Search

The targeted digital advertising infrastructures on which the business models of the social media platform economy rest have been the subject of significant academic and political interest. In this paper, we explore and theorise the appropriation of these infrastructures -- designed for commercial and political advertising -- by the state. In the U.K., public sector bodies have begun to repurpose the surveillance and messaging capacities of these social media platforms, along with the influencer economy, to deliver targeted behaviour change campaigns to achieve public policy goals. We explore how frameworks of behavioural government have aligned with Internet platforms' extensive infrastructures and the commercial ecologies of professionalised strategic marketing. We map the current extent of these practices in the U.K. through case studies and empirical research in Meta's Ad Library dataset. Although the networks of power and discourse within the ad infrastructure are indeed acting to shape the capacities of the state to engage in online influence, public bodies are mobilising their own substantial material networks of power and data to re-appropriate them to their own ends. Partly as a result of attempts by Meta to restrict the targeting of protected characteristics, we observe state communications campaigns building up what we term patchwork profiles of minute behavioural, demographic, and location-based categories in order to construct and reach particular groups of subjects. However, rather than a clear vision of a 'cybernetic society' of reactive information control, we instead find a heterogeneous and piecemeal landscape of different modes of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, anti-immigrant, racist and nationalist attitudes have become increasingly mainstream, transforming public debates on immigration and immigrants in Europe and beyond. These attitudes and sentiments have been widely disseminated and amplified through digital communication, including commercial social media platforms. To better understand the relationship between racism and digital communication, it is necessary to move beyond media-centric explanations and simplified discussions of online hate speech and platform regulation. Therefore, this paper proposes a multi-theoretical approach to digital racism, i.e., racist content produced and circulated online. The paper presents an understanding of digital racism in relation to four perspectives: networked affect, nationalism, masculinity and conspiracy thinking. It takes a relational approach to these theoretical perspectives and discusses how they could be utilized to understand and analytically approach digital racism at the macro, meso and micro levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue contributes to an emerging literature on the role of social media in shaping narratives on migrants and refugees. The issue is organised into two parts. The first part offers analytical and empirical reflections on the dynamics of digital racism, xenophobia and polarisation on discourses by non-migrants, on migrants and refugees. The second part turns to the narratives promoted by migrants themselves through digital platforms as ways of both counteracting dominant narratives but also performing their own migrant subjectivity and creating a public digital identity for themselves. This introductory paper starts by offering a set of analytical considerations on the role of narratives in the communicative sphere in general and on the role of social media in particular with a view to framing the six paper contributions that follow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do public actors visualize the future? Mediations of the future often construct audiences’ prospective actions, and offer insights into society’s imagination of desirable and undesirable futures. In the visually-saturated environment of social media, projections are often visual. Unlike their textual counterparts, future-oriented election visuals have remained understudied. Thus, our paper explores how public actors substantiate their future-oriented, multi-modal claims and the rhetorical outcomes of different strategies. Building on the notion of technologies’ “temporal affordances”, we utilize an inductive qualitative approach to visual rhetoric and analyze projection anchoring strategies using a sample of 400 future-oriented multi-modal tweets. We find that anchoring is carried out in two layers: evidential (the validity of the future-oriented narrative), and visual (the level of aesthetic realism in the image). Examining recurring patterns of anchoring strategies across the sample result in a rhetorical typology of future-oriented visuals, in two modes (consumerism and competition). Overall, our findings highlight the rhetorical pliability of visual anchoring, through which actors utilize an interplay of temporal and technological strategies to generate alternative anchoring in sharing their projections, and to remain authentic in visualizing the unknown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The late 2016 case of the Facebook content moderation controversy over the infamous Vietnam-era photo, “The Terror of War,” is examined in this paper for both its specifics, as well as a mechanism to engage in a larger discussion of the politics and economics of the content moderation of user-generated content. In the context of mainstream commercial social media platforms, obfuscation and secrecy work together to form an operating logic of opacity, a term and concept introduced in this paper. The lack of clarity around platform policies, procedures and the values that inform them lead users to wildly different interpretations of the user experience on the same site, resulting in confusion in no small part by the platforms’ own design. Platforms operationalize their content moderation practices under a complex web of nebulous rules and procedural opacity, while governments and other actors clamor for tighter controls on some material, and other members of civil society demand greater freedoms for online expression. Few parties acknowledge the fact that mainstream social media platforms are already highly regulated, albeit rarely in such a way that can be satisfactory to all. The final turn in the paper connects the functions of the commercial content moderation process on social media platforms like Facebook to their output, being either the content that appears on a site, or content that is rescinded: digital detritus. While meaning and intent of user-generated content may often be imagined to be the most important factors by which content is evaluated for a site, this paper argues that its value to the platform as a potentially revenue-generating commodity is actually the key criterion and the one to which all moderation decisions are ultimately reduced. The result is commercialized online spaces that have far less to offer in terms of political and democratic challenge to the status quo and which, in fact, may serve to reify and consolidate power rather than confront it.

The social live streaming service Twitch was launched in 2008 as Justin.tv, rebranded as Twitch Interactive in 2011, and acquired by Amazon in 2014. Although launched originally as a portal to broadcast videogames, Twitch currently hosts a wide range of content, including science and technology channels. Yet, despite growing interest in this online video sharing platform, Twitch's potential for the study of science videos has been underexploited to date. This paper seeks to go some way to remedying this by studying the potential of Twitch as a data source for social media academic metrics. To do so, a scientometrics-inspired framework (the OBA framework) is proposed to integrate the analysis of Twitch, science videos and research organizations under a common conceptual space. Then, a science-related Twitch channel -- National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) -- is used as a case study. We analyse 197 videos published by NASA between March 2017 and December 2022, as well as 51,935 clips created from NASA videos. Data were collected from the official Twitch API, which is also analysed to identify the units and metrics available and the channel's performance in retrospective quantitative studies (i.e., non-live broadcasts). The results show that Twitch allows in-depth metric analyses of science videos to be undertaken, facilitating identification of both the activity and output-level impact of a scientific organization such as NASA. However, the Twitch API presents a few constraints, due, in the main, to the limited availability of many metrics that are restricted in time range, quantity, accuracy, or access, and which as such limit comprehensive retrospective studies. Despite these technical limitations, it is estimated that Twitch offers considerable potential for the study of science-related activity. The OBA model proposed facilitates the analysis of the activity of specific scientific agents (not only organizations but journals or other aggregates) under a conceptual framework based on approaches applied in quantitative studies of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social platform Reddit hosts a set of communities that denounce offensive behavior, invoking scrutiny and shame on (categories of) individuals. Despite varying in their targets, they all promote actionable content to an audience who can view, share and comment on it. These groups allow a global public to air grievances, enabling both accountability and abuse. Following high profile scandals, Reddit routinely sanctions and purges problematic 'subreddits'. As a matter of self-preservation, subreddits that watch over the public also maintain heightened scrutiny of their own members. Group rules and other prescriptive texts are a means to instill this scrutiny among a broader audience. In analyzing rules and other content management practices in 68 shaming based subreddits, this paper considers how these groups temper platform-based denunciation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media affects and is affected by our literacies -- the way we make, share, and produce a sense of what is happening in these digital spaces. The purpose of this paper is to explore the methodological landscape of literacy research on social media. To achieve this, 161 papers that have explored social media and literacies were systematically reviewed. Results show that most of the research studies reviewed relied on qualitative methods as the dominant mode of obtaining information, although many integrated several data sources. Additionally, findings show that most studies do not use social media data and instead rely on traditional data sources, such as surveys. Overall, this study highlights opportunities for researchers to explore the connection between social media and literacies in innovative ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extant research has addressed various concerns of representativeness in digital social research including: bias in researchers’ selection of online spaces, foci on single-platform approaches, and limited or skewed samples due to API (application programming interface) restrictions. This paper adds to that work through an illustration of tool bias towards specific social media logics (e.g., Twitter logics) in a URL-based network across/within social media sites (illustrative case study = greenwashing). These “biases” are implicit in design, mirror extant societal trends, and are reinforced through platform biases. As such, researchers using such tools (above all, non-computational scholars) may have little awareness of these subliminal influences. The paper consequently argues that (a) tool choices often fall prey to issues in representation, reinforcing existing biases on a subliminal level; and, that (b) non-platform-specific creative situational approaches (like cross-platform URL explorations) provide a much-needed understanding of wider platform dynamics that highlight such biases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communication is fundamental for preventing and managing youth mental health, and for effectively maintaining and improving their emotional wellbeing. Nevertheless, crucial challenges to communication in this context remain. In recent years rapid technological change has produced increasingly complex forms of communication, which hold out great promise in this area. Emoji have the potential to play a key role in the communication of mental health-related information in areas such as: self-disclosure, engagement, treatment intervention, and mental health education. However, compared with their roles in other fields (e.g., computer science, communication, marketing), emoji in the mental health domain have been largely overlooked by both communication scholars and health care professionals alike. Building on their cognitive, emotional and interpersonal aspects, this paper outlines potential applications for emoji in the field of youth mental health, while also pointing out challenges to their use. It then offers recommendations for mental health organizations, public health organizations, social media platforms, high-tech companies, and the Emoji Unicode Consortium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the partisanship of U.S. media outlets is well documented, the role of political affiliation in social media adoption and online discussions is much less studied. Social media allow individuals to contribute to the dissemination of information. As a result, understanding the relationship between political affiliation and content-sharing behaviors provides insight into whose voices are represented in social media content. Political affiliation might be particularly pertinent to engagement with politically charged topics, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper uses survey data collected in Spring 2020 to examine the role of political affiliation in both social media adoption and content sharing about COVID-19 on three platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Subsequently, we look at how these factors relate to COVID-19 knowledge, an important outcome with broader health implications. We find that political affiliation relates to both site adoption and sharing on the platforms, but these relationships are not uniform across all three platforms. We find no connection between political affiliation and knowledge about the virus but we do find that content sharing on two of the examined platforms is negatively related to knowledge. This work has larger implications for other contexts where polarized and politicized arguments take place, such as climate change and other contentious topics as it concerns both whose voices are heard in these discourses as well as what people can take away from engaging with content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media has a significant impact on the process of political polarization. Despite a large body of research on polarization and social media in democracies, studying this relationship in autocracies remains a niche field. This paper describes the content, composition, and behavioral patterns of discussions that take place on YouTube in the community of Russia's most vocal opposition politician, Alexei Navalny. Based on a corpus of more than eight million comments, this study provides empirical evidence on the relatively short-term nature of affective attunement induced by a leader promising social changes within an authoritarian context. This discovery is manifested in the observation that periods of high public interest in Navalny's activities are marked by a significant influx of new audience members into his community. However, the retention rate of this cohort of users was lower than that of the cohort of commenters, who started discussions during periods of lower public interest in Navalny's activities. This conclusion applies not only to the entire set of commenters, but also to pro-government and anti-government users. According to the exploratory text analysis, the most common topics in discussions were praising Navalny's activities, criticizing the government, and enticing people to share videos to change the minds of apolitical citizens or pro-government supporters. Finally, one of the affective polarization parameters, the degree of toxicity of discussions, is higher on Navalny's community than on an apolitical celebrity's YouTube channel, which establishes a baseline for the level of incivility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the hashtag #blacklivesmatter, activists have given new impetus to aspirations of 'leaderful' organizing. Disavowing the centralization of leadership and rethinking the history of the struggle for civil rights, many have sought to develop and revamp models of decentralized leadership. Digital networking features prominently in these models, but the literature suggests its role is ambiguous: while social media provide affordances for decentralized leadership, they may also induce the centralization of leadership. To examine such leadership dynamics, we adopt a computational approach. Drawing on a dataset of roughly 18 million tweets collected over a 30-month period, we examine two aspects of leadership dynamics: the concentration of leadership (i.e., inequality in terms of centrality within networks) and the consolidation of leadership (i.e., the degree to which central figures retain prominence over time). Engaging with the measurement of network inequality by differentiating temporal aspects of concentration and consolidation, we show that leadership dynamics fluctuate strongly over time. Aside from a select few individuals, there is little consolidation of leadership: new voices can consistently rise to prominence. Beyond providing an examination of online leadership dynamics within the Movement for Black Lives, this paper shows how computational analyses can be adopted in ways that do justice to the dynamic and diverse nature of movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 15 July 2016, Turkey faced a military coup attempt against the government. Most Turkish citizens learned about the coup attempt from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who contacted a television channel using FaceTime and urged citizens to go into the streets to resist it. Social media platforms, such as Twitter, were used heavily by Turkish citizens, with hashtags such as #TurkeyCoupAttempt, #darbeyehayir, #NoCoupInTurkey and #TurkeyCoup all trending during this period. This paper focuses on one of the most important anti-coup hashtags, #darbeyehayir (NoCoup), to examine how it was used during the anti-coup protests. By applying a mixed methods approach for Twitter content under the hashtag, the aim of the study is to unveil motivational frames used to call for action and provide a rationale for those participating in anti-coup protests. Results demonstrate that the framing dynamics emerging in the hashtags publics in which pro-Erdoğan supporters were dominant and used this process to provide support to the government during the 'coup'. The hashtag was mainly used as a tool for government propaganda rather than encouraging civic discussions and participation, and ultimately democratic acts in authoritarian countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past 15 years, YouTube has emerged as a large and dominant social media service, giving rise to a 'platformed media system' within its technical and regulatory infrastructures. This paper relies on a large-scale sample of channels (n =36M+) to explore this media system along three main lines. First, we investigate stratification and hierarchization in broadly quantitative terms, connecting to well-known tropes on structural hierarchies emerging in networked systems, where a small number of elite actors often dominate visibility. Second, we inquire into YouTube's channel categories, their relationships, and their proportions as a means to better understand the topics on offer and their relative importance. Third, we analyze channels according to country affiliation to gain insights into the dynamics and fault lines that align with country and language. Throughout the paper, we emphasize the inductive character of this research by highlighting the many follow-up questions that emerge from our findings. Contents [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In times when new means of communication are emerging, it becomes increasingly relevant to revisit and reconsider media studies' main concerns, and how contemporary media can be understood and studied. This paper draws attention to how the presumption of characteristics belonging to certain entities may elevate problems in a datafied age when streaming services, texts, content, producers, audiences, social media sites, and television are always intensely entangled. Here, the paper argues that it might no longer make sense, or even be possible, to make clear-cut distinctions between such entities. The paper further elaborates on the relevance and possibilities for media studies to draw upon actor-network theory (ANT). The paper argues that ANT, through its ideas of approaching objects as situated and local, can be a useful alternative theoretical approach when studying media phenomena in a datafied age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on data collected with Malaysian-Chinese activists and everyday citizens (aged 18-24) who used WhatsApp groups to discuss politically contentious views and actions between 2016 and 2018, prior to the GE14 election. The paper will reveal the extent to which WhatsApp enabled a 'safe space' for citizens to engage in political chat and activism in a context of government censorship and surveillance of more open social media platforms. A key finding is that the state's use of the Sedition Act and the Communications and Multimedia Act to take legal action against citizens engaging in political dissent on social media produced 'chilling effects', leading to changes in the styles and repertoires of civic and political action adopted by participants. This was registered in a shift away from public-facing social media (Twitter, Facebook) toward use of encrypted group chat on WhatsApp and, to a lesser extent, Telegram to shape new publics, which I examine in the paper using the concept of 'crypto-publics'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how structural racism encodes itself into social media. Through the examination of a popular WhatsApp meme in Spain, I show how everyday socio-technical practices on this platform perpetuate power hierarchies based on race. As a first step, the paper links "El Negro de WhatsApp" meme with the long racist tradition of commodifying Black bodies in American popular culture and beyond. Second, I argue that encrypted services like WhatsApp facilitate and amplify what Picca and Feagin (2007) refer to as the "backstage" of racism. The article concludes outlining the challenges of private, encrypted services if we are to dismantle 'platformed racism'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the fake news era, a combination of politics, big technology, and fear and animosity are blamed for the media mistrust and filter bubbles that are entrenching fragmentation in the public sphere. A partisan divide in the media and extreme political disagreements are nothing new, but new technology, such as social media and mobile push notifications, influences these years-old phenomena and plays an important role in current concerns. This paper explores how stories are represented differently by topic and across platforms, examining representation, polarization, and objectivity. Specifically, this paper looks at those issues from a novel perspective: through sentiment analysis of push notifications generated and archived from the Breaking News App on disasters, gun violence, and terrorism. Results indicate that partisan news organizations (1) emphasize different stories; (2) label the same events as categorically different; (3) hyperbolize and emotionalize different types of stories; and, (4) represent different categories of breaking news stories to different degrees of subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last few years, health communication has become central in an environment characterized by disinformation and a pandemic. This paper investigates how official institutions have used social media to communicate about health issues and the effects of government-sponsored content on online engagement. Considering the need for a perspective that takes us beyond case studies from the United States and Europe, we examine the Brazilian Ministry of Health Facebook page during the Zika outbreak in 2016. Our research questions are: How does the Brazilian Ministry of Health use Facebook to communicate about Aedes aegypti? To what extent have the communication campaigns been used to promote the image of political actors and institutions? How do the Ministry's communication strategies on Facebook affect users' engagement with the content about Aedes aegypti? Using quantitative and qualitative methods, we combine content analysis and social media metrics to study posts addressing the Aedes aegypti mosquito. We discovered that publications recurrently adopted a preventive approach. However, posts focused on addressing diseases were those leading to higher user engagement. The data also indicated that emphasizing attributes favorable to government officials negatively affected user engagement, reducing the effectiveness and reach of the Ministry's messages. This research allowed us to grasp the diversity of emerging practices in online government communication. It will potentially help policy-makers, communication managers, and scholars utilize the most effective communication strategies during health crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the literature on problematic COVID-19 information published at the onset of the pandemic in 2020. It explores how scientific research has addressed this issue from a disciplinary, methodological and substantive perspective in different world regions. Three hundred seventy-eight articles were analyzed using content analysis and computational methods, including social network analysis and text mining. The study revealed a multidisciplinary field characterized by substantial contributions from medicine and social sciences and with a certain degree of interdisciplinarity and international collaborations. Research devoted particular attention to infodemic and conspiracy theories and their impact on compliance with health-protective behaviors, and showed a general preference for quantitative methods such as surveys. Most contributions focused on European and Americas regions and were from authors working in the same areas. Attention to various topics was also geographically differentiated. For example, conspiracy theories and informational factors that may influence COVID-compliant behaviors characterize the whole corpus, but Western research did the lion's share. Similarly, the attention paid to different social media platforms differed geographically. Worldwide attention was dedicated to global social media platforms such as Twitter, WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram. In contrast, geographically specific platforms (e.g., VKontakte or WeChat) have been studied less and mainly in regions where they are used the most. Focusing on a crucial period of the COVID-19 infodemic such as the first year of the pandemic, this study contributes to the literature on problematic information by highlighting how misinformation and disinformation research was carried out within and at the crossroads of disciplines and geographic regions. It suggests under-explored areas by contrast with the most relevant trends and establishes a foundation for benchmarking with post-2020 research on this topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social bots are a growing presence and problem on social media. There is a burgeoning body of work on bot detection, often based in machine learning with a variety of sophisticated features. In this paper, we present a simple technique to detect bots: adherence with Benford's Law. Benford's Law states that, in naturally occurring systems, the frequency of numbers first digits is not evenly distributed. Numbers beginning with a 1 occur roughly 30 percent of the time, and are six times more common than numbers beginning with a 9. In earlier work, we established that Benford's Law holds for social connections across online social networks. In this paper, we show that this principle can be used to detect bots because they violate the expected distribution. In three studies -- an analysis of a large Russian botnet we discovered, and studies of purchased retweets on Twitter and purchased likes on Facebook -- we show that bots' social patterns consistently violate Benford's Law while legitimate users follow it closely. Our results offer a computationally efficient new tool for bot detection. There are also broader implications for understanding fraudulent online behavior. Benford's Law is present in many aspects of online social interactions, and looking for violations of the distribution holds promise for a range of new applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political discourse on social media is seen by many as polarized, vitriolic and permeated by falsehoods and misinformation. Political operators have exploited all of these aspects of the discourse for strategic purposes, most famously during the Russian social media influence campaign during the 2016 presidential election in the United States and current, similar efforts targeting the U.S. elections in 2018 and 2020. The results of the social media study presented in this paper presents evidence that political influence through manipulation of social media discussions is no longer exclusive to political debate but can now also be found in pop culture. Specifically, this study examines a collection of tweets relating to a much-publicized fan dispute over the Star Wars franchise film Episode VIII: The Last Jedi. This study finds evidence of deliberate, organized political influence measures disguised as fan arguments. The likely objective of these measures is increasing media coverage of the fandom conflict, thereby adding to and further propagating a narrative of widespread discord and dysfunction in American society. Persuading voters of this narrative remains a strategic goal for the U.S. alt-right movement, as well as the Russian Federation. The results of this study show that among those who address The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson directly on Twitter to express their dissatisfaction, more than half are bots, trolls/sock puppets or political activists using the debate to propagate political messages supporting extreme right-wing causes and the discrimination of gender, race or sexuality. A number of these users appear to be Russian trolls. The paper concludes that while it is only a minority of Twitter accounts that tweet negatively about The Last Jedi, organized attempts at politicizing the pop culture discourse on social media for strategic purposes are significant enough that users should be made aware of these measures, so they can act accordingly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses major social shifts in reading by comparing publishing statistics with results of empirical research on reading. As media statistics suggest, the last five decades have seen two shifts: from textual to visual media, and with the advent of digital screens also from long-form to short-form texts. This was accompanied by new media-adequate reading modes: while long-form content invokes immersed and/or deep reading, we predominantly skim online social media. Empirical research on reading indicates that the reading substrate plays an important role in reading processes. For example, comprehension suffers when complex texts are read from screens. This paper argues that media and reading trends in recent decades indicate broader social and cultural changes in which long-form deep reading traditionally associated with the printed book will be marginalised by prevailing media trends and the reading modes they inspire. As these trends persist, it may be necessary to find new approaches to vocabulary and knowledge building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facial recognition systems are increasingly common components of commercial smart phones such as the iPhone X and the Samsung Galaxy S9. These technologies are also increasingly being put to use in consumer-facing social media video-sharing applications, such as Apple's animoji and memoji, Facebook Messenger's masks and filters and Samsung's AR Emoji. These animations serve as technical phenomena translating moments of affective and emotional expression into mediated socially legible forms. Through an analysis of these objects and the broader literature on digital animation, this paper critiques the ways these facial recognition systems classify and categorize racial identities in human faces. The paper considers the potential dangers of both racializing logics as part of these systems of classification, and how data regarding emotional expression gathered through these systems might interact with identity-based forms of classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extremist and terrorist groups are known to have used games and gaming successfully in their online recruitment and indoctrination campaigns. What are the possibilities for using online games to generate resilience against extremism? Current research on online counter and alternative narratives generally acknowledges effects in terms of awareness raising, yet is skeptical when it comes to impact, mostly owing to the limited evidence and empirical research in this area. A related problem with the early counter and alternative narrative campaigns, however, has been not only a lack of initial preparatory work on understanding the radicalization process itself -- specifically, on how narratives are produced and disseminated -- but also on aspects relating to the audience, the messenger, and the communications strategy more broadly. In designing DECOUNT [1], an online game that incorporates both counter and alternative narratives, we have taken these aspects into consideration and created an accessible, easy-to-use product by first researching the following: individual radicalization processes; extremist online propaganda narratives and imagery; and the preferences and issues of the target population. We then created and tested the game and advertised it on particular social media platforms (Instagram, YouTube and Twitch) with appropriate targeting. Finally, we carried out a number of evaluation procedures, including a qualitative assessment and two quasi-experiments. This paper outlines this preparatory, creative, and evaluative work, and contextualizes it within the literature on the role played by online platforms and content both in individual radicalization processes and in creating resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a postdemographic world, characterized by the continuous production and calculation of social data in the form of likes, comments, shares, keywords, locations or hashtags, social media platforms are designed with techniques of market segmentation in mind. "Datafication" challenges the agency of participatory social media practices and traditional accounts of the presentation of self in the use of social media. In the process, a tension or paradox arises between the personal, curative or performative character of social media practices and the calculative design and commercial usefulness of platforms and apps. In this paper I interrogate this paradox, and explore the potential role of metrics and analytics for emergent data literacies. By drawing together common self-oriented metrics across dominant platforms, the paper emphasizes analytics targets around a) profile, b) activity, c) interactivity and d) visibility, as a step toward developing new data literacies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that transparency promotes interactivity and participation in collaborative Web 2.0 learning environments. Teaching with transparency requires a learner-centered pedagogy for research, writing, and the production of new knowledge in open communities. Transparency is a catalyst for interaction and participation that supports open learning in multiple disciplines and institutional contexts. Transparent design influences the development of wikis, Open Educational Resources (OERs), and mobile applications. The wiki is a flexible, social, and easy to use technology for collaborative authorship and for sharing information. OERs are transparent educational materials for teaching and learning and mobile technologies expand the scope of when and how transparent learning takes place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both horrifying and fascinating, 4chan.org (http://www.4chan.org/) is a wildly popular message board with a highly dedicated community of users. Compared to social media's increasing push to persistent identity online, 4chan maintains a culture of anonymity. Focusing on the ontological encounter spawned by the site, this paper argues that the interface embodies contingency and senses of alterity in several uniquely virtual ways. It concludes by articulating how this online mode of being holds promise beyond the often repugnant content generated by the site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online communities have flourished in organizations in recent years, but large numbers of them fail. A deeper understanding of how participation can be promoted in online idea communities (OIC) is essential, because the most common reason of failure is low levels of participation. In this paper, we investigated how participation could be encouraged in an intra-organizational OIC. Our case organization was Sollentuna municipality in Sweden. They decided to introduce an OIC to collect ideas from staff as input when developing the municipality's forthcoming IT strategy. We used the theory of online identity-based communities (Ren, et al., 2007) as a lens and a mixed research method comprising interviews and an analysis of the content of the OIC. While this theoretical perspective certainly has merits on its own, the study topic at hand made it necessary to complement the theory with more specific design principles that take the unique characteristics of intra-organizational OIC into account. These included that managers were expected by staff to be core members of the community, frequent and complementing promotion activities were necessary in order for the OIC to be used, very low entry barriers were expected, and the employees expected the discussion to be focused, both in terms of content and time. The design principles need to be tested and further developed, by conducting studies on other OIC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze, Eva Illouz, and Mark Andrejevic, this paper critiques the personal branding literature, particularly as it applies to Web 2.0 social media. I first describe the three--part logic of personal branding: dividuation, emotional capitalism, and autosurveillance. Next, in a sort of mirror image to the self-help literature of personal branding, I offer a critical "how to" guide to branding oneself in Web 2.0. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of why personal branding can be seen as a rational choice, given the circumstances of globalized capitalism and precarious employment. Individuals who brand themselves willfully adopt the logic of capitalism in order to build their human capital. However, I ultimately argue that the obsession with personal branding is no antidote for life in precarious times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For years, social media, including Facebook, have been criticized for lacking transparency in their community standards, especially in terms of extremist content. Yet, moderation is not an easy task, especially when extreme-right actors use content strategies that shift the Overton window (i.e., the range of ideas acceptable in public discourse) rightward. In a self-proclaimed search of more transparency, Facebook created its Transparency Center in May 2021. It also has regularly updated its community standards, and Facebook Oversight Board has reviewed these standards based on concrete cases, published since January 2021. In this paper, we highlight how some longstanding issues regarding Facebook's lack of transparency still remain unaddressed in Facebook's 2021 community standards, mainly in terms of the visual 'representation' of and endorsement from dangerous organizations and individuals. Furthermore, we also reveal how the Board's no-access to Facebook's in-house rules exemplifies how the longstanding discrepancy between the public and the confidential levels of Facebook policies remains a current issue that might turn the Board's work into a mere PR effort. In seeming to take as many steps toward shielding some information as it has toward exposing others to the sunshine, Facebook's efforts might turn out to be transparency theater. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May 2016, the United States Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) issued "Security Executive Agent Directive 5" (SEAD-5) (U.S. ODNI, 2016) authorizing the collection, use, and retention of social media information for the personnel security clearance process (PSCP), a process put in place to screen applicants for eligibility for national security and public trust positions. The incorporation of social media was a watershed moment for this process as social media, and even information from the entire Internet, had not been allowed into the investigation process before. The integration was not without resistance to the implementation, though, and backstage concerns about privacy emerged in Congressional hearings. What is most interesting to note, however, is that the resistance was for the most part in support of privacy for the potential employees of whom were receiving the check and the government's obligations for the information collection; however, there was little, if any, mention of deeper, possibly problematic privacy concerns for the social media platforms and their mediated connections that co-create a second, derivative type of content beyond the access of their users. This paper examines the hearing "Incorporating social media into federal background investigations" in response to the SEAD-5 to see what the U.S. Congress did and did not discuss at the hearing and explores potential explanations for the inclusions/omissions, ultimately answering how those in charge of policies could have overlook deeper privacy complexities, and evaluating what this can mean for government, privacy, and policy researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foucault's general notion of "technologies of the self" provides an invaluable starting point for investigating a range of broadly "confessional" practices and technologies over time -- from medieval confession to contemporary forms of networked identity construction. Foucault defines technologies of the self as "reflected and voluntary practices by which men not only fix rules of conduct for themselves but seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their particular being, and to make their life an oeuvre." These are practices or techniques, in other words, that are both undertaken by the self and directed toward it. Specifically confessional technologies involve a deliberate and often structured externalization of the self, often with the help of a confessor or a confessional text or context. Building on existing work (e.g., by Fletcher and Hall), this paper begins by some of the earliest Western confessional practices and "technologies" as described by Foucault, and then proceeding to explain medieval Christian confession and its subsequent "reformation." Next, by appealing to Louis Althusser's notion of interpellation, it develops this conception of confession further, comparing it finally to today's digital media of social self-disclosure, focusing on Facebook in particular. Such contemporary media, the paper concludes, build upon practices and technologies of the self that have been evolving for centuries, if not millennia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common position amongst social media platforms and online content aggregators is their resistance to being characterized as media companies. Rather, companies such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter have regularly insisted that they should be thought of purely as technology companies. This paper critiques the position that these platforms are technology companies rather than media companies, explores the underlying rationales, and considers the political, legal, and policy implications associated with accepting or rejecting this position. As this paper illustrates, this is no mere semantic distinction, given the history of the precise classification of communications technologies and services having profound ramifications for how these technologies and services are considered by policy-makers and the courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the online threats of violence to Roosh V and Return of Kings -- blogs relating to pick-up artist culture and "neo-masculinity" -- as a case study to examine the ways in which people use social media as a technology of the self. In early 2016, groups mobilized online using the Facebook platform to protest meet-ups that had been planned by Roosh V for his supporters. Some of the Facebook users responded with extreme suggestions to rape Roosh and the Return of Kings members themselves, violating them with sharp objects, as well as outright murder. In this paper I am interested in a specific question related to governmentality: what do these hateful, violent threats suggest about the way people use social media as a form of self-governance?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is one of the first to explore and delve into the legal system, with a focus on the burgeoning use of metadata in civil cases. Although metadata is embedded in all kinds of digital files including text, audio, and image files, as well as many social media and game applications, few understand how both the visible and embedded information is being "mined" (collected) for a myriad of uses by organizations, such as, Google or even the United States government. Consequently, in this paper, we explore the implications of metadata use in civil cases and how it could bring a new era of evidence in litigation, which has huge ramifications for how the average citizen may begin to view their privacy in the course of everyday activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas there has been much research into the manufacture of 'fake news' to sow disunity within liberal democracies, little is known about how information disorders affect deeply divided societies. This paper addresses that gap in the literature by exploring how digital media are used to share misinformation and disinformation during contentious public demonstrations in Northern Ireland. It does so by reviewing the literature on social media information flows during acute crisis events, and qualitatively exploring the role of Twitter in spreading misinformation and disinformation during the 2014 and 2015 Ardoyne parade disputes. Results indicate that visual disinformation, presumably shared to inflame sectarian tensions during the parade, was quickly debunked in information flows co-curated by citizens and professional journalists. Online misinformation and disinformation appeared to have minimal impact on events on the ground, although there was some evidence of belief echoes among tweeters who distrusted the information provided by mainstream media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]