scholarly journals Online public discourse on artificial intelligence and ethics in China: context, content, and implications

AI & Society ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yishu Mao ◽  
Kristin Shi-Kupfer

AbstractThe societal and ethical implications of artificial intelligence (AI) have sparked discussions among academics, policymakers and the public around the world. What has gone unnoticed so far are the likewise vibrant discussions in China. We analyzed a large sample of discussions about AI ethics on two Chinese social media platforms. Findings suggest that participants were diverse, and included scholars, IT industry actors, journalists, and members of the general public. They addressed a broad range of concerns associated with the application of AI in various fields. Some even gave recommendations on how to tackle these issues. We argue that these discussions are a valuable source for understanding the future trajectory of AI development in China as well as implications for global dialogue on AI governance.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laila Fariha Zein ◽  
Adib Rifqi Setiawan

In today’s world, it is easier and easier to stay connected with people who are halfway across the world. Social media and a globalizing economy have created new methods of business, trade and socialization resulting in vast amounts of communication and effecting global commerce. Like her or hate her, Kimberly Noel Kardashian West as known as Kim Kardashian has capitalized on social media platforms and the globalizing economy. Kim is known for two things: famous for doing nothing and infamous for a sex tape. But Kim has not let those things define her. With over 105 million Instagram followers and 57 million Twitter followers, Kim has become a major global influence. Kim has travelled around the world, utilizing the success she has had on social media to teach make-up master classes with professional make-up artist, Mario Dedivanovic. She owns or has licensed several different businesses including: an emoji app, a personal app, a gaming app, a cosmetics line, and a fragrance line. Not to be forgotten, the Kardashian family show, ‘Keeping Up with the Kardashians’ has been on the air for ten years with Kim at the forefront. Kim also has three books: ‘Kardashian Konfidential’, ‘Dollhouse’, and ‘Selfish’. With her rising social media following, Kim has used the platforms to show her support for politicians and causes, particularly, recognition of the Armenian genocide. Kim also recently spoke at the Forbes’ women’s summit. Following the summit, Kim tweeted out her support for a recent movement on Twitter, #freeCyntoiaBrown which advocated for a young woman who claimed to have shot and killed the man who held her captive as a teenage sex slave in self-defense. Kim had her own personal lawyers help out Cyntoia on her case. Kim has also moved beyond advocating for issues within the confines of the United States. As mentioned earlier, she is known for advocating for recognition of the Armenian genocide. In the last two years, her show has made it a point to address the Armenian situation as it was then and as it is now. Kim has been recognized as a global influencer by others across the wordl. We believe Kim has become the same as political leaders when it comes to influencing the public. Kim’s story reveals that the new reality creates a perfect opportunity for mass disturbances or for initiating mass support or mass disapproval. Although Kim is typically viewed for her significance to pop culture, Kim’s business and social media following have placed her deep into the mix of international commerce. As her businesses continue to grow and thrive, we may see more of her influence on international issues and an increase in the commerce from which her businesses benefit.


2018 ◽  
pp. 235-242
Author(s):  
Steven McKevitt

The Conclusion draws together the main findings of the study. Britain in 1997 was a far more emotional and expressive society. This is highlighted by two events: the public response to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the success of New Labour in the general election. The extent to which persuasion industries were responsible for bringing these changes about is discussed. There is a discussion of some areas for further study: the subsequent impact of the World Wide Web and social media platforms; persuasion aimed at children/juvenile consumption, and the development of single British brand throughout the period—for example, Virgin.


Author(s):  
Manpreet Arora ◽  
Roshan Lal Sharma

Entrepreneurs are regarded as the leaders of socio-economic, industrial, and business development. They are important pillars of any economy. They are the employment generators and contribute to economic growth. In the current scenario caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we witnessed people across the world losing their jobs. An inclination towards entrepreneurial activities has been observed in 2020. People have started communicating how entrepreneurial activities are the only solution for economies in crises. The role of social media platforms cannot be under-emphasized, and therefore, an entrepreneur today has to be a master of various media of communication. This chapter aims at exploring the concept of entrepreneurship with special reference to communication. It highlights challenges and issues in the post-pandemic world with reference to entrepreneurship and the role effective communication can play in handling them. It also attempts to examine the use of the term ‘entrepreneurship' by general public on social media such as Twitter in particular with a view to work out its implications.


Gender Issues ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zaida Orth ◽  
Michelle Andipatin ◽  
Brian van Wyk

Abstract Sexual assault on campuses has been identified as a pervasive public health problem. In April 2016, students across South African universities launched the #Endrapeculture campaign to express their frustration against university policies which served to perpetuate a rape culture. The use of hashtag activism during the protest served to spark online public debates and mobilize support for the protests. This article describes the public reactions to the South African #Endrapeculture protests on the Facebook social media platform. Data was collected through natural observations of comment threads on news articles and public posts on the student protests, and subjected to content analysis. The findings suggest that the #nakedprotest was successful in initiating public conversations concerning the issue of rape culture. However, the reactions towards the #nakedprotest were divided with some perpetuating a mainstream public discourse which perpetuates rape culture, and others (re)presenting a counter-public that challenged current dominant views about rape culture. Two related main themes emerged: Victim-blaming and Trivialising Rape Culture. Victim-blaming narratives emerged from the commenters and suggested that the protesters were increasing their chances of being sexually assaulted by marching topless. This discourse seems to perpetuate the notion of the aggressive male sexual desire and places the onus on women to protect themselves. Other commenters criticised the #nakedprotest method through demeaning comments which served to derail the conversation and trivialise the message behind the protest. The public reaction to the #nakedprotest demonstrated that rape culture is pervasive in society and continues to be re(produced) through discourse on social media platforms. However, social media also offers individuals the opportunity to draw from and participate in multiple counter-publics which challenge these mainstream rape culture discourses.


Author(s):  
Martina Barchitta ◽  
Annalisa Quattrocchi ◽  
Andrea Maugeri ◽  
Maria Clara La Rosa ◽  
Claudia La Mastra ◽  
...  

The issue of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a focus of the World Health Organization, which proposes educational interventions targeting the public and healthcare professionals. Here, we present the first attempt at a regionwide multicomponent campaign in Sicily (Italy), called “Obiettivo Antibiotico”, which aims to raise the awareness of prudent use of antibiotics in the public and in healthcare professionals. The campaign was designed by an interdisciplinary academic team, and an interactive website was populated with different materials, including key messages, letters, slogans, posters, factsheets, leaflets, and videos. The campaign was launched in November 2018 and, as of 21 December 2018, the website had a total of 1159 unique visitors, of which 190 became champions by pledging to take simple actions to support the fight against AMR. Data from social media showed that the audience was between 18 and 54 years of age, with a high proportion of female participants (64%). Interestingly, the LinkedIn page received more than 1200 followers, and Facebook 685 followers. The number of actions taken (pledges) by the audience was 458, evenly divided between experts (53%) and the general public (47%). Additional efforts are needed to reach more people, thus future efforts should focus on further promotion within the Sicilian region to sustain the engagement with the campaign.


Author(s):  
Isa Inuwa-Dutse

Conventional preventive measures during pandemics include social distancing and lockdown. Such measures in the time of social media brought about a new set of challenges – vulnerability to the toxic impact of online misinformation is high. A case in point is COVID-19. As the virus propagates, so does the associated misinformation and fake news about it leading to an infodemic. Since the outbreak, there has been a surge of studies investigating various aspects of the pandemic. Of interest to this chapter are studies centering on datasets from online social media platforms where the bulk of the public discourse happens. The main goal is to support the fight against negative infodemic by (1) contributing a diverse set of curated relevant datasets; (2) offering relevant areas to study using the datasets; and (3) demonstrating how relevant datasets, strategies, and state-of-the-art IT tools can be leveraged in managing the pandemic.


2020 ◽  
pp. 32-50
Author(s):  
Daniel Kreiss ◽  
Kirsten Adams ◽  
Jenni Ciesielski ◽  
Haley Fernandez ◽  
Kate Frauenfelder ◽  
...  

This chapter discusses how political technology grew into the field it is today. Political technology lies at the intersection of two male-dominated fields, and it also has a number of unique features for politics. The ever-shifting nature of technology requires campaigns and political parties to garner significant amounts of knowledge and expertise from the technology and commercial sectors. This means fluid careers as staffers move into and out of commercial, technology, and political jobs, seeding campaigns with new skills, knowledge, and ways of seeing the world. There are also rapid and continual changes in the technologies that are at the center of how contemporary politicians connect with the public, from social media platforms to political databases. For political tech staffers, this means continual learning and adapting to changes in how the electorate receives political information and communicates about politics. And it means many new opportunities for entrepreneurial ventures to bring talent, tools, and practices down-ballot and across election cycles.


Author(s):  
Soyun Ahn

Disinformation spread through social media has been widely detected around the world in recent years. Researchers, the press, and the public alike have expressed strong concerns about disinformation influencing public discourse and elections, perceiving it as a direct threat to democracy. Democratic countries once reluctant to restrict freedom of speech are now actively examining countermeasures to disinformation. Such measures could be divided into four categories: Regulating platforms, criminalization of offenders, governmental monitoring, and relying on civil society. The existing literature so far has focused more on examining the pros and cons of individual policy directions rather than providing an overview of the entire dynamics when multiples measures are combined in practice. It is due to most countries still being at their infancy discussing and inventing a disinformation regulation suitable for their legal freedom of speech protection structure. South Korea is unique in that it has operated a system dealing with disinformation for over a decade now, and in that it has a system specifically dedicated to election protection combining three of the four measures introduced above. Through scrutinizing both the legal framework and execution practices of the multiple disinformation countermeasures in South Korea, this research expands the existing literature by offering insights on how combining measures could result in unforeseen discounts of freedom of speech.


2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 251 ◽  
Author(s):  
DeeDee M. Bennett, PhD

Social media platforms are increasingly becoming a useful tool for victims, humanitarians, volunteers, and the general public to communicate during disasters. Research has shown that there are multiple advantages to using social media and the applicability of these platforms crosses several different types of disasters (human-caused, natural, and terrorist) here in the United States and abroad. However, some emergency management agencies have been reluctant to use social media as one of their many communications tools. In this study, the usefulness of social media for emergency management was examined over a 30-day period following a series of tornadoes. Using an observational approach, the public posts disseminated from an emergency management agency were analyzed to determine how two social media platforms were used. The findings show how emergency management agencies could leverage the connectedness of social media to reach victims and make unlikely partnerships.


AI & Society ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 945-955 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth Singler

Abstract “My first long haul flight that didn’t fill up and an empty row for me. I have been blessed by the algorithm ”. The phrase ‘blessed by the algorithm’ expresses the feeling of having been fortunate in what appears on your feed on various social media platforms, or in the success or virality of your content as a creator, or in what gig economy jobs you are offered. However, we can also place it within wider public discourse employing theistic conceptions of AI. Building on anthropological fieldwork into the ‘entanglements of AI and Religion’ (Singler 2017a), this article will explore how ‘blessed by the algorithm’ tweets are indicative of the impact of theistic AI narratives: modes of thinking about AI in an implicitly religious way. This thinking also represents continuities that push back against the secularisation thesis and other grand narratives of disenchantment that claim secularity occurs because of technological and intellectual progress. This article will also explore new religious movements, where theistic conceptions of AI entangle technological aspirations with religious ones.


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