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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]

Extant research documents the impact of meritocratic narratives in news media that justify economic inequality. This paper inductively explores whether popular music is a source of cultural frames about inequality. We construct an original dataset combining user data from Spotify with lyrics from Genius and employ unsupervised computational text analysis to classify the content of the 3,660 most popular songs across 23 European countries. Drawing on Lizardo's enculturation framework, we analyze lyrics through the lens of public culture and explore their link with individual beliefs as a reflection of personal culture. We find that, in more unequal societies, songs that frame inequalities as a structural issue (lyrics about 'Struggle' or omnipresent 'Risks') are more popular than those adopting a meritocratic frame (songs we describe as 'Bragging Rights' or those telling a 'Rags to Riches' tale). Moreover, we find that the presence in public culture of a certain frame is associated with the expression of frame-consistent individual beliefs about inequality. We conclude by reflecting on the promise of automatic text classification for the study of lyrics, the theorized role of popular music in the study of culture, and by proposing venues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 6 January 2021, the world watched as Donald Trump's supporters stormed the US Capitol. However, in this paper, I argue that social scientists should not simply focus on Trump or the Republicans who have supported his false claims that the presidency was stolen from him. Instead, researchers need to leverage the insights provided by sociology, political science and information studies and communication to unpack the increasingly dysfunctional movement-party dynamics in the US, which not only made the 6 January riots possible but continue to erode democratic processes. Here, I outline four developments over the last thirty years that help account for the contemporary political moment and underscore the role of digital technologies in these developments. [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]

Netflix's Sex Education both represents sex education and educates viewers about sex. From the opening scene of the first episode, viewers are positioned to see this series as one that is not afraid to represent explicitly the details of a range of sexual experiences. The series' frank depiction of sexual relationships between characters, and its exploration of characters' hopes, fears, and choices regarding ways to express their sexual desire is, arguably, ground-breaking. This paper focuses upon the ways in which the series represents young people as producers and consumers of pornographic/erotic narratives, harnessing the communication options within their social settings to develop understandings of, and share, information that is often structured as 'inappropriate' for under-18 year-olds. Sex Education sits at the intersection of information (seeking), communication, and society, as young people explore issues of crucial interest and importance to them, which have been all but ignored in most of their school curriculum offerings. Challenging a dominant social perception of sexually-explicit materials as harmful to young people, and suggesting instead that such materials may be beneficial, the series demonstrates how young people may come together to learn about themselves and each other, even as they confront the double standards of a hypersexualised society that offers no legitimate speaking position to under-18s. In this environment, with adults absent from authentic discussion, young people co-construct their future adult selves through producing, consuming, and discussing sexual content (and activities) in conversation with other young people. [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]

This paper critically examines a recently developed proposal for a border control system called iBorderCtrl, designed to detect deception based on facial recognition technology and the measurement of micro-expressions, termed 'biomarkers of deceit'. Funded under the European Commission's Horizon 2020 programme, the system is analysed in relation to the wider political economy of 'emotional AI' and the history of deception detection technologies. We then move on to interrogate the design of iBorderCtrl using publicly available documents and assess the assumptions and scientific validation underpinning the project design. Finally, drawing on a Bayesian analysis we outline statistical fallacies in the foundational premise of mass screening and argue that it is very unlikely that the model that iBorderCtrl provides for deception detection would work in practice. By interrogating actual systems in this way, we argue that we can begin to question the very premise of the development of data-driven systems, and emotional AI and deception detection in particular, pushing back on the assumption that these systems are fulfilling the tasks they claim to be attending to and instead ask what function such projects carry out in the creation of subjects and management of populations. This function is not merely technical but, rather, we argue, distinctly political and forms part of a mode of governance increasingly shaping life opportunities and fundamental rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the remediating effect of bio-sensing technology on touch practices in the context of parent-infant interaction. We examine how the entry of a biosensing technology into the social, sensory and technological ecology of family homes interacts with the ways in which parents and babies know each other and communicate through touch. The paper centres on an exploratory case study of the Owlet Smart Sock (OSS), a bio-sensing baby monitoring device. We bring the social critical and experiential lenses of multimodality and sensory ethnography to studying the OSS as a socio-technological probe across a range of research encounters, including focus groups, home visits and video re-enactments with parents. In doing so, we provide an account of the ways in which the technology affects how babies and parents' bodies are (re)imagined, assessed, controlled, interrelated, experienced, and cared for and move beyond generic social debate around the quantified-objectified baby and fears of touch deprivation in contemporary digital culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although previous research has offered important insights into the consequences of mis- and disinformation and the effectiveness of corrective information, we know markedly less about how different types of corrective information – news media literacy interventions and fact-checkers – can be combined to counter different forms of misinformation. Against this backdrop, this paper reports on experiments in the US and the Netherlands (N = 1,091) that exposed people to evidence-based or fact-free anti-immigration misinformation, fact-checkers and/or a media literacy intervention. The main findings indicate that evidence-based misinformation is seen as more accurate than fact-free misinformation, and the combination of news media literacy interventions and fact-checkers is most effective in lowering issue agreement and perceived accuracy of misinformation across countries. These findings have important implications for journalism practice and policy makers that aim to combat mis- and disinformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid development and dissemination of data analysis techniques permits the creation of ever more intricate algorithmic models. Such models are simultaneously the vehicle and outcome of quantification practices and embody a worldview with associated norms and values. A set of specialist skills is required to create, use, or interpret algorithmic models. The mechanics of an algorithmic model may be hard to comprehend for experts and can be virtually incomprehensible to non-experts. This is of consequence because such black boxing can introduce power asymmetries and may obscure bias. This paper explores the practices through which experts and non-experts determine the credibility of algorithmic models. It concludes that (1) transparency to (non-)experts is at best problematic and at worst unattainable; (2) authoritative models may come to dictate what types of policies are considered feasible; (3) several of the advantages attributed to the use of quantifications do not hold in policy making contexts. [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]

Living alone has been indicated as a key variable to explain loneliness in older adults. In contemporary society, where technology has become one of the main means of communication and personal interaction, has the internet influenced the relationship between living alone and loneliness? This paper aims to answer this research question by using a sample of 64,297 individuals who were surveyed in SHARE project wave 6 – in European countries with different welfare regimes (Portugal, Greece, Italy and Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, Luxemburg, Poland, Czech Republic; Slovenia, Estonia, and Croatia). The results of the regression analysis evidence the moderating role of the internet on the relationship between living alone and feelings of loneliness in individuals aged 50 and over, so that the impact of living alone on loneliness is diminished for internet users as compared to their peers who do not use the internet. The results therefore reinforce the importance of policies aimed at fostering e-inclusion as a way of reducing the loneliness of older adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the first systematic analysis of memes created by Palestinians in Israel. An analysis of 150 memes reveals how memes are used to reflect on and intervene in Palestinian youths' navigation of life in mixed cities under prolonged war and colonialism. I analyze these memes at three different levels: global popular culture and politics, in relation to the Israeli State, and Palestinian in-group dynamics. The analysis reveals a divide between Palestinians and Israelis despite living in mixed cities, putting the myth of coexistence in such cities into question. Memes appear to function both in navigating the contested cultural and spatial politics and carving out space in the cultural landscape for youths' aspirations. I propose a framework that conceptualizes Internet memes as mapping tools of everyday life. I argue that memes map out the social, cultural, and political landscape in which meme makers live and operate, and further reveals the intricate ties between new media technology and the political, cultural, and spatial arenas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a global health crisis in early 2020, memes of populist political leaders were disseminated in abundance on social media. At first sight, these political memes satirized and exposed the hazardous actions, appearances and communicative strategies of the populist leaders in this unforeseen situation that not only unsettled existing power balances, but also standard modes of professional and personal conduct. Based on a thematic analysis of memes of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and US President Donald Trump during the COVID-19 crisis, this paper finds, however, that the political memes' critical and affirmative power conflated. This challenged their potential as counter-narratives to the actions and communication of these populist leaders. We argue that this can be explained by an overlap in the communicative form of populism and memes: Political memes are a social media genre that uses incongruent humor to expose the contradictions, conflicts and hypocrisy of populist politicians. Similarly, populist politicians communicate in polarizing and personalizing rhetoric that emphasizes conflicts and the mischiefs of others on social media and beyond. This raises the broader question of how populist leaders might be criticized and their actions subjected to scrutiny in political memes without feeding into their own communicative patterns and logics, and thus unintentionally confirming their worldview and interpretations of events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the recent turn to humour, irony and ambiguity embodied in the adaptation of memes into the repertoire of online propaganda of the militant neo-Nazi group the Nordic Resistance Movement; in a process, we dub the 'memefication' of white supremacism. Drawing on a combination of quantitative visual content analysis (VCA) and in-depth visual analysis focused on iconography and symbolism, we explore all memes (N = 634) created and circulated by the group around the 2018 general elections in the country. The analysis proceeds in two steps: First, we present the results of the VCA in which we identified five thematic categories of memes crafting white supremacy, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny and anti-Semitic ideas onto esoteric and popular culture iconography then to map these across a matrix of content and form. We then proceed to the analysis of the cluster of memes coded as violent to explore the iconography and symbolism used to promote violence and death threats and render them banal. We draw on a range of recent scholarship on the entanglement of memes in the rise of the far-right and engage critical perspectives on the necropower of fascism to explore the interplay between ambiguous, playful and jokey imagery on the one hand and the murder fantasies and serious threat of white supremacist violence at the heart of neo-Nazi ideology, on the other. [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]

This paper discusses the relevance of Georg Lukács' 1923 book History and Class Consciousness in the context of digital capitalism. It does so by analysing how Lukács' concepts of the dialectic of subject and object, ideology, reification, reified consciousness matter today in the context of big data and digital capitalism. The essay shows that History and Class Consciousness' critique of reification, ideology, and reified consciousness remains highly topical in the age of digital capitalism and big data. Lukács' analysis allows us to critically analyse how social media, big data, and various other Internet technologies are used as tools of reification. At the same time, Lukács reminds us that only human praxis can establish alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technologies change users' existing social, cultural, and material practices by providing new opportunities for reflecting on and managing their lives. As technological advancements pervade our private and professional lives, users are tempted to see them as 'magic bullets' that can help them become more organized and efficient. In this paper, we introduce the term 'time hacking' to capture the various ways technologies mediate users' time perception and perspective. We will use the examples of virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa and the Quantified Self Movement to illustrate how people feel that they are capable of hacking time by using devices and programs. Imagining tools as neutral entities that help them better manage their lives in a world that seems increasingly sped up, users are often blind to the multifarious ways these technologies, and the companies that produce them, shape what they attend to and how they make sense of information. The concept of time hacking helps us examine what narratives users construct and share about timesaving tools and how users' perception of and perspective about time changes in response to emerging technologies. Most importantly, time hacking can help to explain the allure of timesaving technologies, why users might be enthusiastic about taking them up and integrating them into their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Music streaming services all provide affordable and easy access to massive databases of music and instead attempt to increase customer loyalty by optimizing personalized recommendations and offering opportunities for listeners to build their 'own' music libraries. In this paper, these features are operationalized as the convenience, price, archive and algorithmic value of streaming services. Existing studies detail the multitude of ways of making sense of these services, but do not allow for specifying what features matter more. Drawing on an online survey and interviews, this study indicates that price, convenience and archive value predict continued intention to use music streaming services. Survey results negate the importance of algorithmic value, but the interviews suggest that for some, algorithmic individuation is too evasive to be noticed. Those who 'see' and value recommendations 'cater for algorithms' and consider their own listening and archiving practices as input for optimizing output. Combined, the different features set the stage for both overt and covert tethering of people and streaming services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the topic of social media users' polyvocal political activism facilitated by participatory culture and expressed through multimodal digital humour (including humorous memes) in the context of a threat of a regime. The focus of attention is political humour on the r/HongKong subreddit, specifically the posts pertinent to the ongoing boycott movement of multiple companies consequent upon their actions in response to the 2019 protests in Hong Kong. Apart from presenting the multimodal characteristics of the creative digital data through the lens of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, the central aim is to discuss the functions of users' political humour online, offering various socio-pragmatic conclusions about the polyvocal participatory practice at hand. It is argued that this digital humour resides solely in the attention-grabbing form, with the otherwise serious posts performing informative and persuasive functions as they convey community members' socio-political critique. While disparaging the 'butts', online users do bonding through collectively expressing their political dissent (which also gives them psychological relief) and sharing subversive ideologies. The humorous items inform and warn potential punters and tacitly call for a boycott of the companies that bow to the regime, all in an act of solidarity with Hong Kong protesters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning in 2014, Chinese Internet-users can purchase care and concern online. Customers can hire both male and female virtual lovers (xuni lianren) to talk to them while the lovers perform character roles of their choice. By examining why female customers consume virtual loving services, we argue that women hire male virtual lovers to assuage the frustrations that they accrue in their daily lives, and not to look for offline romantic partners. Inspired by the concept of 'emergent masculinity' (Inhorn & Wentzell, 2011. Embodying emergent masculinities: Men engaging with reproductive and sexual health technologies in the Middle East and Mexico. American Ethnologist, 38(4), 801–815), we coin the term emergent femininity. This term describes how, after a century-long process where the individual breaks free from familial and societal strictures, present-day young and urban Chinese women now exhibit a novel mode of womanhood characterized by historically unprecedented self-confidence, a willingness to openly articulate and purchase what they want, and a high degree of mediatization. Hence, this paper illuminates the appearance of 'new women' in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender-based online violence (GBOV) involves digitally-mediated and -enabled forms of harassment and abuse targeting women, and thus represents a major challenge to feminist movements globally. In this paper, we argue that civil society-based feminist organizations from various parts of the world have responded to this challenge by centring evidence of GBOV in order to develop key though hitherto under-examined epistemic, cultural, and socio-political practices, which we term evidentiary activism. Using a qualitative content analysis of 82 documents produced by feminist organizations, our analysis finds that this activism has two fundamental components. First, feminist organizations engage with existing formal evidentiary cultures by advancing and critiquing legislative and regulatory reforms to address GBOV, platform-based technological 'solutions,' and conventional notions of user privacy and anonymity. Second, they embrace and contribute to informal evidentiary cultures, which treat evidence as a tool of cultural and political mobilization against GBOV through strategies of publicization, moral pollution, and the cultivation of feminist digital citizenship. We contend that, akin to evidence-based advocacy that is influential in the fields of biomedicine and health, feminist organizations participate in and invent modes of digitally-oriented evidentiary activism designed to combat GBOV. Feminists' recasting of the how, why, and what of evidence represents a noteworthy development in struggles against online violence and misogyny, and within digital culture more generally. [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]

This paper examines gender-biases on Stack Overflow, the world's largest question-and-answer forum of programming knowledge. Employing a non-binary gender identification built on usernames, I investigate the role of gender in shaping users' experience in technical forums. The analysis encompasses 11-years of activity, across levels of expertise, language, and specialism, to assess if Stack Overflow is really a paradise for programmers. I first examine individual users, asking if there are gender differences in key user metrics of success, focusing on reputation points, user tenure, and level of activity. Second, I test if there are gender-biases in how technical knowledge is recognised in the question-answer format of the platform. Third, using social network analysis I investigate if interaction on Stack Overflow is organised by gender. Results show that sharing and recognising technical knowledge is dictated by users' gender, even when it is operationalised beyond a binary. I find that feminine users receive lower scores for their answers, despite exhibiting higher effort in their contributions. I also show that interaction on Stack Overflow is organised by gender. Specifically, that feminine users preferentially interact with other feminine users. The findings emphasise the central role of gender in shaping interaction in technical spaces, a necessity for participation in the masculine-dominated forum. I conclude the study with recommendations for inclusivity in online forums. [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]

Existing research on coping accentuates the role of positive emotions as defensive mechanisms to cope with stressful situations and the ensuing negative emotions. The same literature justifies the long-term effects of positive emotions that help build lasting resilience. Grounded in theories of coping and resilience, this paper (1) identifies the emotions that people actuate to cope with adversaries and (2) evaluates the resulting long-lasting adaptation and resilience. To do this, we examined the emotions felt by Qatar residents due to a land, sea, and air blockade enforced by neighbouring counties. Accordingly, we analysed 160,000 Arabic tweets originating from Qatar between June-2017 and March-2018 using a novel machine-learning algorithm termed Weighted Conditional Probability. Our algorithm achieved state-of-the-art performance when compared with the often-used Support Vector Machine, Naïve Bayes and Deep Neural Nets algorithms. Results show that, while Qatar residents experienced an emotional roller coaster during the blockade, they used positive emotions like love and optimism to cope with adversities and accompanying emotions of fear and anger. Moreover, our analysis reveals that their adaptive resilient capacities gradually strengthened during the nine months of blockade. The study supports the renowned theory of positive emotions using an advanced methodology and a large-scale dataset. [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]

Billions are faced with poor sanitation in developing countries, forcing United Nations' to miss sanitation targets over the years. This is mainly due to the poor condition of sanitation in the global-south comprising mostly developing countries. International and national organizations are mainly focused on building sanitation infrastructure to target the Sustainable Development Goal 6.2 (i.e., eradicating open defecation by 2030). But the service delivery in terms of monitoring & maintenance along with other governance issues is often overlooked in most cases. How can we arrange sustainable monitoring of a global sanitation community? In this paper, we discuss how information and communications technology (ICT) may be used to address sanitation governance. We outline the necessary governance criteria found in our field-observations and then explore ICT options to address these issues. We conceptualized and created 'Find A Loo' – a mobile application designed to be a 'good-governance' enabler. We tested this application with the help of System Usability Scale (SUS) and Potential Capability Scale (PCS), where it appeared as 'Good' with an 'A Grade' score, based on evaluators' satisfaction on usability and capability. Overall the evaluation affirms that the application is not only useful and ready to use, but also capable of helping in addressing governance issues in sanitation. This work will be of interest to policy & decision-makers, researchers, service providers, NGOs and people working in the sanitation space. Further, such a system lends itself to analytics that helps optimize the performance of sanitation infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite recent efforts to establish a European Digital Single Market (DSM), access to audio-visual (AV) works through on-demand service providers, such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, continues to be restricted across jurisdictions to the detriment of consumers through geo-blocking measures. This paper introduces a proposal for a central clearing house for AV rights which facilitates the cross-border provision of AV services and thereby contributes to the creation of the DSM. To ensure that the adoption of the proposal enhances the efficiency of the market, we assess whether it meets specific criteria that pertain to market design and the functioning of the market for AV works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital information settings may not only offer an opportunity structure for democratic deliberation, but also facilitate the occurrence of negative phenomena – such as incivility, hate speech and false information. Even though extant literature has provided theoretical arguments for a discursive affinity between false or deceptive information and uncivil speech, we lack empirical evidence on whether and how false information and incivility converge. Against this backdrop, we rely on an extensive content analysis of fact-checked statements in the US (N = 894) to assess to what extent and how different forms of incivility are present in different degrees of false information. Our main findings illustrate that partisan attacks, negativity, and hate speech are most likely to occur in false information that deviates furthest from reality. These findings help us to dissect different degrees of untruthfulness based on their content features: Disinformation (goal-directed deception) may be distinguished from misinformation (unintentionally misleading content) based on the centrality of hostility, partisan attacks, and hate speech in the former. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary reviews the strengths of the concept of data colonialism, arguing that it makes a strong and useful contribution to the debates on how to make sense of the myriad effects of datafication. It points out, however, that the key decolonial insight about supposed European objectivity are weakly integrated into the concept: while it gestures to decoloniality, it is primarily about explaining datafication as resource extraction. As a result, the concept has non-decolonial implications as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does data visibility affect vulnerable communities that face uncertainty over land tenure? Can data justice be realised in settings of acute resource injustice? These are the overarching questions that our case study interrogates by opening up the black box of the community in the volatile and fast-transforming peri-urban fringe of Hyderabad, India. We examine the unfolding of data and information processes through the lens of enumeration and community mapping exercises conducted in a low-income neighbourhood. We argue that the realisation of data justice is mediated by 'information politics', i.e., the ways in which informational resources, as well as the risks and rewards associated with them, are distributed across individual actors and identity groups within the community. The democratising potential of emerging digital technologies is severely constrained by structural inequities across gender, caste, class, and even linguistic lines. Our case study underlines the importance of such a structural understanding of data justice and also suggests directions for embedding justice in data processes. Our findings reveal an arena of stark informational disparities between vulnerable, indigent populations and the increasingly sophisticated digital data apparatuses used to encode them. Efforts to promote data justice must take explicit cognisance of these disparities and fragmentation and recognise the internal structural differentiation of vulnerable communities. We argue for an explicit mapping of the information flows and associated information politics that characterise such settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

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

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]

Within academia, industry, and government, the terms 'health' and 'toxicity' are widely used to describe and justify decisions around online content and its removal. However, the meanings of these terms are assumed to be self-evident and therefore are rarely examined. This article turns a critical eye to the health and toxicity metaphor to unpack its hidden political work. We trace the metaphor through three different discourses: the historical political economy of the term, the usage by cultural elites in the last two decades, and finally through its contemporary instrumental usage by volunteer content moderators on Facebook. By linking these discourses together, we argue that the metaphor of health and toxicity serves as a means for justification and legitimacy under contemporary neoliberalized orders that typically chafe at modes of public intervention and the language of democratic statecraft. Rather than elucidating the challenges of online content, we find that the metaphor often serves to obfuscate or sidestep the hardest problems in democratic governance. This analysis therefore has practical significance for researchers, policymakers, journalists, and other speakers that publicly traffic in this discourse at large. [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]

Whilst data-driven strategies are allegedly prevalent in political campaigns, evidence regarding their actual effectiveness is scarce. This study investigates, from an individual perspective, the effect of issue congruency in political ads on immediate responses and voting behaviors. To reach our goal, we combined different types of data collection: mobile experience sampling method (mESM), panel survey, and content analysis. The combined approach allowed us to effectively study targeted ads within the cross-device and cross-platform environment. The results showed that voters perceive online political ads that are about a topic that they care about as more interesting, informative, and persuasive regardless of their partisanship. This positive ad perception subsequently leads to a higher probability of voting for the promoted party in the ad. We also found that an ad discussing a topic in line with the receiver's concerns positively affects the evaluation of the promoted party in the ad only when the party is already favored by the voter. Taken together, this study provides insights into the conditional effectiveness of data-driven strategies in political campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of algorithms in decision-making is now so consequential that we agree that algorithmic systems must be designed, implemented, and managed in ways that are understandable to interested parties. Anchored in a tradition of capturing, contextualizing, and preserving evidence of analog and digital technologies, this article draws out the roles adopted or tried on by the recordkeeping professions to account for algorithmic systems as they communicate and represent meaning in the world. We begin by delineating a promising role for recordkeeping professions as algorithmic conceptualizers. We show how expertise in evaluating recorded information provides a method to conceive or model algorithms from an accountability and transparency perspective. Then we delineate a breakthrough role for recordkeeping professionals as algorithmic historicizers, revealing how the professions' curation of records of human actions extends to the capture and preservation of algorithms for purposes of critical review. Finally, we delineate an emerging role for recordkeeping professionals as algorithmic sponsors involved in harnessing algorithmic tools to manage and make accessible other forms of digital evidence at scale. In articulating such roles, our goal is to examine the opportunities inherent in harnessing the relationships that form at the intersection of algorithmic activity and evidentiary work. [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]

The article applies the critical lens of sphere transgression to the field of law, with a particular focus on legal dispute resolution. The engagement of technology corporations with dispute resolution is described in terms of either facilitation or disruption, depending on whether the corporations aim at modernizing the existing justice system, or substituting it with their own adjudicative institutions. The article argues that, while facilitation can be understood as a transgression of technology into the sphere of law, disruption ultimately amounts to a counter-transgression of law into the sphere of digital goods. These observations help illustrate the usefulness of sphere transgression as a critical lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China is the largest foreign information and communications technology (ICT) investor in Africa, and Chinese telecommunication companies including Huawei, CloudWalk, and Transsion have brought a range of artificial intelligence (AI) technology to Africa, from face recognition to smart cities. Existing analysis of China's AI impact in Africa, however, habitually falls into a Cold War-style narrative of 'authoritarianism' against the backdrop of 'liberal democracy.' This article calls for going beyond the oversimplified paradigm and proposes to examine the new phenomenon through a more sophisticated and critical lens. First, I show how (English language) media's investigations and academia's analysis of China's AI policy and its global impact (particularly in Africa) usually concentrate on a deep concern about the exportation of authoritarianism from Beijing. The article then demonstrates that the 'authoritarianism vs liberal democracy' model is problematic, if not outdated, and particularly insufficient to capture the multi-layered and overlapping realities of authoritarian and democratic moves by states around the world and the distinguishing properties of AI technologies. Based on a critical appraisal of the notions of surveillance capitalism and data colonialism and the recent empirical evidence from Africa in the third and fourth sections, I propose that these two concepts are more productive analytical frameworks for understanding what is going on in Africa related to the presence of China's AI, as well as for updating and moving forward the debates about whether China is colonizing Africa. [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]

The prevalence of automation and advent of intelligent machines have created new constellations in which the attribution of criminal responsibility is complicated. Automation results in complex settings of interaction, while the conduct of technical systems is becoming less determined, predictable, and transparent. There is an ongoing scholarly debate regarding how these developments shape moral and legal agency, as well as the best ways of allocating responsibility. Concerns have been expressed about the emergence of responsibility gaps, calling for ways to ensure accountability. This article explores whether these apprehensions can be empirically substantiated. A factorial survey study (N = 799) conducted in Switzerland was used to research attribution mechanisms in criminal cases involving various forms of human-machine interaction. The results revealed that the level of automation significantly affected the attribution of responsibility. In cases of high automation, attribution became considerably more complex and more actors, especially corporate entities, were called to account. A difference in automation level (i.e., the question of how much humans are still 'in the loop') had a stronger effect than did the aspect of technology being described as capable of learning. However, the involvement of intelligent technology seemed to have made the responsibility attribution more arbitrary. According to the respondents, there were no discernable responsibility gaps. However, in the present research, significant shifts among the agents called to account were observable. Yet, since these evasion mechanisms are hardly covered by today's law, there is an ongoing risk of a gap between the desire for punishment and actual legal constructs. [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]

Political journalism often tries to predict the future, especially the outcomes of elections. This has historically been accomplished through written articles or opinion pieces. A more recent development involves the publication of data-driven predictions in online news media. These news items not only contain an estimate for the election results but also often try to visualize potential uncertainties of the prediction. However, the ways in which users react to these forms of journalism have not yet been studied extensively. In this work, we survey users of a predictive journalism piece on the 2021 German federal elections published by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung to better understand their reactions. While we found an alignment between the designers' intention to show the inherent uncertainty of election predictions with the audience's reception, we encountered mixed results in users' ability to interpret the uncertainty visualizations presented. Most respondents indicated that the predictions did not influence their thinking about the race, and some remained skeptical toward such predictions published by journalists for various reasons. Based on these findings, we suggest the need for rigorous user testing of visualizations for election prediction and increased awareness and future research on ways to increase the transparency of methods and data to develop appropriate trust toward predictive journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]