Weibo of China

2020 ◽  
pp. 115-146
Author(s):  
Huatong Sun

This chapter studies the design case of Weibo from China and explores how a local social media service, which at first was regarded as a copycat of a Silicon Valley technology, arose in the Chinese social media market and beat its Western competitor on Wall Street with its culturally sensitive design features. It reviews Weibo’s two stages of development to explore the complicacy of technology design and the dynamic and dialogical structuring process behind the formation of a technological genre for microblogging. Through the case, it unpacks three sensitizing concepts of the culturally localized user engagement and empowerment (CLUE2) framework for coming up with empowering global designs: a genre of technology as normative and performative practice, a dialogic model of communication, and hybridity as creative mixing for empowerment. Together they outline a pathway to connect the macro and the micro in cross-cultural design: A rhetorical genre view helps us to see how a culturally sustaining technology functions as a technological genre, instantiating both normative and performative practice as local uptakes. The local uptake develops and evolves by following a dialogic model of communication in design practices to generate new meanings and produce new practices, and it forms through the process of hybridization as a creative mixing for agency. Various local uptakes make up an open, globally networked technology assemblage with dialogic relations flowing between.

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 451-476 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mona Khattab

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, misinformation and unscientific interpretations flooded the internet. Seeking credible information in Egypt was paramount at the time. An answer to this quest was ‘Ask Nameesa’, an award-winning Egyptian-focused chatbot that utilizes Facebook Messenger to communicate with social media users in an individualized response engagement. It relies on information validated by WHO and the Egyptian Ministry of Health. This article examines the structure of Ask Nameesa as an example of infobots and studies the interactive engagement it offers users to provide health information. The study analyses data gathered by interviewing the founder and CEO of DXwand, the company that developed Ask Nameesa as well as content analysis of conversations with Ask Nameesa to assess its user engagement. The study aims at understanding the potential Ask Nameesa has in providing information literacy and tackling public demand for information.


PeerJ ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. e1455 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meizhen Lv ◽  
Ang Li ◽  
Tianli Liu ◽  
Tingshao Zhu

Introduction.Suicide has become a serious worldwide epidemic. Early detection of individual suicide risk in population is important for reducing suicide rates. Traditional methods are ineffective in identifying suicide risk in time, suggesting a need for novel techniques. This paper proposes to detect suicide risk on social media using a Chinese suicide dictionary.Methods.To build the Chinese suicide dictionary, eight researchers were recruited to select initial words from 4,653 posts published on Sina Weibo (the largest social media service provider in China) and two Chinese sentiment dictionaries (HowNet and NTUSD). Then, another three researchers were recruited to filter out irrelevant words. Finally, remaining words were further expanded using a corpus-based method. After building the Chinese suicide dictionary, we tested its performance in identifying suicide risk on Weibo. First, we made a comparison of the performance in both detecting suicidal expression in Weibo posts and evaluating individual levels of suicide risk between the dictionary-based identifications and the expert ratings. Second, to differentiate between individuals with high and non-high scores on self-rating measure of suicide risk (Suicidal Possibility Scale, SPS), we built Support Vector Machines (SVM) models on the Chinese suicide dictionary and the Simplified Chinese Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (SCLIWC) program, respectively. After that, we made a comparison of the classification performance between two types of SVM models.Results and Discussion.Dictionary-based identifications were significantly correlated with expert ratings in terms of both detecting suicidal expression (r= 0.507) and evaluating individual suicide risk (r= 0.455). For the differentiation between individuals with high and non-high scores on SPS, the Chinese suicide dictionary (t1:F1= 0.48; t2:F1= 0.56) produced a more accurate identification than SCLIWC (t1:F1= 0.41; t2:F1= 0.48) on different observation windows.Conclusions.This paper confirms that, using social media, it is possible to implement real-time monitoring individual suicide risk in population. Results of this study may be useful to improve Chinese suicide prevention programs and may be insightful for other countries.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 205630511878477 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan A. Obar ◽  
Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch

The clickwrap is a digital prompt that facilitates consent processes by affording users the opportunity to quickly accept or reject digital media policies. A qualitative survey analysis was conducted ( N = 513), assessing user interactions with the consent materials of a fictitious social media service, NameDrop. Findings suggest that clickwraps serve a political economic function by facilitating the circumvention of consent materials. Herman and Chomsky’s notion of the “buying mood” guides the analysis to analogize how social media maintain flow to monetized sections of services while diverting attention from policies that might encourage dissent. Clickwraps accomplish this through an agenda-setting function whereby prompts encouraging circumvention are made more prominent than policy links. Results emphasize that clickwraps discourage engagement with privacy and reputation protections by suggesting that consent materials are unimportant, contributing to the normalization of this circumvention. The assertion that clickwraps serve a political economic function suggests that capitalist methods of production are successfully being integrated into social media services and have the ability to manufacture consent.


Author(s):  
Martin Fredriksson Almqvist

Since the 1990s, the understanding of how and where politics is made has changed radically. Scholars such as Ulrich Beck and Maria Bakardjieva have discussed how political agency is enacted outside of conventional party organizations, and political struggles increasingly focus on single issues. Over the past two decades, this transformation of politics has become common knowledge, not only in academic research but also in the general political discourse. Recently, the proliferation of digital activism and the political use of social media is often understood to enforce these tendencies. This article analyzes the Pirate Party in relation to these theories, relying on almost 30 interviews with active Pirate Party members in Sweden, the UK, Germany, the USA, and Australia. The Pirate Party was initially formed in 2006, focusing on copyright, piracy, and digital privacy. Over the years, it has developed into a more general democracy movement, with an interest in a wider range of issues. This article analyses how the party’s initial focus on information politics and social media connects to a wider range of political issues and to other social movements, such as Arab Spring protests and Occupy Wall Street. Finally, it discusses how this challenges the understanding of information politics as a single issue agenda.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-132
Author(s):  
Shirley Law Kheen ◽  
◽  
Mohd Nazri Mohd Noor ◽  

This paper aims to develop a framework for mobile social commerce purchase decisions based on the existing literature. Social media and mobile technology advancement has shifted the way contemporary selling is conducted online. This new business model has revolutionised the relationship between consumers and businesses. Mobile social commerce integrates the features of social media, which enables the interactions between users during their mobile shopping experience. Users’ creativities provide innovative solutions in user generated content (UGC) that not only solves their own problems, but also provides possible improvements to products and services. Even so, the authenticity of UGC and the possibility of fabrication remains a challenge that needs to be resolved. Previous studies have shown that user engagement in UGC has a significant effect on enhancing the efficiency of social interaction between businesses and consumers. The corresponding purchasing decisions depend on the degree of consumer involvement in UGC. Based on a review of the literature from 2010 – 2020, the positive attitudes towards online community knowledge sharing will positively influence consumers’ purchasing decisions. A favourable review about the products or services that generate strong positive attitudes is more likely to be considered by consumers. Thus, their purchasing decisions are determined by their commitment to an attitude. The risk perception of consumers differs from various dimensions and capacities. The risk tolerance of each purchasing goal will have an effect on their purchasing decisions. The framework proposed in this study can be further tested in the context of Malaysian consumers.


Author(s):  
Kishokanth Jeganathan ◽  
◽  
Andrzej Szymkowiak ◽  

Social media is an important source of product information for many users. Marketing in social media is based not only on building a community around the brand, but social media is used as a way to reach a defi ned group of users with a marketing message. These users are shown content, including promoted posts, which is to draw their attention, interest and get them to action, i.e. click on the link and read the article promoting an event or product. In this article, we investigated how the diff erent headline wordings (question, traditional, forward referring) aff ect the desire to read the article. An experiment was conducted on 75 participants, which confi rmed that the header has a large eff ect size. The ANOVA analysis was carried out in two stages, additionally taking into account the importance and general interest in the subject of the article by users. Finally, the possible business implications, limitations, and directions for future research were identifi ed.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Wang Gao ◽  
Hongtao Deng ◽  
Xun Zhu ◽  
Yuan Fang

Harmful information identification is a critical research topic in natural language processing. Existing approaches have been focused either on rule-based methods or harmful text identification of normal documents. In this paper, we propose a BERT-based model to identify harmful information from social media, called Topic-BERT. Firstly, Topic-BERT utilizes BERT to take additional information as input to alleviate the sparseness of short texts. The GPU-DMM topic model is used to capture hidden topics of short texts for attention weight calculation. Secondly, the proposed model divides harmful short text identification into two stages, and different granularity labels are identified by two similar sub-models. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on a real-world social media dataset to evaluate our model. Experimental results demonstrate that our model can significantly improve the classification performance compared with baseline methods.


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