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

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

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

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

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

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

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]

How do gender and class work together to shape adolescent girls' unequal access to mobile phones within the family in Mumbai, India? What are the everyday practices and cultural logics upon which these inequalities are built? This paper addresses these questions by using a mixed-methods study of 59 group interviews and 268 surveys with adolescents aged 13–15 in Mumbai. Taking an intersectional analytical framework, the findings show how gender and class together create varying standards of 'respectable femininity' and class distinction that families aspire to and cultivate in adolescent girls. The mobile phone can be seen as both a threat and a necessity to the maintenance of these standards of respectability, resulting in families variously enabling or constraining access to mobile phones by girls. Rather than interpreting the findings through binaries of low-income/high-income or empowered/constrained, I instead consider how classed ideals of 'respectable femininity' create different aspirational conditions for girls belonging to each class group, and form the cultural frames of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current period of disruptive social change is inextricably bound up with new means and modes of communication, information, and media streams. The Communication, Information Technologies & Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association (CITAMS) locates these factors at the center of our collective interests, investigating them through a plethora of methods, theories, and empirical cases. Each year, CITAMS runs a special issue in ICS showcasing select works presented at the previous year's American Sociological Association conference and the affiliated Media Sociology preconference. Papers in the 2022 CITAMS Special Issue reflect a social context defined by a prolonged global pandemic and wrought by democratic uncertainty. Across these social circumstances, technology and media loom large. Simultaneously, everyday life continues and classic CITAMS scholarship sustains relevance for the ways people interact, construct identity, consume, and mobilize. All of this and more are contained in the pages of this year's Special Issue, from which readers can get a sense of what CITAMS has to offer and consider how their own work may fit within the broad CITAMS umbrella. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are currently no concerted attempts to understand the role of whistleblowers in the new social and political environment created by digital ICTs. Digital ICTs drive an accelerating visibility where elites and citizens constantly acquire new tools to track, surveil, and scrutinize each other. Moreover, these technologies make possible a new kind of invisibility. Increasingly complex modes of digital data production and usage generate grey areas that seem to escape legal jurisdiction and democratic oversight. With their privileged access inside these grey areas, conscientious employees-turned-whistleblowers are likely to become key sources for the disclosure of serious wrongdoing in the coming years. The argument is empirically illustrated through three cases that represent different types of grey areas in advanced democracies: big data surveillance (Edward Snowden), tax havens (Antoine Deltour and the Panama and Paradise Papers), and digital political profiling (Christopher Wylie). [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]

The idea of post-factual politics has become increasingly relevant for describing current political and societal developments. Though research on the topic has been blooming, we lack a common framework and systematic tool to map and analyze post-truth communication. Therefore, our paper advances the adaptation of claims-making for the analysis of how actors relativize the truth and use discourses of untruthfulness to attack their opponents, constructing their own versions of reality. We extend the affinity between populism and post-truth to conceptualize truth contestation in two aspects: (1) the antagonistic anti-elite constructions of accusations of creating and spreading false information and lies, (2) the emphasis on emotionality and negativity over facts and expertise. Building on a communication-centered approach to populism, we define key content and stylistic characteristics of post-truth claims to study the contestation of truth in political communication in a systematic way. Taking the Twitter communication of Donald Trump as a prime example, we illustrate the employability of our approach via a pilot study on the longest period of shutdown in US history (22 December 2018–25 January 2019). As a result, we introduce claims analysis as an approach that can be usefully adapted to study post-truth discourses. [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]

This paper draws on my experience over two decades as part of an early generation of scholars who graduated with a PhD in sociology into a career as a researcher and teacher in the multidisciplinary field of digital media. I reflect on my experiences to offer an assessment of the state of digital media scholarship within sociology and the field of communication. The study of digital media remains underdeveloped within sociology. In part, this is due to disciplinary failures, an array of relevant, specialized areas within sociology have yet to fully realize the role of digital media. Sociological perspectives are also constrained through a dominant 'communication perspective' at the center of the field of communication. Communication is home to most digital media scholars and uses its institutional dominance to arbitrate what qualifies as scholarship. Whereas communication serves as a plural disciplinary catch-all for the subjects of the social sciences, it often does so without crossing the boundaries of a relatively homogeneous, epistemological framework. That framework does not adequately represent sociological perspectives on digital media. I point to key differences between sociology and communication that tend to marginalize sociological perspectives. These differences have also served to render the field of communication less relevant to sociology (and likely to other disciplines in the social sciences). I stress the importance of building institutions and practices that support (multi)disciplinary representation in the field to strengthen sociology and other perspectives and avoid a myopic lens on our understanding of digital media and social life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes all the articles and corresponding comments of Al-Jazeera Arabic's coverage of the Syrian war from 2011 to 2017. I propose a multilayered Critical Discourse Analysis Guided Topic Modeling method that includes context of social structures and processes in the analysis of topics. This article shows that the employment of topic modeling without Critical Discourse Analysis does not unravel the power relations embedded within the platform. Two different applications of this method are used to demonstrate how a guided topic modeling method can lead to more nuanced results that can unravel important social dynamics which would have remained unperceived if applying traditional computational methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite extensive studies on ethical data use and algorithms, little is known about the ethical perspectives of tech workers – insiders of a profession that heavily relies on data and algorithms. Nor have there been sufficient cross-national comparisons of their perspectives. Relying on interviews with 98 tech workers in China and the US, this paper is guided by two questions: (1) What are tech workers' perceptions of big data ethics, and (2) what are the cross-national similarities and differences in China and the US? The study found that there are cross-national similarities in tech workers' cautious enthusiasm about the applications of big data in their work, as well as in their complex and ambivalent ethical perspectives on the use of big data in government digital surveillance. The main cross-national differences occur in tech workers' perceptions of whether big data may reinforce social inequalities. US-based tech workers are concerned about the reinforcement of race and gender-based inequalities through the use of big data, whereas their colleagues in China are optimistic that the use of big data may reduce income-based inequalities across geographical regions. The study's findings have implications for how to leverage tech workers' influence and promote the ethical use of data and algorithms. [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]

Online petitions have become a widespread vehicle for contemporary political participation. While research tends to focus on individual factors for potential petitioners that influence signing, less attention has been paid to the influence of the actual text of petitions. This paper uses data from an original web-based survey experiment in Australia and Germany to test the influence of content factors: narratives (i.e., stories based on individual experiences and emotions) and popularity cues (i.e., high numbers of signatures) across two issues: climate change and welfare policy. We find that narratives within petition texts involve readers through the mechanism of transportation and motivate them to sign petitions, as do popularity cues. The effects of narratives were found across both countries but tended to be stronger in Germany than in Australia. We argue that our novel framework can be used for future research on how the presentation of issues shape contemporary political participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the findings of a study of two automatically generated corpora of multimodal digital items user-tagged as 'Black Lives Matter memes' and 'Blue Lives Matter memes'. The central aim is to flesh out the memetic trends representing the discourses and ideologies on the Black and blue memescape, which is explored in the wake of the most infamous but interest-generating tragedy in the history of the Blue Lives Matter movement, namely George Floyd's death at the hands of white police officer Derek Chauvin. Studied through a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analytic lens, the internet memes are shown to contribute to the polyvocal political discussion and, with some neutral or ambiguous exceptions, to display a positive (pro-) or – more often – negative (anti-) stance on each of the opposite movements (with anti-BLM items consituting the largest category in the dataset). Also, contrary to the well-entrenched conceptualisation of memes as a type of humour, the majority of the memes at hand manifest no humorous potential. Humour is present mainly among the negative-stance memes, which points to the disparagement of a target as a concomitant of humour in the memes on this serious political topic. [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]

Amid the ongoing pandemic and the so-called 'New Cold War,' physical mobility dwindles and political paranoia surges. China has been increasingly portrayed as a 'black box' in anglophone discourse, scholarly and popular alike. More than ever, digital platforms serve as the sites and means to know 'the Chinese reality.' In this paper, we mobilize insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS), especially its epistemological and ontological reflections on the 'black box' metaphor, to confront the ongoing 'blackboxing' of China and, in tandem, the embrace of digital platform data as 'open source' to penetrate China from afar. Foregrounding the role of technological infrastructures, research positionality, and power relations in knowledge production, we situate this phenomenon in broader shifts in geopolitics and academic ecology. We then suggest alternative routes for empirical investigation: (1) to reembed Chinese platform data in their sociotechnical contexts, (2) to approach a 'networked China' at and across different scales, and relatedly, (3) to attune to obscured positionalities in fieldwork and analysis. Ultimately, we urge communities of China researchers to attend to the politics and materiality of knowledge production and resist the pervading 'New Cold War' framing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the algorithmic era, both users and the platform battle for visibility. Chinese fans are savvy users who explore the hidden algorithms behind platform functions. With the collectively developed algorithmic imaginary, digital fandom communities negotiate with the platform over algorithms to optimize the visibility of celebrities they endorse. Drawing from participatory observation and semi-structured interviews in Chinese online fandoms of an idol group, INTO1, we detailed how fans as digital users collectively explore, interpret, and creatively utilize algorithms to increase their idol's visibility. We conclude that visibility, as a representation of algorithm power, is co-defined through the constant push-and-pull between digital users and the platform. This paper contributes to both algorithm and fandom studies by describing large-scale non-professional users' daily construction of the algorithmic imaginary in the unique context of Chinese fandom and beyond. It also discusses broader civic implications of fans' algorithmic practices to wider digital users in China. [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]

This paper contributes to emerging discussions of blockchain governance through an analysis of dispute resolution platforms that reimagine justice. We focus specifically on Kleros, a blockchain-enabled dispute resolution platform, that promises to secure, authenticate, and democratize access to justice for the twenty-first century. We advance the concept of cryptocourts whereby jurors, incentivized by accumulating cryptocurrency, rapidly mobilize using principles of on-demand crowdsourcing to resolve disputes. We critique the broader social imaginaries that cryptocourts such as Kleros will result in a more open, trustworthy, transparent, and democratic systems of justice. These platforms instead pose important questions concerning their potential impact on civil dispute resolution practices by embedding it within an economy of cryptocurrency speculation. This ostensibly results in a legal infrastructure founded on principles of financial acquisition that positions jurors as economic agents seeking to profit from disputes, and courts as computational systems that merely authenticate and secure the distribution of evidence and verdicts. [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]

Discussions about AI development frequently bring up the question of ethics because it is difficult to predict how technological decisions might play out once AI systems are implemented and used in the world. Engineers of AI systems are increasingly expected to go beyond the traditions of requirement specifications, taking into account broader societal contexts and their complexities. In this paper we present findings from a hackathon event conducted with working engineers, exploring the gaps between existing guidelines and recommendations for addressing ethical issues with respect to AI technologies and the realities experienced by the engineers in practice. We found that when faced with the uncertainties of how to recognize and navigate ethical issues and challenges, engineers looked to identify the responsibilities that need to be in place to sustain trust and to hold the relevant parties to account for their misdeeds. We re-envision familiar engineering practices as nodes of certainty to accommodate the needs of responsible and ethical AI. Despite the desire for mechanisms for sustaining certainty in how to build AI technology responsibly by providing frameworks for action and accountability, there remains a need to ensure just enough spaces and opportunities to cultivate reasonable doubt. Space and capacity to doubt accepted certainties, in fact, is the very process of ethics, necessary for holding to account our standards, guidelines, and checklists as technology and society co-evolve. [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]

The internet is an increasingly influential actor and arena for debating emerging sustainability controversies, but studies often overlook the role of visualisations in online spreading of information. This paper offers a way to better understand this role: what images do competing online actors use, are there differences between opponents and proponents, differences between internet regions, and are there shifts in their online visualisations over time? Adopting a controversy studies perspective and the digital methods approach, we studied the online spread of visual information. We compared the use of visualisation about shale gas on top-ranked pages in the internet regions of South Africa, Mexico and the United Kingdom in 2018 and 2019. The results indicate a connection between the actor's standpoints in the controversy and the type of image used. In Mexico, proponents and neutrals used, most of all, photographs of people (officials). Opponents posted more data visuals. South African and British neutral actors used more data visuals, while proponents posted landscapes and opponents photographs of people (protesters). Also, we noticed that changes in the actor's position in the controversy between 2018 and 2019 coincided with changes in the use of type and content of visualisations. Context-specifics of each country offered possible explanations for these shifts in standpoint and visualisation of the controversy. Our study indicates that visuals are highly relevant digital objects in public debate and the decision-making process. [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]

This paper examines how mobile communication and mobile banking is used by women in rural western Kenya (Elgeyo Marakwet), a resource-constrained area where women must carefully monitor the flow of money through their households. Also, women face structural inequality. Among other things, polygyny (one husband and several wives) is legal. Based on the inductive analysis of 25 interviews with women, and using the lens of intersectionality, we examine their use of mobile banking. We examine how mobile technology plays into the management of the household economy, and how it is used in extramarital relationships. We discuss how women use mobile communication in their collective savings groups (chama). We see how the mobile phone can be the locus of tensions within the household and how mBanking both supports the lives of the women but also how this can eventually undercut social support. [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 uses the Swedish, once neo-Nazi expression culture enricher (Swedish: kulturberikare) as a case study to explore how covert and coded far-right discourse is mainstreamed, over time and across websites. A sample of 2,336 uses of the expression between 1999 and 2020 were analysed using critical discourse analysis. The findings illustrate how the expression works like a 'dog whistle' by enabling users to discretely self-identify with an imagined in-group of discontent white 'Swedes', while simultaneously showing opposition to the priorities of a generalised 'establishment'. It shows how the expression is circulated in settings ranging from mainstream to far-right, and particularly, it highlights the potential role of semi-radical settings to act as gateways between mainstream and far-right ideas. Finally, the analysis shows evolving, ever more covertly hateful uses of the expression over time, illustrating the adaptability of far-right language online more generally, as a means to evade unwanted exposure by the far-right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing number of undecided voters has attracted a lot of interest due to its important role in determining election results. Many studies have addressed the media consumption of undecideds but few have examined the role of undecideds' attitudes towards the media institution. This paper is innovative in its attempt to address the issue of the role of media trust in undecided versus decided voters' media engagement, based on a survey (N = 1427) followed by a multivariate analysis during the Israeli April 2019 elections campaign. The analysis revealed that although decided voters have more doubt in the accuracy of the news media, they still consume more news from more diverse sources, highlighting decideds as more critical and simultaneously more informed than undecideds. A parallel experiment (N = 121) identified that undecideds tended to rank a fake news item shared by one of their Facebook friends as credible significantly more often than decideds, demonstrating undecideds' lower critical ability to identify misinformation. The present study highlights the under-explored roles of undecideds (mis)trust of the news media and high susceptibility to believe fake news items, thus adding new evidence to the notion that elections are often won by the least informed and least critical citizens. We discuss the grim implications of our findings to current literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an important indicator of digital divide, the digital skills have been measured by many instruments on the netizens or adults in western countries. However, there are still few concerns on children in developing countries. This paper aimed to develop a reliable and valid digital skills scale for school children (DSS-SC) based on solid theoretical ground and robust empirical evidence. A cross-sectional study was conducted by cluster random sampling among Chinese urban-rural school children (N = 3217). After developing the initial framework and executing EFA and CFA, the final DSS-SC was a theoretically and empirically consistent instrument consisting of 22 items in 5 dimensions, i.e., Operational Skills (basic operation, information management, information navigation), Mobile Skills (software operation, device application), Social Skills (social sharing, social interaction), Creative Skills (content creation, content integration), and Safety Skills (privacy protection, risk prevention). It provided theoretical and practical significance in future research and digital education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change and populism are two major phenomena in contemporary politics. Recent successes of populist parties and politicians, especially in Europe and in the US, have given rise to extensive debates in the academic literature and beyond. Yet the link between populism and climate change scepticism (henceforth 'scepticism'), has so far received little attention. This paper examines the link between scepticism and populism by means of a unique dataset: a survey and detailed web browsing histories of participants from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the US, and the UK. The web tracking data includes more than 150 million website visits over a period of three months and the survey contains questions about political attitudes and attitudes towards climate change. We analyse the 8893 websites which contained 'climate change' and its cognates in the URLs and link these website visits and the content of these websites to the political attitudes and climate change orientation of those who visited them. The contribution is both methodological (linking surveys and web tracking data, including cross-country comparison) and substantive (uncovering links between populists, their climate change orientations, and the content of related websites they visited). Our analysis demonstrates the value of computational methods in political communication research and provides insights into the link between populists and climate change scepticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Algorithms are an integral part of our everyday lives and shape the selection and presentation of information and communication on the internet. At the same time, media users are faced with a lack of control and transparency when interacting with these systems because algorithms largely remain black boxes to end users. Relying on the notion that algorithms are socio-technical systems that comprise both technical and human components, this paper examines internet users' awareness of algorithms in different areas of internet use and inquires into users' perceptions of the impact of algorithms on their autonomy when interacting online. Empirically, we rely on qualitative interviews with 30 German internet users. Findings indicate that users in general are aware of algorithms operating in a wide range of applications and demonstrate a basic understanding of how these systems work. In line with the third-person effect, users perceive algorithms to have a stronger impact on others' internet use than on their own. Further, users' awareness of algorithms was found to be closely related to their perceived autonomy. When users feel in control of their interactions online, they are less aware of the impact of algorithms governing their interactions. Based on these results, we discuss the implications for transparency measures in algorithm regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is a large literature on the determinants of generalized trust, few studies have explored the impact of internal migration and attempted to tackle potential endogeneity issues. Using nationally representative data from the latest five rounds of the China General Society Survey, this paper estimates the impact of internal migration on generalized trust by exploiting arguably exogenous, historical changes in the GDP growth target set by the government and the share of migrants at the county level. We find evidence of a significant negative impact of internal migration on generalized trust. We also investigate the moderating role of Internet use, and find that whilst Internet use significantly attenuates the negative impact on generalized trust of internal migration, this moderating effect is much stronger for urban-to-urban migrants than it is for rural-to-urban migrants. The results further indicate that internal migration in China has led to the deterioration of subjective well-being, changing perceptions of fairness, increased likelihood of downward social mobility, and deterioration in social relations, which we interpret as potential mechanisms behind our findings. [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]

How-to videos on YouTube have become a popular source for procedural learning. An important difference to traditional educational videos is that the instructor is often not a professional educator, but an amateur or peer. Building on work on social learning from models, this paper explores how instructor characteristics such as model-observer similarity, instructor credibility (expertise, trustworthiness, attractiveness), and conversational human voice influence choice and evaluation of a how-to video. A survey (n = 401) among active Internet users was conducted. Most respondents had used YouTube and had watched how-to videos on YouTube. Respondents preferred videos with instructors that they perceived as experts and trustworthy, and who talked in a conversational human voice. Instructors of the same gender as the viewer were also preferred, especially by males. The instructor variables explained variance in perceived usefulness and intention to use how-to videos above and beyond the technical and instructional quality of the video. However, only conversational human voice and same gender of the instructor turned out to be significant predictors of perceived usefulness and intention to use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a first systematic analysis and conceptualization of local comic responses to global events, as articulated by internet users. We probed the multifaceted interactions between the global-local and entertaining-disruptive dimensions of contemporary satire through a cross-linguistic analysis of reactions to Donald Trumps' election. Using a combination of qualitative methods, we analyzed humorous messages in Arabic, Chinese, English, German, and Spanish (n = 321) on Twitter and Weibo during November 2016. We found that globally shared themes are mainly apolitical and entertaining, while glocal responses align with three ideal types, which we term inbound, transitional, and outbound satire. Each type of satire featured a distinct combination of protagonists, targets and humor mechanisms. In conclusion, we discuss how cross-national satire on social media problematizes the (already murky) distinction between entertaining and disruptive satire, why satire is uniquely equipped to domesticate global affairs through estrangement, and how our typology may be linked to bilateral relations between countries in the contemporary international arena. [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]

As global agricultural production methods and supply chains have become more digitised, farmers around the world are adopting digital agricultural technologies (AgTech) such as drones, IoT, remote sensors, blockchain and satellite imagery to inform on-farm decision-making. Yet, on the backdrop of a persistent digital divide between rural and urban communities, many Australian farmers are not taking up digital AgTech. It has been argued that these farmers are being 'left behind' in an increasingly digital world, and this may impact their future success. Scholars of digital AgTech adoption typically take a siloed approach, positioning the individual or farm as the key unit of analysis, with fewer studies addressing structural conditions. This has provided a useful but incomplete understanding of the disparity between users and non-users. This paper builds upon emerging sociocultural approaches, which aim to address this gap, by using a novel 'communitive ecology' analytical approach to consider how adoption occurs through networks of actors. Based on an exploratory, qualitative study of a digital farming project on a cotton farm and its digital communicative ecology in South-East Queensland, Australia this study identifies technological, discursive, and social factors of digital AgTech adoption. Overall, an evolution from a digital divide to data divide, expressed in the interactions between farmers and stakeholders, and characterised by gaps between the generation and application of farm data, is observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through document analysis and interviews, this paper examines the patent narratives of Transsion, a Chinese company dominating Africa's smartphone market and a leading innovator in facial recognition technologies (FRTs) optimized for darker skin tones. We identify two major narratives concerning Transsion's FRT patenting practice. First is 'empowerment', through which Transsion argues that there are 'blind spots' in conventional AI technologies and presents its AI camera as a remedy and an empowerment tool for dark-skinned users by 'seeing' their beauty. Second is the 'warfare' narrative, which is shaped by the heightening market competition and accelerating patent races among Chinese phone makers. As the battle for tech supremacy intensifies in Africa, Transsion expresses a strong sense of crisis and considers its FRT patents as 'weapons of competition' in preparation for a future smartphone warfare in Africa. This study makes two contributions. Empirically, through analyzing patents, we examine a relatively less-known Chinese tech company that has tremendous impact in the Global South. Theoretically, we interrogate the possibility of algorithmic empowerment against racist AI and technological independence through patents, although developing AI as weaponry, in the China-Africa context, also hampers the politics of decolonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the experiences of Latin American data workers who annotate data for machine learning algorithms through labor platforms. It introduces the notion of 'embedded reproduction': the relationship between embeddedness, the degree to which non-economic institutions and their social environment constrain socioeconomic activity, and social reproduction, or the activities that nurture, maintain, and regenerate the workforce. The analysis of 38 interviews with platform workers suggests they are situated in a highly disembedded market due to the lack of regulations on the data production process, giving free rein to platforms to set rules to their detriment. This article explores how this disembeddedness shapes social reproduction by studying three forms of collective social support received by workers: from family members, neighbors and local communities, and online groups. The support of these networks is primarily local, depends on high levels of trust, and is gendered. These findings suggest that platform data work is unsustainable from an embedded reproductive perspective since platform intermediation leads workers and local communities to carry out the social and economic risks associated with this form of gig work. This research invites a dialogue between the embeddedness framework with social reproduction as well as a consideration of the importance of nature and natural resources in the study of social environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper unpacks how dynamic political and media systems shape the kinds of frames political actors champion, when and how they express support for frames and the implications of both for individual claimsmaking. To do so, we conduct a rigorous qualitative analysis of discourse during a two-week period in which the Florida legislature considered and passed the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act after a shooter killed 17 people in Parkland, Florida. We systematically explore how two framing dynamics – competition and amplification – shape what frames political actors champion and the relative effects of these dynamics on individual claimsmaking in 438 letters to the editor and op-eds appearing in mainstream outlets, 4,962 emails sent to Florida Governor Rick Scott, and 1,000 tweets. We find that amplification and competition shape the relative visibility of frames and the frequency with which individuals use these frames in their claimsmaking. Generally speaking, gun control and progressive groups selectively amplified frames associated with the emerging, student-led Never Again Marjory Stoneman Douglas movement and legislative frames that were consistent with their goals. This seems to have increased the visibility of these ideas in mainstream outlets and influenced claimsmaking insofar as individuals drew on amplified frames across the forums relatively frequently. This was not true of frames opposing gun control. Gun rights groups bickered with politicians and among themselves. As a result, gun rights frames were less prevalent in mainstream discourse and in individual claimsmaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]