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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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]

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

In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, European countries implemented several non-pharmaceutical interventions with country-specific policies and reduced coordination. Digital Contact Tracing (DCT) was one of the few interventions on which European countries had a common approach oriented toward DCT apps' interoperability. As most EU countries implemented interoperable apps relying on an Apple and Google's framework, France developed the app autonomously. Recent literature argues that France's choice was mainly due to its strong stance in defense of national digital sovereignty. However, current contributions do not largely cover the issue empirically. Therefore, we aim to better explore the role played by digital sovereignty in the political debate related the development of DCT apps. To do so, we conducted a thematic analysis of 16 documents from France's political bodies, selected from a larger corpus of 438 documents dealing with DCT. Three main relevant dimensions related to digital sovereignty emerge. First, the initially sponsored EU interoperability progressively faded in the French political debate. Then, Apple and Google's involvement in the healthcare domain was perceived as highly problematic. Finally, having national players developing the DCT app was largely preferred. Based on our empirical findings, we further engaged with the concept of digital sovereignty, pointing out its difference from digital sovereignism by highlighting the ontological distinction between practices and ideas. Building on these reflections, we argue that France's stance towards DCT and the related digital sovereignty practices subtended digital sovereignism positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While internet connectivity is a key promise of progress and the rule of law, criminal contestation of state control over territory is considered one of the main obstacles for development. This article provides the first known quantitative approach to the link between urban lawlessness and internet provision. Taking the Santiago Metropolitan Region (SMR) – the capital of Chile – as a case study, the authors discuss the origins of Red Zones (areas where telecommunication companies do not provide fixed broadband). A first hypothesis is based on the corporate excuse given by telcos for Red Zones: criminal activities – and not just socioeconomic discrimination – are a force majeure that impede internet connectivity in specific neighbourhoods. An alternative hypothesis acknowledges criminal governance in Latin American cities, admitting the possibility of criminal redistribution being favourable to internet connectivity where state control is contested. Employing a random effects regression model with panel data from 52 boroughs during the 2012–2020 period, the two hypotheses are tested. Contestation of the territorial control by the state is significantly and positively correlated to fixed broadband connectivity in the SMA. In contrast, lower connectivity is linked to higher presence of poor households, favouring a profit-based explanation for the Red Zones. The results hold when replacing the percentage of contested territory per borough with the murder rates. This research contributes to heterodox views within institutional economics and highlights the need of state-led redistribution in order to retake control of contested territories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept 'performance expectancy' is used to theorize about older people's day-to-day use of technology mediated communication (telephone, text/emails and video calls) in family relationships and the impact on social isolation and loneliness. Using theoretical and methodological triangulation six mediation models are conceptualized, followed by empirical validation using a nationally representative dataset of older people (≥ 65 years) living in Wales, UK (N = 2,099). The results reveal that frequency of telephone and video calls mediate the relationship between proximity of family and social isolation, and telephone calls mediate the relationship with loneliness. Text/emails have no significant mediating effect. Qualitative data analysis provides a deeper understanding of conditions that facilitate technology mediated communication. Demonstrating the impact of lifecourse habits, social context and environment on technology mediated communication shifts the focus from individual deficits to other reasons for non-adoption. Understanding the link between the individual, the social-cultural and social structural environment, social interaction, and loneliness requires an understanding of what is important to older people. For example, knowledge concerning the role of embodied presence in alleviating loneliness can be used to better understand the likelihood of implementing successful interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines civil society engagement with the 2016–2020 Airbnb and Facebook civil rights audits as counterpublic strategies to address discriminatory harms on platforms. Drawing on critical theories of (counter)publics, care work, and civil rights, we explore (1) civil society organizations' negotiations with various stakeholders in the audits, (2) the perceived utility of the audits as a platform governance mechanism, and (3) motivations behind using a civil rights framework for auditing platforms. Based on interviews and textual analysis, we find that civil society used dualistic strategies, working with and against platforms to navigate corporate and government neglect of digital harms to marginalized communities and negotiate asymmetric power structures. Groups used the audits to urge platforms to respect civil rights law while asking them to address areas beyond the existing law. They also mobilized the audits to achieve immediate 'harm reduction' from the platforms while simultaneously advocating for government regulation by demonstrating the audits' limitations. In the process, the civil society counterpublic faced challenges from the externalization of responsibility by platforms and the co-option and politicization of civil rights. As a result, we argue, the utility of the audits may ultimately lie in how their limitations and failure can be used by counterpublics to rearticulate responsibility for harm to marginalized communities in platform governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing datafication of social life has led to a growing body of research on data work which focusses on new data practices like self-tracking, new professions like data analysts or new occupational roles. In these new types of data work, people develop strong affective relations to data, and caring for data (quality) is key. This attention to 'spectacular' data work however leads to an important oversight: Much of the data work in everyday organisational practice is done by workers 'somehow', in addition to and alongside their existing tasks. This article sets out to better understand this mundane data work. It asks: Why and how do people in organisations care for data? Based on two qualitative case studies, we present the concept of data care arrangements. Data care arrangements are configured through the ascription of values to (specific) data sets and the work of generating, maintaining, and repairing data. This data care work is not necessarily homogeneous in organised settings but can become stabilised in data care arrangements. Thus, the notion of data care arrangements underlines that data in everyday organisational practice are not an object of care per se, but that data care is an accomplishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article spotlights the role of children from poor, underprivileged families who are drawn into care work to facilitate inclusion for their families in food security by performing fingerprint authentication. Owing to the youthful suppleness of their bodies, children's fingerprints are more likely to succeed in fulfilling biometric requirements. They are also more compliant in having their schooling or playtime disrupted by the unpredictable and time-consuming biometric authentication process. Children's names may also be added on ration cards to facilitate food security for relatives other than their parents who depend on the biometric viability of children's bodies and time for welfare. Supplementing ethnographic data with the state's data of the biometric authentications recorded in the Aadhaar database of India, I make visible the poor child as an 'ideal biometric child' in enabling the biometric assemblage of the welfare state to care for its citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this special issue, we ask: What do we see when we look at datafied societies through the lens of care? Following the footsteps of feminist writers, activists, and academics who take care as a vantage point for scrutinising and reimaging technoscientific societies, this special issue brings together scholars from critical data studies who explore what we might learn (and see) when we apply care ethics to the study of datafication. To develop a view on datafied societies informed by ethics, concepts, and practices of care, we propose a move from critique to care in social studies of data-driven technologies. We specifically identify five moves in which a care lens provides a new perspective when studying datafication and datafied societies: (1) a move from data-driven technologies to socio-digital care arrangements, (2) a move from data science to data work and care, (3) a move from technical to situated modes of knowledge production, (4) a move from studying harms of datafication to the politics of vulnerability, and (5) a move towards building communities of care. Discussing how critical data studies and care ethics can mutually contribute to each other, this collection explores how this way of thinking can inform new ways of seeing datafied societies and imagine living and being well in more than human worlds nurtured by care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unexpected chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic brought about a host of political discussions in the US, including conversations about the Trump administration's COVID-related policies. During these conversations, major news outlets represented each political group's stance using social media in addition to their traditional channels. This study explores how those news outlets' political stances relate to early COVID-19 social media discourse with three distinct methods. We selected two YouTube videos about the World Health Organization (WHO)'s declaration of a pandemic from two news outlets with contrasting political stances, Fox News and MSNBC. Three types of analyses were conducted to compare those videos on different observation levels: (1) a video network analysis based on the YouTube recommendation algorithm, (2) a framing analysis exploring how differently the two news outlets delivered the news, and (3) a content analysis of viewer comments. Our results demonstrate that the videos were not directly connected to each other in the YouTube recommendation network, that they delivered the same news with contrasting frames, and that characteristics of the viewers' comments – commenters' political positions, roles in knowledge sharing, and social cues – significantly or partially significantly related to the YouTube channel's political position. Based on these findings, we argue that while news outlets' political stances were associated with the behaviors of all three types of agents on YouTube – news outlets, their viewers, and the platform – to some extent, the viewer groups' knowledge-sharing behaviors did not significantly differ as the news outlets' contrasting frames did. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Relationship Dissolution Model (RDM) was used to analyze what and why virtual possessions people retain or delete after a romantic relationship breakup. Participants (N = 406) completed online open-ended survey questions to understand their decision-making process for retaining or deleting relationship possessions. Upon completing an emergent thematic analysis, findings showed that people retained and deleted virtual possessions for a variety of reasons, including documenting memory, documenting emotion, managing the past – moving on, and managing the present – emotional regulation. Based on these findings, the RDM was adapted to include a relationship curation process, which describes the management of relationship memories tied to virtual possessions. The implications offer a foundation for expanding on memory management processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beyond a consciousness-raising hashtag, #MeToo has become a transnational movement, crossing the borders of many societies. However, outsized attention has been paid to the manifestations of #MeToo in the US and on Twitter when the reach of this movement was not restricted to a single country, language, or platform. Drawing from the concept of hybridization, we seek to understand how the uses of #MeToo are contextualized across cultures, languages, and social media platforms. By establishing a macroscopic computational approach, we examine the global diffusion of #MeToo as a hybrid communicative process across different language groups (English, Spanish, and Korean) and social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram). Through time-series analysis and comparative descriptions of language groups and platforms, we demonstrate how discourse flows, language characteristics, and actors differ across cultural and platform contexts and how public discourse of #MeToo was reappropriated and re-signified in different parts of the world to localize connective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we propose a new theoretical framework to conceptualise Internet memes and to trace their temporal variation on 4chan/pol/. We draw from literature on primary and secondary orality to conceptualise the repetition-with-variation of Internet memes as a form of memecry, which we argue is specifically pertinent to the collectivity of online subcultures. We operationalise its study through formulas: mnemonic phrases that encapsulate important elements of oral cultures, which have arguably regained prominence in ephemeral and fast-paced online environments. While Internet memes have often been studied as single images or words, formulas provide a more complex unit for tracing variation and not only circulation. We offer a quali-quantitative protocol to investigate memecry and visualise the spread and variability of 65 prominent formulas on 4chan/pol/, a far-right space known for its reliance on memes. By discussing several cases, we demonstrate how 4chan's collective identity indeed features typical of secondary oral cultures, while revealing how the memecry of its formulas is entwined with reactionary sentiments and a subcultural struggle for distinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As social media has become a means of information sharing, knowledge dissemination, and social interactions, it follows that its use significantly influences the formation of attitudes and social norms. Existing literature has raised significant concerns about social media causing political polarization. This study examines whether the use of social media causes polarized attitudes on redistribution by applying the instrumental variable (IV) estimation to the Asian Barometer Survey (14 countries). We find that informational and expressive social media use contributes to citizens' diverging redistributive attitudes, and these effects are more pronounced in countries that are perceived as less democratic. Based on our findings, we discuss policy implications regarding the role of social media in forming redistributive attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technology is widely promoted as a solution to greater independence and better health for the rapidly growing UK older population. If this is to be realised, we need to understand barriers and facilitators to uptake and investigate who wants this technology and who does not express an interest in use. This analysis is based on data from a population-based cohort study, the Cognitive Function and Ageing Study (CFAS)-II, which focused on brain health in older people and included questions about access to- and interest in- internet technologies. The factors affecting willingness to use technologies that support memory and ADL were identified using binary logistic regression analysis. 541 people aged 75 years and older from Cambridgeshire, Nottingham and Newcastle responded. Older adults were more willing to use technologies directed towards improving memory (65%) than towards ADL supportive technologies (38%). Regression analysis showed that an older age (OR = 0.64, 95% CI = 0.34–0.98), female gender (OR = 0.64, 95% CI = 0.42–0.99), no access to technology including laptops and tablets (OR = 0.48, 95% CI = 0.32–0.72), and self-reported physically less slowing down (but no objective health indicators) (OR = 0.57, 95% CI = 0.36–0.88) were strongly associated with UK older adults' lesser willingness to use memory assistive technologies while not having access to laptops and tablets (OR = 0.57, 95% CI = 0.39–0.84) was associated with willingness to use ADL supportive technologies. Older people, females and those with less access to technologies should be considered as target groups by healthcare providers, policymakers, and technology producers to promote technology and support healthy and independent ageing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although algorithms are increasingly used for enabling the automation of tasks in public administration of welfare states, the citizens' knowledge of, experiences with and attitudes towards automated decision-making (ADM) in public administration are still less known. This article strives to reveal the perspectives of citizens who are increasingly exposed to ADM systems, relying on a comparative analysis of a representative survey conducted in Estonia, Germany, and Sweden. The findings show that there are important differences between the three countries when it comes to awareness, trust, and perceived suitability of ADM in public administration, which map onto historical differences in welfare provisions or so-called welfare regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many privacy concerns are related to influencer sharenting, or the practice of influencers sharing content about their children on social media. This study uncovers how momfluencers (i.e., mothers who collected a large following on their social media channels by sharing insights of their motherhood experiences) reflect on these privacy concerns and examines how these concerns rationally and/or biasedly impact their sharenting behaviour. By conducting in-depth interviews with 20 Flemish momfluencers on Instagram, this study reveals that, while they are concerned about their child(ren)'s privacy and take some privacy-related measures to protect it, cognitive biases (unconsciously) reduce their risk perceptions. As such, privacy risks are perceived as relatively abstract and distant because the majority of them have not (yet) personally experienced them. Additionally, a privacy-openness paradox occurs in which mothers tend to lose the explicit and immediate benefits of influencer sharenting when protecting their child(ren)'s privacy, further stimulating them to disclose personal details. These results show that children derive little to no benefits from their mothers' influencer activities, yet are the ones carrying the potential privacy risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]