An Investigation of the Portrayal of Social Media Challenges on YouTube and Twitter

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Amro Khasawneh ◽  
Kapil Chalil Madathil ◽  
Heidi Zinzow ◽  
Pamela Wisniewski ◽  
Amal Ponathil ◽  
...  

A social media phenomenon that has received limited research attention is the advent and propagation of viral online challenges. Several of these challenges entail self-harming behavior, which, combined with their viral nature, poses physical and psychological risks for both participants and viewers. The objective of this study is to identify the nature of what people post about the social media challenges that vary in their level of risk. To do so, we conducted a qualitative analysis of three viral social media challenges, the Blue Whale, Tide Pod, and Ice Bucket challenges, based on 180 YouTube videos, 3,607 comments on those YouTube videos, and 450 Twitter posts. We identified common themes across the YouTube videos, comments, and Twitter posts: (1) promoting education and awareness, (2) criticizing the participants, (3) providing detailed information about the participants, (4) giving viewers a tutorial on how to participate, and (5) attempting to understand this seemingly senseless online behavior. We used social norm theory to discuss what leads people to post about the challenges and how posts intended to raise awareness about harmful challenges could potentially create a contagion effect by spreading knowledge about them, thereby increasing participation. Finally, we proposed design implications that could potentially minimize the risks and propagation of harmful social media challenges.

Author(s):  
Alan J. Reid ◽  
Kate Prudchenko

A survey of 100 undergraduates and 30 post-secondary faculty members was conducted in order to examine the current attitudes and perceptions of both groups toward the integration of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter in education. Results indicate that both parties are willing to incorporate these social media sites into academics but caution that digital identities are not necessarily representative of face-to-face behavior, thus suggesting the need for an awareness of social presence for online interaction between students and faculty. Social cognitive theories are applied to the use of social media as an instructional tool and a set of best practices for implementing social media in academics is proposed.


Author(s):  
Yi Song ◽  
Xuesong Lu ◽  
Sadegh Nobari ◽  
Stéphane Bressan ◽  
Panagiotis Karras

One is either on Facebook or not. Of course, this assessment is controversial and its rationale arguable. It is nevertheless not far, for many, from the reason behind joining social media and publishing and sharing details of their professional and private lives. Not only the personal details that may be revealed, but also the structure of the networks are sources of invaluable information for any organization wanting to understand and learn about social groups, their dynamics and members. These organizations may or may not be benevolent. It is important to devise, design and evaluate solutions that guarantee some privacy. One approach that reconciles the different stakeholders’ requirement is the publication of a modified graph. The perturbation is hoped to be sufficient to protect members’ privacy while it maintains sufficient utility for analysts wanting to study the social media as a whole. In this paper, the authors try to empirically quantify the inevitable trade-off between utility and privacy. They do so for two state-of-the-art graph anonymization algorithms that protect against most structural attacks, the k-automorphism algorithm and the k-degree anonymity algorithm. The authors measure several metrics for a series of real graphs from various social media before and after their anonymization under various settings.


2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan A. Van den Berg

This contribution focusses on some of the digital theological expressions of Stephan Joubert from an auto-ethnographic angle. Orientating from a practical theology perspective, I have chosen the social media platform Twitter, and more specifically the @stephanjoubert domain, as source to chart some significant tweet expressions for the purpose of describing the character and value of an aphoristic theology. In order to do so, I have used some randomly selected tweets of Stephan Joubert, spanning the period 2020–2021, which express aspects of a relevant contemporary ecclesiology. Against the backdrop of the disastrous impact of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as some important dates on the Christian calendar (Easter and Christmas), I specifically emphasise the significance of the formulation of an aphoristic theology using amongst other markers of simplicity, contextuality and relevance.Contribution: I conclude the reflection with some critical-evaluative remarks on the significance of aphoristic expressions for the development of a meaningful contemporary ecclesiology and theology.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-264
Author(s):  
Ray Surette

A 2006 US copycat crime wave came into being, surged with thousands of crimes committed, and dissipated without substantial news media attention. The development of this early copycat crime meme is traceable to the nature of the crime, “ghost riding the whip,” and the social media and popular music communication channels associated with it. Ghost riding the whip involved traffic violations where drivers exit their cars and dance atop or alongside the moving driverless vehicles. Social media allowed the widespread diffusion of detailed instructions that spread this crime from a single minority community to the middle class within a 3-month period. The study of this copycat crime meme examined four types of data: Google Trends, rap songs, ProQuest news media data, and YouTube videos. The examination of the crime wave suggests how Gabriel Tarde’s 19th-century ideas operate in the contemporary social media era. However, unlike pre-social media-based crime waves that were launched via interpersonal and legacy media communication pathways, for ghost riding, rap songs, YouTube postings, and Google searches spurred its growth. Legacy media were found to be most important during the crime wave’s decline, but not during its diffusion. For this copycat crime meme, social media’s influence flowed in a unique upward and outward pattern and the results raise the research questions as to how social media have changed the dynamics of crime waves and how important legacy media will be in future crime waves.


2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (10) ◽  
pp. 759-767 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley N. Patterson

The ever-developing arena of social media blurs lines separating public and private spheres. Voluntary usage of social media platforms transforms users’ personal and sometimes private imaginings into publicly accessible artifacts. The entanglement of these two domains demands society’s consideration as policy makers, employers, and qualitative inquirers contend with making meaning of messages initiated within the social media sphere in a world extending beyond it. In this article, I reflect on interplay with a subset of data from my dissertation featuring transcripts pulled from YouTube videos posted by self-identified biracial individuals. As I attempted to instill dialogic properties into what could have been unidirectional interactions, I confronted several challenges. I managed pressures of simultaneous allegiances to my research goals and to the integrities of my informants who were not aware that they were informing me. This article provides insight into navigating these tensions, which are necessary and, to date, too scarcely available.


2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (5) ◽  
pp. 359-383 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holly Thorpe ◽  
Kim Toffoletti ◽  
Toni Bruce

In this article, we take seriously the challenges of making sense of a sporting (and media) context that increasingly engages female athletes as active, visible, and autonomous, while inequalities pertaining to gender, sexuality, race, and class remain stubbornly persistent across sport institutions and practices. We do so by engaging with three recent feminist critiques that have sought to respond to the changing operations of gender relations and the articulation of gendered subjectivities, namely, third-wave feminism, postfeminism, and neoliberal feminism, and applying each to the same concrete setting—the social media self-representation of Hawaiian professional surfer Alana Blanchard. In aiming to conceptually illustrate the utility of these three feminist critiques, we are not advocating for any single approach. Rather, we critically demonstrate what each offers for explaining how current discourses are being internalized, embodied, and practiced by young (sports)women, as they make meaning of, and respond to, the conditions of their lives.


2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Forrest Stuart

Abstract Academics, criminal justice professionals, and news outlets have warned that gang-associated youth use social media to taunt rivals and trade insults in ways that cause offline retaliation. But there is surprisingly little empirical research investigating how gang-associated youth deploy social media in gang conflicts. Criminal justice professionals routinely overstate the violent effects of social media challenges, which further exacerbates criminalization, racial stereotyping, and social inequality. Drawing from two years of ethnographic fieldwork on Chicago’s South Side, this study asks how gang-associated black youth use social media to challenge rivals. Bridging traditional theories of urban violence with emerging media scholarship, I argue that social media disrupt the key impression management practices associated with the “code of the street.” Specifically, gang-associated youth exploit social media to publicly invalidate the authenticity of their rivals’ performances of toughness, strength, and street masculinity. Challengers do so through “cross referencing,” “calling bluffs,” and “catching lacking.” Each strategy differs in its likelihood to catalyze physical retaliation, which is a function of the amount and depth of counter-evidence necessary to refute a given challenge. These findings carry important implications for addressing urban violence, gangs, and inequality in the social media age.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. p94
Author(s):  
Yousef F. Bader ◽  
Sajeda F. Al-Shatnawi

This study investigates lexical variation, which is due to more education, more mobility, and widespread use of the social media, in the dialect of three towns around Irbid City in north Jordan and its correlation with age, gender, and level of education. Labov’s approach is adopted to examine the linguistic variation among 98 speakers of the Irbidite dialect. Around 100 words were collected and put in the form of a questionnaire to elicit the opinion of speakers from different age groups, genders, and levels of education towards the frequency of their use of these words. The study used the method of direct interview to elicit the feelings of the participants about the dialect they use. The results show that old speakers and less educated ones tend to preserve their native lexical items more than others. They indicated that they use the original lexical items because they are proud of their dialect which reflects their identity. The groups which tend more to neglect some lexical items are educated young and middle-aged female subjects. They indicated that they do so for prestige and imitation of peers in the Irbidite society.


Author(s):  
David Myles

This presentation examines the social media campaign #SupportIslandWomen that was undertaken by reproductive rights activists in Prince Edward Island (PEI). The initiative gained popularity in 2016 due to both the off- and online circulation of posters throughout PEI landmarks depicting the Green Gables-like image of a young girl (“rogue Anne”) wearing red braids and a bandana. These posters showcased specific hashtags that encouraged debates on various online platforms. For this study, we underline how human actors invoked the symbolic ‘figure’ of rogue Anne to give weight to their own arguments by speaking or acting in her name. By ‘figure’, we mean any symbolic entity that is materialized through interaction and that possesses agency, or the ability to make a significant difference in interaction. Hence, our study examines the processes through which rogue Anne was made present in interaction, the role of digital (online) and physical (offline) affordances in the materialization of this figure, and the differentiated effects that these invocations generated. To do so, we build our dataset by performing non-participant observation on social media platforms and by exploring Canadian blogs and newspapers. Drawing from organizational discourse theory, our results show that invoking the figure of rogue Anne allowed for pro-choice collectives to assert their authority in abortion debates by labelling the fictional character as a modern feminist icon. They also underline the importance of studying the intervention of symbolic figures, their effects, and their materialization within political initiatives that incorporate and go beyond the practice of ‘hashtagging’.


2014 ◽  
pp. 1032-1047
Author(s):  
Alan J. Reid ◽  
Kate Prudchenko

A survey of 100 undergraduates and 30 post-secondary faculty members was conducted in order to examine the current attitudes and perceptions of both groups toward the integration of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter in education. Results indicate that both parties are willing to incorporate these social media sites into academics but caution that digital identities are not necessarily representative of face-to-face behavior, thus suggesting the need for an awareness of social presence for online interaction between students and faculty. Social cognitive theories are applied to the use of social media as an instructional tool and a set of best practices for implementing social media in academics is proposed.


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