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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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Algorithms make highly consequential decisions and, thereby, exercise considerable power. In this study, I investigate how social power through algorithms is exercised in media consumption, particularly through curation algorithms. This conceptual paper then contributes to the understanding of social power through algorithms by suggesting the concept of algorithmic meta-capital. The concept derives from Bourdieu's theory on meta-capital which has also been applied to legacy media. I then argue that this algorithmic meta-capital is an extension of the power traditionally held by the state and legacy media. The study also contributes to the understanding of meta-capital as it proposes how the meta-capital possessed by digital intermediaries functions. It does so by legitimating representations of the world and by creating a necessity for algorithmic visibility across different fields, thereby shaping habitus. This Bourdieusian approach enables researchers to take a balanced view on the power of algorithms on the structure/agency continuum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses the role of alternative far-right media in promoting and organizing mobilization against the Global Compact for Migration – the first intergovernmentally negotiated agreement, prepared under the auspices of the United Nations, covering all dimensions of international migration in a holistic and comprehensive manner. Exploring four European alternative far-right media: PI-News in Germany, Il Primato Nazionale in Italy, the UK localization of Breitbart, and the transnational Voice of Europe, we show that these media have gone beyond (dis)informing and have actively mobilized and channeled indignation through petitioning and protest organization. While most research on far-right media practices so far has focused either on social media interactions or exclusively on 'disinformation' and 'fake news', we analyse web based alternative news media as part of а far-right social movement that has successfully used progressive left-wing protests repertoires and tactics. We argue that alternative far-right news media act as 'indignation mobilization mechanisms' that not only fuel the indignation of the public by channeling the messages of far-right politicians but also channel bottom-up indignation through online campaigns, petitions, and offline street protests. This unabashedly biased and mobilization-oriented approach is what distinguishes far-right media from mainstream media and guarantees them a loyal and dedicated supporter base. [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]

The emergence of social network sites and online communities has offered new possibilities for older adults to stay socially connected and older adults comprise a growing user group of social media. This paper examines the relationship between older adults' online social engagement and social capital based on a national survey of adults aged 60 and over. Findings show that older adults who engage more often in specific online social activities (i.e., asking questions on social media, looking at photos of family members/others) enjoy greater bridging social capital (both in offline and online contexts) than those who do so less often. Furthermore, Internet skills moderate the relationship between online social engagement and social capital. Specifically, older adults with greater Internet skills benefit relatively more from engaging in specific online social activities more often with respect to online bridging. The paper discusses the implications for digital inequality scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been widely recognized that platforms utilize their editorial capacity to transform the industries they intermediate. In this paper, we examine the intermediary role of the leading audio streaming platform – Spotify – on the recorded music industry. Spotify is often called the 'new radio' for the influence it has on breaking songs and artists, and for the role it plays in music discovery and consumption. Our purpose is to determine whether Spotify is leveling the playing field or entrenching hierarchies between major labels and independent labels. We attempt to answer this question through a longitudinal analysis of content owners (major labels or 'indies') and formats (albums, tracks, or playlists) promoted by Spotify through its global Twitter account: @Spotify. As a carefully curated venue for corporate speech @Spotify provides a window into continuities and changes in Spotify's corporate strategy. By using @Spotify as a proxy through which to track patterns of promotion between the years 2012 and 2018, this paper offers a novel empirical examination of how Spotify is shaping the consumption of music, and in turn the structure of the recording industry. In doing so, we provide evidence for speculating about the future of the recorded music industry in a platform era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers some insights into Twitter as a political field, based on Bourdieu's field theory. Networked publics, as agents of this field, are competing overpower by performing networked practices. To investigate this field, we focused on two networked practices: networked framing and narrating. Persian Twitter in 2017 presidential election provides a good context to analyze how such a field is constituted. Combining a social-network analytic approach with discursive and textual interpretations, we analyzed a corpus of 2,596,284 tweets. We identified three main networked publics in the retweet network: reformists, conservatives, and diaspora users. Having identified the most influential users in each community based on PageRank metric, we thoroughly investigated all of their tweets. The results show that ordinary users constituted the major population of conservative and diaspora publics. The reformist community included mostly journalists and to a lesser extent media. Findings also confirm that all networked publics used the same strategies to gain more power in the field. They produced quite the same frames and narratives to compete with each other. Moreover, the battle was more about the routine and electoral debates, not the legitimacy or entity of regime. Hence, none of the networked publics challenged the hegemonic discourse in Iran significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing body of literature around the concept of artivism, which refers to artists who use social engagement and activism in their artistic practices. Artists, however, are not necessarily perceived as political actors and are heard for their political activism only through a legitimacy cross-over from artistic field to political field. In this paper, therefore, we theorize that audience attention has become an important resource for political legitimacy and study how a set of artivists are received on social media. To this end we have analyzed over two million tweets and argue that content on social media platforms such as Twitter provides insight into how people talk about social issues, such as politics and activism. We employ the methods of topic modeling and semantic network analysis to study how Twitter users engage with artivists and find that very few Twitter users are interested in the societal issues that artivists raise. Instead, the majority of tweets in our data involves attention to state prosecution, media-centric artistic recognition and consumerism. These findings indicate that even though some artivists succeed in bringing their activist art to Twitter audiences, political activism that originates from artists is rarely a topic of discussion among Twitter users in terms of its activist content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1970s, the Mexican government has been embroiled in an armed conflict with the drug cartels, and criminal organisations have engaged in violent confrontations with each other. Violence escalated in 2006 under the presidency of Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, and since then killings have become spectacular and highly mediatised. An often-overlooked front of the cartel wars is the use of non-official networked media that generates and sustains popular narratives about cartel leaders. In this paper, we focus on the media assemblages that sustain the myths associated with the now captured 'El Chapo' Guzmán, perhaps the most celebrated narco in Mexican history. In particular, we focus on the phenomenon of the El Chapo memes as these have moved into a new phase via digital platforms such as Whatapps. We argue the El Chapo memes play an important role in popular communication revolving around narco culture, functioning as artefacts of and even opportunities for political contestation, as well as everyday humour and survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media uptake in the Gulf States continues to grow, and while previous research has explored its place in terms of political action and individual responses to pressures of globalisation and urbanisation, little attention has been paid to how social media has integrated with the tribal networks in the region. This paper presents research that uses inductive thematic analysis of 107 public Twitter and Instagram accounts of Gulf State tribal groups to explore how tribes in the Gulf region use these platforms to facilitate tribal power and cohesion. We argue that tribal social media is performing multiple simultaneous roles, including aiding in maintaining tribal cohesion in the face of urbanisation and globalisation, displaying a tribe's social power and influence, and enabling social cohesion and mutual aid. We conclude that to understand flows of power and information in the Gulf States, it is critical to understand the influence of the tribe on both individuals and wider social and political trends in the Gulf region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TikTok, a short video platform featuring content between 15 and 60 seconds long, has become a popular and rapidly growing social media application around the world. As a platform catering for light entertainment, TikTok champions virality and encourages memetic remixes. Meme videos, mostly featuring lip-syncs, dance routines, and skits, have become one of the defining features of the platform. These seemingly trivial videos have been utilised by young TikTokers to advocate for various causes. This paper uses #OkBoomer memes as a case study to examine the political culture of young people and Gen Z in particular. By analysing how intergenerational politics has been 'memefied', this study delineates how Gen Z imagines and expresses a generational sentiment towards 'Boomers' as the imagined other. They do so through short video cultures and practices on TikTok, drawing upon the networked experiences of their peers. Specifically, the paper considers the key controversial issues, meme forms and meme functions across the #OkBoomer memes on TikTok, and its eventual mainstreaming in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early days of the internet it was hoped that going online would bring communities together, help people find each other and that social media would become a powerful advocacy tool as communities could better campaign for the causes they believed in. Instead, gender discrimination, trolling and abusive behavior are rife on the internet. This introduction provides context on women in the digital world. The papers in this special issue include research on gender and politics from political actors' and citizens' perspective, they examine the importance of the online access to information, the role of women within the tech industry, they look at online harassment, at how women are treated online, and how NGOs deal with evidence of mistreatment of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media provides marginalized activists multiple options for constructing alternative narratives that challenge mainstream discourse. However, despite these platforms' increasing accessibility, disabled activists may struggle in creating their counter-narrative. Their inability to conform to able-bodied notions of activism leaves their individual experiences out of the discussion of social media activism. This paper addresses this gap by presenting the individual decision-making process of disabled social media users regarding activists' performances in social media as gleaned from the qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews. This process includes three phases that demonstrate the experiences of social media users with communicative concealable disabilities – autistics, hard-of-hearing (HoH), and people who stutter. First, these interviewees present a spectrum of perceptions of disability activism in social media. Second, these perceptions lead to a spectrum of motivations, which mirror the interviewees' various risk-benefit calculations regarding public self-disclosure as disabled. Third, these perceptions and motivations are manifested through interviewees' strategic design of their activist performances in private and public spheres. By rethinking key concepts in social media activism – risk-benefit calculation, slacktivism, and digital storytelling – this process illustrates taken-for-granted assumptions of personalization, visibility and representation, that challenge current discussions on social media activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The disclosure of life events is among the most common behaviors on social media and is part of the everyday activities revealed through the use of many other new media. This paper explores the awareness of major life events through these media as they relate to a person's belief in a just world for themselves and others. Using survey data, we find that text messaging, commenting on Facebook, and having more Facebook friends are associated with awareness of desirable events. Passive modes of communication, e.g., the use of the 'like' interaction on Facebook, are related to an awareness of both desirable and undesirable life events across a greater range of social ties. Awareness of undesirable events in the lives of strong ties fosters a lower perception of equity and justice for others, whereas an awareness of desirable experiences in the lives of strong ties is related to greater, perceived, personal justice. We discuss the implications of the awareness of major life events through new media in terms of the psychological benefits that can come from the vicarious joy and comfort one receives from other's experiences; what we call mudita and comfort from others (MACO). We argue that the long-term, cumulative effects of greater awareness of undesirable life events may lend support to social movements that seek to reduce injustices experienced by disadvantaged groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For some time now, media regulators in Germany and beyond have been trying to cope with the rise of digital intermediaries like social networks and search engines. In this context, the German Network Enforcement Act ('NetzDG') has become the epitome of the concept of new-school speech regulation: the increasing co-optation of intermediaries for governmental content moderation – with all its potential harms to free expression and democratic discourse. Contrary to this trend, however, recent legislative measures in Germany, including the Interstate Media Treaty (IMT), suggest that the country is exploring new avenues in digital intermediary regulation. Not only does the new German legislation focus on procedural instead of substantive aspects of content moderation, offering a case study for concepts promoted by recent literature on platform regulation. By introducing a positive bias for certain 'content of value,' the country also includes the role of beneficial content in its regulation. This paper analyzes the new German countermovement against new-school regulation and presents its potential impact for future regulatory concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of social media evidence in sexual assault trials in Canada, focusing on cases with underage female victims. Teenage girls are among the heaviest social media users and face unique expectations regarding the performance of heteronormative gender norms. Society simultaneously encourages girls to enact gender roles that emphasize their femininity and sexuality and punishes them for acting according to these standards. When girls engage in performativity online, they leave behind a digital footprint that can be used against them at trial. Through a detailed case study of 14 publicly available judgments, we analyze how judges evaluate girls' social media content in sexual assault trials that feature a mistake of age defense. Drawing on social media research, legal studies, and the concept of performativity, we show that judges vary greatly in their understandings of gender norms and that this translates to divergent case outcomes. In the 'guilty' cases, the judges contextualize social media content as insufficient and unreliable, noting that it is common for youth to lie or embellish facts online. In the 'not guilty' cases however, the judges appear to take such evidence at face value and hold girls accountable for having provocative pictures or misrepresenting themselves online. Such practices are problematic because they perpetuate rape myths and misconceptions about victim behavior. We call for greater consideration of the socio-cultural norms that govern girls' social media use to avoid biased interpretations that adversely shape the outcome of sexual assault trials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Checking in' at or 'tagging' oneself to various places on social media constitute online representations that contribute to the classification, or 'making', of places. At the same time, users are also classified based on what they (show that they) do where. In this paper, we deploy Bourdieusian cultural sociology to the realm of place-exposing geomedia practices to understand social reproduction on social media. The study uses multiple correspondence analysis on a national survey deployed in Sweden (n=3,902). Various place-exposing practices are analyzed in relation to the contemporary Swedish class structure. Results reveal a connection between various forms and volumes of capital and the places that people visit and chose to put on display for online audiences. We are thus able to verify how the socio-technological regime of geomedia, with its new arenas for online exposure, extends deep-seated dynamics of socio-cultural reproduction and even reinforces the classificatory linkages between spatial appropriation and social identity work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As hiring processes have increasingly moved online, having better digital skills could play an important role in successful job seeking. However, digital inequality suggests that people use the Internet in different ways with varying levels of skills raising questions about who is most likely to be able to search for jobs online, including on social media. This paper examines online job searching, including the role of digital job-search skills in the process. Results show that sociodemographic characteristics (i.e., age, race, education, and income) as well as online experiences, being a social media user, and having higher digital job-search skills relate to online job-seeking behaviors. These findings highlight the presence of digital inequalities in online job searching including differences by social media experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a case study of a digitally enabled mode of transnationally networked framing by far-right actors. We analyze the reach and strategic aims of the '120 decibels' campaign, launched by members of the Austrian Identitarian Movement via social media in early 2018 in an attempt to latch onto the prominence of the MeToo hashtag (#MeToo). We argue that this constituted a form of discursive 'hijacking,' marked by a narrowing of the scope of the problem definition and a reformulation of the political demands. We draw on user-generated Twitter data and focus on geolocation markers and language clusters in order to investigate the transnational scope of these coordinated efforts. We employ content analysis to investigate the campaign's strategic use of #MeToo. Our findings show distinct clusters of German-Austrian – and UK-US-based user groups, from which we infer directionalities in the transnational spread of the campaign. We demonstrate how the initial dissemination of the hashtag was driven by influential individual nodes within their respective networks and tied to #MeToo. The results point toward transnational networking activities among the far right and illustrate emerging dynamics between progressive and reactionary forms of digitally enabled networked framing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media constitute a fertile though challenging arena for the use of ironic humor. A combination of facilitating and hindering factors turns the production and identification of irony in this sphere into a complex venture, positioning it as a powerful tool in consolidating group boundaries. The main aims of this paper are to identify the markers of ironic humor on social media and to explicate their workings within the dynamics of digital interactions. Existing literature about ironic markers addresses mostly face-to-face and mass-mediated interactions, while there is a gap in our understanding of the production and interpretation of irony in the unique communicative conditions of social media. An analysis of a bilingual corpus of successful and failed ironic utterances extracted from five social network sites yielded a novel typology of five ironic markers: platform, participants, style, intra-textual content, and contextual knowledge. These markers both resemble and deviate from features of irony in non-digital settings. Media affordances often allow access to necessary complementary information, yet such forensic activity is only accessible to active users, who recognize the need for further investigation of the meant. Hence, using certain types of ironic markers forms utterances that are decipherable to some audiences but opaque to others. In this sense, the marking of digital irony and its decoding both rely on group boundaries and play a central role in their delineation. We conclude by evaluating the roles of this new regime of ironic markers in processes of boundary work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper contributes to the research on the activities of far-right actors on social media by examining the interconnections between far-right actors and groups on Telegram platform using network analysis. The far-right network observed on Telegram is highly decentralized, similarly to the far-right networks found on other social media platforms. The network is divided mostly along the ideological and national lines, with the communities related to 4chan imageboard and Donald Trump's supporters being the most influential. The analysis of the network evolution shows that the start of its explosive growth coincides in time with the mass bans of the far-right actors on mainstream social media platforms. The observed patterns of network evolution suggest that the simultaneous migration of these actors to Telegram has allowed them to swiftly recreate their connections and gain prominence in the network thus casting doubt on the effectiveness of deplatforming for curbing the influence of far-right and other extremist actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media use enables information consumption and exchange as well as group ties that can facilitate participation in boycott and buycott campaigns. Social media also provide low-threshold activities that serve as a stepping stone towards more intense forms of cause-oriented participation. This paper uses original survey data (n = 1,539) collected in 2019. Reading political information, posting political information on social media, and following social and leisure groups increase the likelihood of boycotting and buycotting. Changing profile pictures doubles the odds of participating in political consumerism. Overall, citizens use symbolic low-effort activities on social media to mobilize their peers to participate in political consumerism but, in the end, they also mobilize themselves toward more intense forms of participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sharenting, or the practice of sharing one's parenting or information about one's children on social media, occurs in an increasingly platformized digital culture, where visual formats are central across participatory and commercial repositories. This paper investigates the articulation between sharenting as performed by celebrities and the wider construction of children's digital identities. Through qualitative content analysis, this research looks at how Cristiano Ronaldo, the most-followed individual on Instagram since 2018, his partner, and his mother shared information about his children on that social media platform between 2018 and 2020. Through manual exploration, we searched for Ronaldo's children across a variety of digital spaces. Our analysis reveals that sharenting on Instagram engages audiences through the portrayal of children as the parents' extended self. Content from Instagram and news media is appropriated in vernacular and commercial digital spaces for conflicting affects: the cute father-son dyad, and the son as extension of the uber-famous, vain father. This extreme case shows how the digital identities of children of celebrities are widely public, formed by the everyday, intimate content of the family's life, which is persistent and collectively recreated by news media, vernacular culture, and commercial platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people's lives are inextricably tied in with the digital, whether it is for education, engagement, leisure, or work. Studies from the Global North have examined children and social media from several perspectives, with discourse now veering towards a rights-based approach to foreground young people's voices in a digital and social media world, something that is missing in countries like India. This paper drew on deep interactions with young people from a large Indian city to gain preliminary insights into social media practices and modes of engagement with particular reference to management of access, privacy, safety, and negotiating challenges or problem solving. Our study suggests that conversations about digital platforms, particularly social media spaces, in relation to children's everyday life practices need to begin early, at the point when children begin interacting with these technologies. Critical digital literacy must recognize the agency of young people, their naturalized interactions with the digital world, as well as the complexities of family and school life that moderate such interactions. These contextual nuances become significant when framing regulatory policies, parental advisories and critical digital literacy and media education programs. This article adds to the slowly growing literature from the Global South that enhances and diversifies our understanding of how the 'born digital' generation lives with/in social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, political discourse in digital spheres has seen a rise in the use of infographics. The paper addresses an unexplored question about this phenomenon: which characteristics are associated with higher levels of ostensive user engagement with political infographics in social media? We conceptualize ostensive user engagement as the outward-facing metrics afforded by a platform (e.g., like, share, and comment count) that serve both as means for self-presentation and shape the informational environment that others are exposed to. A corpus comprised of all infographics posted on Facebook by the four leading candidates in the 2016 US presidential campaign (N = 252) was coded for cognitive, behavioral, and emotional characteristics. We found that two of the cognitively oriented dimensions enhanced engagement, while behavioral cues (calls to action) were, surprisingly, negatively linked. The inclusion of emotions did not show an overall association; however, a deeper look revealed a candidate-specific effect: anger was associated with greater engagement on Trump's infographics, and similarly, pleasure on Sanders'. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of our findings for understanding the informational environment shaped by engagement with infographics in light of the two seemingly opposing perceptions of internal and external authenticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines memetic content as a window into the values expressed by far-right constituents. Our main premise was that far-right memes are a site of interaction between two types of values: those of the far-right as a social movement and those characterizing memetic communication on social media. We studied this notion through a case from Italy: the photo-based meme genre of 'alternative calendar commemorations' that memorialize events or figures important to the far-right imaginary. A multi-modal qualitative analysis based on Schwartz's theory of personal and political values yielded mixed results. As expected, we found strong appeals to collectivistic values such as patriotism and tradition. Yet some of the individualistic values associated with memes, such as self-direction and authenticity, were also evident in the corpus. We conclude by discussing how this blend of values challenges both well-established value theories and perceptions about the political work of far-right memes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we complicate and bring a new perspective to debates on the democratic limitations of filter bubbles, by exploring the case study of feminist filter bubbles. We extend understandings of the filter bubble to examine the highly reflexive, everyday ways in which filtering is adopted as a practical response to the information saturation and the politicised vulnerability engendered by digital environments. In doing so, we make a case for the necessity of filtering practices to create 'safe spaces' for feminist deliberation, at the same time as questioning whether absolute 'safety' is possible in feminist politics. Drawing on two separate studies of young feminist women who regularly engage with feminist private groups on Facebook, we document significant ambivalence regarding these closed spaces. While feminist filter bubbles were essential for surviving the risks of more open online environments, participants reported complicated feelings of guilt in not moving beyond these bubbles. Maintaining the 'safety' of these spaces also involved significant, ongoing labour in the requirement for participants to customise content within these bubbles, involving vigilant practices of moderation of content and the consistent application of trigger warnings. As such, we question whether the model of the feminist filter bubble is sustainable in the labour it requires already exhausted feminists to perform, and politically capacious enough to allow sustained difficult conversations. We suggest further critical engagement is required to connect filter bubbles to the everyday, affective politics of deliberation on social media platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aside from #MeToo and similar campaigns, sexual assault survivors use social media to disclose personal experiences. This paper uses a mixed-methods approach and draws on network ethnography (Howard, 2002) to explore the visibility of these 'everyday' sexual assault disclosures and how such disclosures further survivors' disclosure motivations. Social network analysis of 23 Twitter hashtags related to sexual assault shows minimal engagement with disclosive tweets, while interviews with survivors (N = 27) indicate that hashtagged disclosures can result in impactful interactions with other survivors, particularly via less visible social media channels, such as direct messages. In combination, results suggest (1) that survivor networks can and do form around mundane hashtags, and (2) that highly visible hashtagged disclosures act as beacons to other survivors and are employed in pursuit of motivations such as supporting other survivors and challenging stigma associated with sexual assault. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an image and location sharing platform, Instagram offers intimate visual access to events, experiences and situations in a manner that is mobile and contextual. Partnering with Australian Red Cross, this paper develops a mixed methodology for using Instagram data to identify and understand individuals' everyday humanitarian activity in a major urban centre (Melbourne, Australia) outside of the temporal frame of crisis. The research integrates hashtag data collection with thematic analysis in a Geographic Information System (GIS) to use visualise the links between types of humanitarian action, their motivations and contextual situations to precise urban locations. These attributes of Instagram posting practices offer a base layer of information about disparate prosocial action taking place in an urban context. We see this as informing and sustaining a new hybrid mode of promotional and humanitarian communication, evidencing social good 'place making' and enabling new forms of visible humanitarian participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bridging third wave HCI with infrastructure studies, this paper examines the relationship between infrastructural visibility, breakdown, and experience through an existentialist lens. We present and theorize a state of infrastructural functionality – which we term 'hyper-functionality' – that renders infrastructure visible because of its experiential effects on end-users, not necessarily because of malfunction. We introduce this term through the presentation of a story from the life of one of the authors in which an infrastructural assemblage behaved unexpectedly, giving rise to the experience of the absurd – a feeling of alienation from oneself and the technological assemblages that constitute one's daily world. We explore the applicability of hyper-functionality for the interpretation and theorization of larger-scale scenarios by using it to interpret reactions to the role that social media – Facebook in particular – played in the troubled United States presidential election in 2016. We contend that the existentialist-tinted lens of hyper-functionality constitutes a novel and meaningful way of analyzing the human experience of the mundane in relation to infrastructures, thus forming the basis for a humanistic infrastructure studies. [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]

The content moderation practice of deplatforming, i.e., the removal of undesired actors, has become common on social media platforms such as YouTube. Our study aims to examine the impact of deplatforming on prominent far-right channels on YouTube. In our study, we are particularly interested in the deplatforming of prominent far-right channels such as Alex Jones, James Allsup, or Red Ice TV to understand the impact deplatforming has on them. To do so, we analyze two datasets: We check whether 11,198 YouTube channels have been removed in 22 months between 2018 and 2019 and for what reason. We then focus on the far right and check whether the deplatformed far-right channels have found a new home on the alternative video platform BitChute. The time frame for this study includes the removal of some critically important far-right figures. Our analysis shows that deplatforming effectively minimizes the reach of disinformation and extreme speech, as alternative platforms allowing this kind of content cannot mitigate the negative effect of being deplatformed on YouTube. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While scholars have studied democratic backsliding in the West, rapid democratic backsliding in the Global South is relatively underexplored, and the role of social media is unclear. Through a mixed-methods analysis of pro and anti-military Facebook and Telegram posts and offline protests and state violence in the backsliding democracy of Myanmar, our research expands current understandings of connective action in the Global South. Supported by both qualitative and quantitative data, we find that the interaction between offline state violence and offline protests is mediated by engagement on Facebook and Telegram, and thus that social media in Myanmar is integral to democratic social movements against the authoritarian state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the framework of 'digitized narratives' to examine how, in the aftermath of the Gabby Petito case, survivors of narcissistic abuse turned to Twitter to share personal narratives and educate others about violence against women. Drawing on a qualitative content analysis of 204 tweets collected during Domestic Violence Awareness Month in the U.S. in October 2021, we argue that survivors of narcissistic abuse used #NarcissisticAbuse to build community, publicize the characteristics of narcissistic abuse, and encourage survivors to recognize warning signs and seek help. The strong educational focus in the discourse around #NarcissisticAbuse separates it from other social media movements (e.g., #MeToo, #WhyIStayed) in that women strategically drew on their personal narratives to describe the traits of a narcissist, the control mechanisms used to subdue victims, and the types of abuse they experienced. In doing so, they educated the public about the dangers of narcissistic abuse and raised awareness about this often less visible and less talked about form of abuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mounting studies have suggested that messages featuring morality and emotion are more likely to go viral on social media platforms. Our study investigated three controversial events intensely discussed on Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter), with a focus on the linkage between morality/emotion and social media in a non-Western cultural context. We found (1) more moral content than non-moral content in the online discussion across the three events, (2) no delay of hourly aggregated moral/emotional content between individual posts and media posts, and (3) posts with stronger but heterogeneous emotions attract more retweets, comments, and likes, while homogenous moral foundations in a post can gain more comments and likes but not retweets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problematic social media use (PSMU) is a new and potentially addictive behavior causing a public health issue among young adults. PSMU has been extensively researched; however, prior studies primarily focus on the direct or indirect correlation of PSMU and other proximal or distal variables, rather than examining links with distinct factors or the importance of each factor in the development of PSMU. The current study, based on the Person-Affect-Cognition-Execution model aimed to investigate the relationship between PSMU, the intensity and extent of social media usage, personal characteristics, negative emotions and cognitions, and self-control using network analysis. A total of 896 Chinese young adults (Mage = 20.57, SD = 2.00) were included in this study. The results showed that state-fear of missing out had the closest association with PSMU, followed by social network site usage intensity, social media self-control failure, and social media engagement, which were the strongest risk factors of PSMU. Social media engagement, fear of missing out, and social media self-control failure were the most core co-occurring symptoms with PSMU. Neuroticism was a distal factor that influenced the whole network. This study contributed to the conceptualization and visualization used to explain the development of PSMU and provided important theoretical and practical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As social media becomes more ingrained in political and social discourse around the world, the need for systematic measures and interpretations of online polarization grows. In this work, we introduce five major organizational forms of community-level polarization and nine subforms to support comparison of community dynamics in controversial discussions across time, platforms, languages, and domains. We propose a multi-dimensional social network analysis approach to characterize the structure within and between ideologically opposed communities and evaluate the organizational form. Through three case studies, we demonstrate applying the proposed methodology on two social media platforms (Twitter and Reddit) and levels of conflict (topic and partisanship). This work has implications for depolarization interventions and policies on social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While government regulators, the press, and academics struggle to determine who should be responsible for content on social media platforms, we know little about what the public believes about these issues. In this study, we investigate what drives Americans' opinions on whether the government, platforms, or individual users should be responsible for social media content. Using data from a nationally representative survey of over 10,000 Americans, we investigate how anti-establishment attitudes relate to who Americans believe should be responsible for content on social media. We also examine the role of beliefs in the government's role in the market, free speech beliefs, and beliefs in individual responsibility in this context. Among other findings, we show how anti-establishment beliefs and beliefs in individual responsibility may drive people to put the onus on individual users to bear the responsibility for online content. Theoretically, our study contributes to the ongoing discussion in sociology and political science that partisanship alone is not sufficient for explaining American public opinion. Practically, this study contributes to the ongoing public discussion around content moderation and related policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following concerns about social media's role in politics (fostering polarization and spreading disinformation), many activists and civic hackers have developed alternative digital democracy platforms for both deliberation and the representation of public opinion. But how are we to study the role of these platforms, and in particular, their algorithms in the development of issues and the publics that gather around them? This article employs a simple quali-quantitative data visualization to study how a particular digital democracy platform, vTaiwan (an implementation of Pol.is – a tool for generating opinions and consensus about public issues) – formats political participation. We investigate how one particular issue (Uber legalization) was formed and reformed by users, moderators, and algorithms on the vTaiwan platform over time. while the algorithm sorted opinions into a binary of pro and anti-Uber positions, we find that the comments themselves and their sequence suggest more nuanced positions and the potential for dialogue. We argue that vTaiwan may be limited by its focus on simple quantitative data points (positive or negative votes as opposed to the texts themselves) and a forced separation of participants into in-or-out opinion groups. This study contributes to critical algorithm studies and digital democracy studies by offering an effective way to analyse the role of algorithms in democratic politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]