial relations of the public contention (focusing primarily on WeChat and GitHub). In doing this, the paper contributes a more comprehensive approach to examining the social, structural and participatory characteristics of the contestation of censorship in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By analyzing Douyin users' mediated interactions with interracial couples in everyday contexts, this paper addresses the convergence of anti-blackness and domestic gender tension on Chinese social media. It introduces the perspective of 'multiple triangulations' to examine discussions of four types of interracial relationships on Douyin: black women and Chinese men, black men and Chinese women, white women and Chinese men, and white men and Chinese women. This approach complicates explanations of why Chinese social media users have been rejecting blackness in a potentially mixed-race China in relation to whiteness and Chineseness. It also illuminates how they have encoded gender tension in marriages in China into anti-black discourses. Additionally, this research highlights the race-blind digital infrastructure and the dynamic connotations of anti-black racism in contemporary China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the 'Decolonising the Internet' themed special issue which includes research presented at the 23rd annual Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference (2022). The conference theme centred on decolonisation, highlighting the persistence of colonial practices but also the resistance they generate. Focusing on the internet as entailing colonial appropriations, reproducing inequalities, and foreclosing alternative ways of being, the conference theme asked participants to consider not only the ways in which the internet walks on the path forged by colonialism, but also how research practices are implicated in reinforcing the same exploitative patterns. This special issue includes seven papers that cover new and innovative approaches to studying decolonising the internet, including contexts related to LGBTQIA + digital spaces, neighbourhood and local surveillance, data colonialism, misinformation and conspiracies, and inclusion and access problems for Indigenous peoples. The papers in this issue also focus on various geographic locations in the Global South, including Africa, South America, and the Asia Pacific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper articulates the emergence of the user-citizen as a result of techno-solutionist approaches to pandemic management by tracing the rapid infrastructuralisation of surveillance in and through the platformisation of pandemic governance in Vietnam. Coinciding with Vietnam's rollout of chip-based national identification cards for citizens over the age of 14, the development of a one-stop 'super-app' solution that streamlines data flows across different domains of authority happened in a context where platforms were increasingly discussed alongside, and understood on the same terms as, infrastructure. By conducting situational analysis of publicly available policy documents and official government communication, the paper traces how pandemic platforms contract and expand in response to evolving pandemic management needs, and gives an account of the evolution of institutional dependency across different domains of authority and technology development. Using Vietnam as a case study, this paper contributes to ongoing theorisation at the intersection of platformisation and infrastructuralisation in pandemic social service provision. The paper is an invitation to examine the increasing entanglements of technology and citizenship performances around the world as they unfold throughout the course of the pandemic and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Chapter 2, I Control, i Shapiro follows gig workers: the human bodies commissioned to enact smart logics of maximum flexibility and modularity, to ensure that goods and money flow with as little "friction" as possible. Drawing from his own time working as a delivery worker for Caviar in Philadelphia, Shapiro vividly demonstrates the lack of predictability and control for the gig worker. [Extracted from the article]

The increasing digitisation of healthcare services has transformed healthcare provision into a data-centric enterprise. Thinking with Joan Tronto and her notion of care, we study medical data practices in the context of a health-tech company developing an algorithmically driven platform to match patients and their physicians with clinical trials. What does it mean to pose the patient in the centre in such a context? In this paper, we show how the enactments of patient-centrism translate to multidimensional enactments of data care for a diversity of domain experts handling medical data, informed by the values and backgrounds of each 'data handler' situated within the concerns of their domain expertise. Where data experts engage solely with the patients' data to facilitate data creation for the platform's algorithmic system, the quest for data quality depends on the preceding practices of care and affective labour about and for the patients. We show how patients get help to torque their medical records and histories into data to fit the demands of the system to ensure access to experimental treatments and clinical trials. We demonstrate how patient-centrism manifests as care for data quality, shaped throughout by differentiated concerns for regulatory compliance. Finally, we argue that regulatory compliance constitutes a care practice across data work that is diversified in its enactments by the experts' domain concerns and backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the emergent field of biocuration, taking it as a case of academic data work. Biocurators organise, manage, and enrich the now vast quantities of data that are produced by the contemporary biosciences, but their work remains largely invisible to the scholarly communities that make use of it. Based on ethnographic engagement with the field and interviews with biocurators, and mobilising conceptual frames of care and epistemic justice, we examine how biocurators frame their data practices, arguing that biocuration can, in emphasising collaboration and care, be seen as an 'academia otherwise' that resists dominant narratives of scholarly excellence. At the same time this explicit framing of data work as care work involves a 'dark side' that elides the epistemic labour involved in it. In closing we suggest that engagement with biocuration leads us to attend to the ways in which care work constitutes technoscientific knowledge, and to the epistemic contributions it may make. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the datafication of ageing by drawing on a practice approach toward care. We describe the datafication of ageing as a matter of care, achieved through the local tinkering of actors – technology designers, care staff, older adults, and highlighting the practices necessary to develop, maintain and implement data infrastructures. This paper draws on research conducted in a qualitative interview study in a LTC facility that uses AI-supported sensors to detect, predict and alarm care staff about falls of older residents. 18 interviews with developers, staff, residents and interest groups were conducted, as well as 24 h of participant observation in the care facility. The results reveal how AI-development for older target groups is characterized by absent data on these populations. Designers turn to practices that decontextualize data from the realities of older adults, relying on domain experts or synthetic data. This decontextualization of data requires recontextualization, with staff and older residents ensuring that the system functions smoothly, adapting their behavior, protecting the system from making false decisions and making existing care arrangements 'fit' the databases used to monitor activities in these arrangements. The ambivalent position of older adults in this data assemblage is further highlighted, as their caring practices are made invisible by different actors through ageist stereotypes, positioning them as being too frail to understand and engage with the system. While their bodily behavior is core for the databases, their perspective on and engagements with the operating system are marginalized, rendering some aspects of ageing hyper-visible, and others invisible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conceptual paper explores the role of communication around data practices of Big Tech companies. By critiquing communication practices, we argue that Big Tech platforms shape users into data subjects through framing, influencing behaviour, and the black-boxing of algorithms. We approach communication about data from three perspectives: (1) current data communication constructs reductive data identities for users and contributes to the colonization of daily routines; (2) by strategically deploying the black box metaphor, tech companies try to legitimize abuses of power in datafication processes; (3) the logic in which communication is mediated through the interfaces of Big Tech platforms is normalizing this subjectification. We argue that critical data literacy can foster individual resilience and allows users to resist exploitative practices, but this depends on transparent communication. The opposite seems standard among tech companies that obfuscate their data practices. Current commercial appropriations of data ethics need to be critically assessed against the background of increasing competition in the digital economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the performance of the far-right community in the Australian Twittersphere during two information crises: the 2019–2020 Australian bushfires and the early months of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Using a mixed method approach to analysing the performance of far-right accounts active in both crises and using an information disorder index to estimate the quality of information being shared on Twitter during the two events, we found that far-right accounts moved from the periphery of these disaster-driven conversations during the Australian bushfires to assume a more central location during the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that an increase in information disorder and overperformance of far-right accounts during COVID-19 is suggestive of an association between the two, which warrants further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Secondary data collection practices are often opaque to platform users and researchers but known to shape individuals' life chances in significant and unequal ways. In this paper, we articulate a clear relationship between invisible, unwanted data collection and its adverse, downstream consequences for marginalized groups by examining instances in the criminal justice field where social media data function as criminal evidence. We show how social media, as a now common form of courtroom evidence, may structurally work against public defense attorneys and defendants with low socioeconomic status (SES). Drawing on casework interviews with public defenders in New York City, we illustrate the mechanisms by which low-SES criminal defendants are at a disadvantage through overbroad search warrants, asymmetrical cooperation, and prejudicial evidence. We discuss the lessons and implications of our case study for platform privacy and governance research and for the courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although other social media platforms have seen a steeper increase in users recently, Facebook is still the social networking site with the largest number of users worldwide. A large number of studies from the social and behavioral sciences have investigated the antecedents, types, and consequences of its use. In addition or as an alternative to self-reports from users, many studies have used data from the platform itself, usually collected via its Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). However, with the drastic reduction of data access via the Facebook APIs following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, this data source has essentially become unavailable to academic researchers. Hence, there is a need for different modes of data access for what Freelon (2018) has called the 'post-API age'. One promising approach is to directly collaborate with platform users to ask them to share (parts of) their personal Facebook data with researchers. This paper presents experiences from two studies employing such approaches. The first used a browser plugin to unobtrusively observe Facebook use while users are active. The second asked participants to export and share parts of their personal Facebook data archive. While both approaches yield promising insights suitable to extend or replace self-reports, both also entail specific limitations. We discuss and compare the unique advantages and limitations of both approaches and provide a list of recommendations for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital divide gained new importance since the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemics. However, the phenomenon is far from being fully conceptualized or effectively measured. The key question, whether digital divide is a mere extension of other social inequalities, or it has significant new meaning, remains largely unanswered; a reason is the lack of effective instruments of quantitative study of the phenomenon that would capture its complex nature. The present paper addresses both conceptualizing and measurement issues, suggesting that separation of supply- and demand-side considerations is crucial in understanding the digital divide and introducing a composite Digital Life Index, measures separately the digital supply and demand across seven independent dimensions. The Index is based on Internet-borne data, a distinction from traditional research approaches that rely on official statistics or surveys. Though the empiric part of the paper is focused on the sub-national digital divide in Russia we argue that its methodology can be applied on many other levels and its conceptual findings are relevant to understanding the phenomenon globally. The hierarchical regression analysis is used to determine the relative importance of factors like income, human capital, and policy in shaping the digital divide. The result of the analysis suggests that the digital divide is driven more by the differences in demand than in supply; the role of income is insignificant, and the quality of policy and human capital is the key determinant of the divide. The paper advances the existing conceptual and methodological literature on the issue and can also inform practical decision-making regarding the strategies of national and regional digital development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past decades have seen efforts to increase digital inclusion for women worldwide, with the ultimate aim to advance gender equality. However, progress is slow, despite important advances in moving beyond a focus on 'digital access' (as measured by network coverage and hardware) towards a more holistic understanding of inclusion that considers abilities, awareness and agency. Here, we propose a further theoretical shift that draws on social system theories (e.g., Luhmann, 1984) and on the theory of 'intersecting inequalities' (Kabeer, 2010). We propose to understand the gender digital gap, particularly in mobile and internet usage, not merely descriptively but dynamically – since even factors like agency and awareness change over time – by applying concepts of feedback loops, low-equilibrium traps, multi-dimensional exclusion and systems analysis. This paper highlights how women may become locked in a state of low-inclusion unless the feedback loops between digital, social, economic and political exclusion are addressed through policies that tackle multiple dimensions. The paper reviews research on gender digital gaps with particular focus on developing countries, and with direct implications for policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the 'Independence' themed special issue which includes research presented at the 22nd annual Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference (2021). 'Independence' as a special issue theme could hardly be timelier, both in geopolitical and internet research terms. The call for the 2021 AoIR annual conference asked us to reflect on the ambivalence of the term, to look back on historical struggles for independence, the long waves of history, and prompted us to ask who benefits from independence (and who does not). Hosted online for a second year, this time by universities in Philadelphia (USA), the conference was bounded by the Black Lives Matter movement, the insurrectionist storming of Washington, D.C.'s Capitol Hill, and global struggles to control the COVID-19 pandemic. This special issue includes nine papers that showcase new research exploring the affordances offered by digital media platforms to people, users, and workers, while also identifying tendencies towards new forms of control and surveillance facilitated by platforms. Topics include geopolitical and biopolitical digital sovereignty, facial recognition technologies, data divides, new methods approaches and innovative data sourcing, mobile and social media, examinations of embodied local knowledge as well as patriarchal, racist, and gendered social structures, and a broad range of field sites from Asia, Africa, and South America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital inclusion research explores the complex inequalities among different societal groups that affect people's ability to fully participate in social, economic, and cultural life. Globally, digital inequalities exist between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and this paper contributes to a growing body of literature focused on Indigenous digital inclusion in Australia. This paper outlines how a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers developed an Indigenous research methodology to investigate the digital inclusion challenges, and opportunities, for Aboriginal families living in a remote community on Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria. This methodology applies principles of decolonisation, through Indigenous yarning and photography, to foreground the voices of Indigenous people in articulating barriers and solutions to low levels of digital inclusion in their community. The findings detail the everyday and novel ways Indigenous families use the internet and digital devices, and how these insights might inform Indigenous-focused policy, practices and programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During COVID-19, there has been an unprecedented rise of videoconferencing use, primarily through Zoom. This increasingly popularity of Zoom has led to growing debates about its negative health impacts. In particular, 'Zoom fatigue' is a rapidly popularizing phenomena that describes the mental exhaustion or burnout arising from Zoom use. However, the specific mechanisms through which Zoom leads to Zoom fatigue are not well understood. To fill this gap, this study tested a mediated model linking Zoom use with the camera on ('ZUC') to Zoom fatigue, through the mediator of social interaction anxiety on Zoom, with a survey sample from the United Kingdom. It was also posited that self-monitoring positively moderated the effects of ZUC on social interaction anxiety on Zoom. The results demonstrated that the direct effects of ZUC on Zoom fatigue was significant and positive. The paper also showed that social interaction anxiety on Zoom increased Zoom fatigue. However, ZUC failed to indirectly increase Zoom fatigue due to the insignificant effects of ZUC on social interaction anxiety on Zoom. Self-monitoring also did not moderate the insignificant relationship between ZUC and social interaction anxiety on Zoom. These insights can guide conceptual frameworks for future research exploring the social psychological impacts of digital media on health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Burgess and Bruns (2015) have linked the computational turn in social media research to an increase in the number of studies focussing exclusively on 'easy data', such as the 'low hanging fruit' provided by Twitter hashtags. This paper explores whether there is a preponderance of such easy data in digital activism research through a systematic review of relevant journal articles published between 2011 and 2018 (N = 315). Specifically, it examines whether computational digital methods have become increasingly prominent in digital activism research during this period. A key focus of the paper is the extent to which digital activism research focused on easily accessible Twitter data, and whether these were obtained via standard API services. Results indicate that (1) traditional research methodologies were more commonly deployed in these articles than digital methods, but (2) Twitter was the most researched platform in the corpus, and (3) single-platform hashtag studies were an archetype of digital activism research alongside single-platform Facebook studies and holistic approaches (hybrid, multi-method & multi-sited, e.g., ethnography). The paper concludes by advocating for greater diversity in terms of the methodological approaches adopted in digital activism research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue of Information, Communication, and Society (ICS) is edited by the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology (CITAMS) section of the American Sociological Association and includes papers that were first presented at either the 2021 or 2022 ASA meetings or Media Sociology Symposia. For this special issue, an innovative editorial approach was taken that brought the editing process into a graduate classroom. That process is described below along with a brief introduction to themes of the selected articles. Key themes for this special issue include content analysis, ethics, privacy, new economy, and digital inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central to the growth and visibility of conspiracy theory QAnon is the #SaveTheChildren movement – a digital social movement aimed to bring awareness to and end child trafficking. This paper analyzes the #SaveTheChildren movement on image-sharing platform Instagram, where the hashtag (and related others) had to be shielded by the platform because of its association with QAnon. A thematic analysis of #SaveTheChildren posts examines the motivations, tactics, and desired outcomes of the movement. Emergent themes highlight the pervasive spread of misinformation regarding human trafficking and the ideological, political, and social motivations of posters. Drawing on shared reality theory and social identity theory, we argue that the movement represents a 'networked moral panic' and explore the structural limitations of digital social movements in an era of information disorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contexts where young people feel prohibited from reflecting openly on sensitive political issues, they may explore alternative ways to communicate and negotiate their opinions and beliefs. Internet memes are popular digital artifacts that offer a space for such debates. This research focuses on the Internet memes that were created and used as an unconventional method for discussing post-genocide peacebuilding processes among Rwandan youth. These memes were made in storytelling workshops that involved interacting with transmedia projects and creating stories about peacebuilding and reconciliation processes in Rwanda, Guatemala and Cambodia. Within this context, this study approaches memes as participatory tools that allow (1) youth inclusion in post-genocide peacebuilding, often considered an 'adult topic' and (2) the mapping out of the social imaginaries of peace by young people in post-genocide societies. The paper analyzes how and why young Rwandans negotiate peacebuilding processes through memes and the ambivalence of utilizing memes for youth participation. The results suggest that meme-making emerged mainly as a response to intergenerational differences in discussing the genocide and peace-related issues. Humor in the memes unveiled differences in the ways of addressing peacebuilding processes. Detachment from other contexts resulted in more sarcastic articulations, whereas proximity led to more positive reflections on how peacebuilding should unfold in post-genocide societies. While meme-making proved to be useful for sparking discussions and manifesting imaginaries of peace, it also showed how certain dominant discourses about peacebuilding processes are embraced and often not contested within memes due to self-censorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communicative responsiveness of politicians to public opinion signals has become increasingly important for politicians' electoral fate and citizens' sense of feeling represented. Although politicians can communicate directly with the public via social media, little is known about the extent, conditions, and favorability of politicians' responsiveness on social media to public opinion cues. This paper scrutinizes politicians' responsiveness to one particular public opinion signal: street protest. Do politicians respond to street protest on social media? And if so, when, and how do they react? We address these questions by means of two datasets: (1) a protest event dataset of all protests staged in Brussels (Belgium) between July 2017 and June 2019 (N = 124); and (2) a social media dataset containing all Facebook messages (N = 36.323) and tweets (N = 142.596) by Belgian politicians (N = 236) in the days surrounding each protest. Results show that politicians do respond to protest and its issue; the lion's share of social media messages supporting protesters. Protest that is large, (inter)nationally coordinated, and organized on socio-cultural issues is more frequently discussed by politicians; left-wing, opposition, and issue-owning politicians are more responsive as well. Whereas especially left-wing politicians endorse protests, right-wing politicians are more prone to discredit it. Responsiveness is thus asymmetric across the political spectrum. Our findings have implications for democratic representation and its challenges in hybrid media systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines refugee women's ICT and digital media usage during the Covid-19 pandemic. It aims to ascertain how women in refugee accommodation centres in Hamburg, Germany overcome information precarity due to limited or no internet access when public life primarily moved to the digital world. The discussion in this paper is drawn from 32 semi-structured interviews conducted during the fall and winter of 2020 with refugee women from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Eritrea, Ghana, Syria, and Turkey. The study findings reveal that once all public life either closed or transferred online, refugee women and their families could no longer participate in everyday life or continue their education. The study established that the lack of internet access and hardware at refugee accommodations exacerbated pre-existing social inequalities, turning them into digital isolation and social exclusion. At the same time, the study found that when instant knowledge becomes pivotal in the fight against coronavirus, the lack of access to adequate information for refugees fosters distrust in measures taken to overcome the pandemic and appears to provide fertile ground for misinformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferation of hate speech and disinformation on social media has prompted democratic countries around the world to discuss adequate regulations to limit the power exerted by platforms over national politics. As a result, the once ostensibly uniform content moderation practices of social media companies are becoming increasingly territorialized, and the governance of online political speech is constantly negotiated between global social media platforms and national governments. To comprehend the evolving landscape of online political speech governance, this paper scrutinizes how Facebook has adapted its content moderation practices to the political and legal contexts of three democratic nations: the United States, Germany, and South Korea. We assessed national laws and governmental documents to explain the regulatory landscapes of the three countries, and used VPNs and corporate PR materials to see how Facebook's platform design and public communication diverge by location. The findings suggest that the seemingly 'splintering' regulatory frameworks still have a 'centralizing' effect: Facebook formally complies with national laws, but its platform interface and communication activities steer users away from the local systems and towards its centralized operations. We discuss future implications for the regulation of online political speech in democratic nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digitalization supports the development of platform organizations, changing work relationships between individuals and organizations. This paper analyzes workers' perceptions of autonomy and control in for- and non-profit platform organizations. Based on a mixed-methods study combining qualitative interviews and a quantitative questionnaire in digital food supply chains, this contribution empirically evaluates the interrelation of autonomy and control for two German sample groups of riders and volunteers. The analysis shows that the perceptions of autonomy and control are constitutive of work outcomes and thus essential for understanding work relationships in platform organizations. These perceptions differ in for- and non-profit contexts, providing insights to motivation and labor processes in platform work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the Twitter communication of Tanzania's first female President Samia Suluhu Hassan. Informed largely by African feminism, this study explores the relationship between Samia's political discourse and gender perspectives on her Twitter account within the frame of Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis. Specifically, this study looked at the construction of her identity and leadership attributes as the country's first female leader and found that her identity, 'Mama Samia', signals respect that evokes the African conception of a respected mother. Indeed, even though gender-constructed feminine roles as mother take precedence, gradually her stature as a national leader is eroding these stereotype labels a handful of hostile sexist comments notwithstanding. In effect, the president's leadership attributes as constructed in her Twitter discourse are more feminine than masculine. Yet, it is these same feminine attributes of nurturance, wisdom, humility, humanity, collaborative-ness, calmness and politeness that present more of an advantage than a disadvantage in her leadership. Overall, netizens have been accommodative of these feminine attributes, which they find to be effective in addressing pressing national issues in the economy, political and social sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a 2020 disinformation campaign promoting the unsubstantiated claim that the novel coronavirus is the product of a Chinese bioweapons program. Exploiting a vulnerability in open-access scientific publishing, the campaign was based on papers posted to an online preprint repository designed to accelerate the diffusion of scientific knowledge. This provided the campaign with an air of scientific legitimacy, helped it reach millions of Americans, and muddied public discourse over the origins of SARS-CoV-2. This case study offers insights into the tactics and practices of media manipulation, the contested nature of modern epistemic systems, the interplay of technical and social systems, and the vulnerability of open systems to manipulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the logic of surveillance capitalism manifests itself within the public sector with a specific interest in how the government's use of data about its citizens may reconfigure rights and power. In Denmark, for example, the public administration relies heavily on the processing of vast quantities of data about the individual and increasingly uses predictive analytics to identify specific areas of intervention, such as fraud or vulnerability, as part of its decision-making processes. Methodologically, the paper uses Denmark as an example of the digital welfare state, including two public sector cases of automated decision support, namely Gladsaxe municipality and the central processing of welfare benefits (Udbetaling Danmark). It further investigates Danish digitalisation strategies, particularly the governments AI strategy from 2019. The case is examined with a view to understand how technology (and automated decision support in particular) is deployed by state actors, which interests it serves, and how it may benefit or disadvantage the individual. Theoretically, the paper leans towards theories of surveillance capitalism, governance in the digital era, and data politics and rights. The paper argues that unless a more critical and human-centric approach to 'smart governance' is taken, the digital welfare state will advance a digital technocracy that treats its citizens as data points suited for calculation and prediction rather than as individuals with agency and rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have long been critical of development agendas where Global North organisations develop aid programmes and resources to address inequalities in the Global South, which tend to reflect Western values, frameworks, and identity. Critical response can be seen in current calls for decolonising the 'resourcing' of LGBTQ+ young people in the Global South. Drawing from the postcolonial lenses of 'Asia as Method' and a reorienting of that paradigm through 'queer Asia as method', we argue for 'queering' approaches to digitally resourcing LGBTQ+ young people in the region by centring the knowledge of local communities. This paper is informed by findings from two research projects involving digital resources on young people's digital citizenship, safety, literacy and participation, and the lived experiences of respondents from 10 countries across the Asia Pacific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical scholarship about datafication reveals the implications of algorithmically driven digital transformations for both social processes and human experiences of subjectivity. Digital transformations embed ontological beliefs in the information systems that drive new organizational processes and are accompanied by techno-positivist discourses that promote the benefits of these schemes. The dual power of new information systems plus strong discursive influences has led to fears that data subjects will come to be defined by data and information systems – that their subjectivity will be subordinated by the algorithm. However, in this paper, we argue that real experiences of data sharing offer a means to reveal actual experiences with subjectification, and that often these experiences are multiple and complex. Drawing on the results of five digital literacy interventions carried out by partner organizations in Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay in 2021, we consider participants' lived experiences with datafication. Our work reveals how people experience, negotiate, reject, and accept data power's multiple manifestations in ways that strategically mobilize data resources, constituting a fractured data subjectivity that overlaps the bounds of any one information system. This leads us to suggest the idea of the 'unhomed' as a useful concept for understanding data subjectification in the contemporary moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Specialty coffee is increasingly produced and consumed as part of routine life in many cities in modern China, but the social and cultural shifts it has engendered yet to be systematically examined. By examining the intersections between social media and the operations of independent Chinese coffeehouses in the field of taste, this paper puts forward the idea of new taste among Chinese millennials, which comprises individual subjectivity, heterogeneous social relationships, and forms of class distinction. Using taste-oriented keyword searches on WeChat official accounts, 20 articles were returned and analyzed in terms of their textural and visual orientations to examine the processes underlying how taste is influenced in the consumption of specialty coffee in China. Findings suggest the importance of taste makers in this process, from routine creation of aesthetic ambience in the coffeehouses to the construction of affective taste spaces online, and the establishment of taste cycles from online to offline, which all underpin class privilege. Moreover, the emergence of an 'urban café community' appears to be characterized by specific forms of belonging resulting from a productive effect of the interplay between independent coffeehouses and consumers in everyday urban life in which a set of aesthetic boundaries reside. Second, these digital consumers distinguish themselves socially by positioning themselves as having a cosmopolitan taste grounded in coffee appreciation instead of merely consuming coffee for physiological benefits. These findings extend taste propositions through engagement of Chinese digital millennial consumers to uncover the underlying cultural classifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Red Table Talk, a web series exclusively aired on Facebook Watch, represents the narrative of intergenerational Black women who tackle critical conversations. The show, developed by Jada Pinkett-Smith and featuring her daughter and mother, brings in special guests for discussions on race, gender identity, sexual and mental health, co-parenting, and relationships. This paper relies on both qualitative and quantitative data from an audience survey, supplemented by thematic analysis to explore these themes. We show how the alternative media model of Facebook Watch and the series itself act as rebellions against institutionalized narratives that perpetuate stereotypes against people of color. We examine how Black women creators reclaim agency and resist generational forms of silencing by authoring a counter-narrative at the intersection of their lived cultural experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore how highly visible users in the context of #BlackLivesMatter on TikTok shape the narrative around Black victims of police brutality, the understanding of these narratives by others, and the potential consequences of these portrayals for the movement at large. To examine these dimensions, we analysed the 100 most circulated TikTok videos and associated comments depicting victims of police brutality using the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag through multimodal critical discourse analysis. We identified how users attempted to increase visibility of their content, and how this was supported or criticised by commenters depending on the perceived motives of these efforts. Furthermore, we showcased how influencers raised awareness of the movement with little personal effort or risk, sometimes appearing to leverage the movement for self-exposure. Our analysis showed that many of the most liked videos were made by white content creators who, in their videos, seemed to be addressing an imagined white audience. While these efforts portrayed the movement favourably, the content creators remain outsiders who have not themselves been in harm's way of police brutality. While there were exceptions that promoted the perspectives of marginalised communities, and while the white narratives were consistently supportive of the movement, they also work to displace focus on racial (in)justice away from those directly affected by it, that is, away from Black people's own experiences of police brutality. We discuss these findings in relation to questions about digital representations of Black victimhood, digital visibility and practices of whiteness, on TikTok and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media may have amplified the Black Lives Matter movement, but companies like Facebook are often accused of not doing enough to address online hate speech. These platforms nevertheless have the potential to facilitate informal learning about the color blind racism through which whites rationalize the inequalities and injustices experienced by People of Color (PoC). This paper adds to the emergent literature in this area by exploring a high-profile Twitterstorm in February 2018 following a tweet from Cambridge University Professor Mary Beard about the sexual misconduct of Oxfam aid workers in Haiti. Academics like Dr Priya Gopal faced much criticism for suggesting the tweet was evidence of the white fragility and privilege to which they were frequently subjected. A qualitative content analysis of 1718 unique tweets containing 'Mary Beard', posted between 16 and 20 February 2018, was conducted to assess whether there was much evidence of agonistic debate between critics and supporters of Beard about whiteness. Results indicate that there were twice as many tweets criticizing Beard for her performative white privilege and frailty than those defending her. While the framing of the Twitterstorm was generally agonistic, there was little evidence of informal learning, with PoC conspicuously under-represented. Indeed, the burden of talking about racism and whiteness fell on the few PoC in the corpus, in much the same way as the 'pre-social media' era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media platforms are increasingly looked at as means to investigate social phenomena like collective events, issues or causes. Digital methods – techniques exclusively focused on online data and shaped by the environment hosting these data – have become part and parcel of these investigations, often approaching platforms as hybrid assemblages of users, infrastructures, and algorithms. In its 'online groundness', this type of digital methods research, however, often tends to skim over the socio-cultural, contextual dimension of both wider social phenomena and social media uses and practices. In this paper, we advance a threefold contribution aimed at both sparking future efforts to address this limitation and aligning digital methods inquiry with contemporary epistemological debates that counter universalistic views of platforms and data. First, we question the degree to which digital methods can inform social investigations of collective events, issues or causes. Second, we advance a digital methods paradigm that addresses platforms as socio-cultural artifacts rather than hybrid assemblages. Finally, by reflecting on how we accessed, handled, and explored 9,000 Instagram visuals and around 400,000 Facebook comments to understand influences on middle class understandings of food consumption in Brazil and South Africa, we illustrate a way to design culturally sensitive digital methods research built on 'quanti-quali' practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early days of the internet, it was hoped that digital technology would bring about democracy and positive outcomes for society. Recently, the debate has shifted towards tech lash with many critics pointing towards technology companies undermining democracy, stability, and sustainability. As a result, a new consensus seems to be emerging among policymakers, companies, and civil societal actors that self-regulation has to move towards co-regulation. This Special Issue of Information, Communication and Society draws together cutting-edge contributions on three core themes in scholarly and policy discourse on platform regulation: First, the papers in this special issue enhance empirical understandings of the role of the state in governing social media platforms developing in the United States, Europe, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Second, they provide a holistic framework to understand policy problems that need to be addressed, which helps to develop and evaluate new policy initiatives. Finally, papers point towards three approaches in governing social media platforms and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of content moderation, process-based co-regulation, as well as competition regulation and alternative business models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a study of focus groups on three vulnerable population categories (ethnic minorities, older people and people with disabilities) and explores the patterns of intersectionality in these populations' digital inclusion and its role in their social inclusion. The paper illustrates the value of the concept of intersectionality within the study of the aforementioned three vulnerable populations' digital inclusion and questions the existing evidence available on the roles of nationality, ageing and disability in their digital inclusion. It identifies patterns of intersectionality that stress the role of individuality and life circumstances (such as life changes and periods of transition), as well as the stigma and concomitant experiences of social marginalisation regarding the digital inclusion of these populations. The paper concludes by pointing out the policy significance of intersectional patterns in the digital domain and calls for a systematic study of the different categories of the cultural and social specificities of vulnerability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores self-visual presentation practices by female political candidates on Facebook during Kenya's political campaigns that culminated in the national elections of 2022. The unit of analysis is the Facebook profile image of the women leaders. Image-centrism is operationalized as the extent to which 'the image' becomes the primary mode of self-presentation in political communication discourse. The study adopts a social semiotic approach to image interpretation postulated by Roland Barthes (1972. Mythologies. (A. Lavers. Trans) (Original work published 1957), 1977. Rhetoric of the image. In Image, music, text (pp. 32–51). Hill and Wang) and Kress and van Leeuwen (1996. Reading images: The grammar of visual design. Routledge, 2006. Reading images: The grammar of visual design (2nd ed.). Routledge). Using Kress and van Leeuwen's approach, images are studied as 'linguistic codes' that have their own 'grammatical' structure. Barthes's approach explores the cultural dimension of the images. The argument here is that visual communication is context-bound, and the theoretical premise laid is that politics is given direction, shape, and impetus by the culture of a people. In order to understand visual political communication in Kenya, therefore, the study analyses and interprets images from the lens of the wider African cultural contexts within which this communication takes place. The overarching questions in this study include: How did female politicians in Kenya strategically use Facebook images for self-representation during the political campaigns in 2022? How have women politicians in Kenya interwoven cultural ideology with visual political communication on their Facebook pages? The ultimate conclusion is that political images not only serve as discourses for communicating political ideas and making political statements, but they also serve as self-representation modes as well as cultural manifestation codes that illuminate specific societal concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this blended ethnography, combining fieldwork with campus conservative organizations/figures and digital ethnography of their social media, we explore how capitalism, Christianity, and conservatism are brought together and branded for youth. We argue that campus conservative organizations like Turning Point USA are important sites for mainstreaming, branding, and circulating an assemblage of conservative, Christian, and racialized discourses aligned with Christian nationalism and against the left. We analyze how this 'friend enemy distinction' occurs through gendered social media practices, constructing female 'cuteservatives', influencers who sell friendship and t-shirts, and masculine heroes who battle a socialist enemy. We explore how these discourses are produced, marketed, and circulated. And finally, through Turning Point's celebration of Kyle Rittenhouse, we show the dangerous potential consequences of this violent rhetoric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

NSO Group is an Israeli cyber surveillance firm notorious for Pegasus – an intrusive malware capable of covertly taking control of smartphones and remotely extracting their contents. In 2019, after a series of unflattering reports on governments' use of Pegasus to infiltrate the phones of activists and journalists, NSO embarked on an uncharacteristically public legitimation campaign. This article focuses on this campaign and explores how this otherwise secretive spyware company publicly legitimizes its surveillance. Based on an empirical analysis of hundreds of public documents across various media, we explore NSO's legitimacy management practices and identify the audiences and contexts of this legitimation. Our analysis identified four legitimation practices: securitization, Zionist patriotism, ethics washing, and normalization. We argue that these legitimation strategies operate across two interrelated axes of legitimation: a local axis that echoes a particularly Israeli 'security-driven populism'; and a universal axis that follows Silicon Valley's ethics washing. We show that these legitimation axes are designed to simultaneously ensure the company's survivability and to sustain surveillance realism – the perception of surveillance as the only viable option This article contributes to the emerging literature on cyber surveillance firms and to the burgeoning research on the legitimation of surveillance by shedding light on the discursive infrastructures behind contemporary cyber espionage. Moreover, while surveillance is often understood as a global phenomenon, this article highlights the need to focus on the local contexts from which surveillance originates to understand its sustainability, expansion, and vulnerabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]