scholarly journals The populist allure of social media activism: Individualized charismatic authority

Organization ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 431-440 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nils Gustafsson ◽  
Noomi Weinryb
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Media Activism ◽  
Charismatic Authority ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Organizational Consequences ◽  
Connective Action ◽  
Digital Engagement ◽  
Technological Affordances

This article argues that the type of individualized social media activism that has been conceptualized as ‘connective action’ has affinities to populism, and may have detrimental consequences for democratic procedures and the bureaucratic structures that enable them. We trace the normative allure of individualized digital engagement to the libertarian roots of techno-utopianism and argue that this, in combination with a form of mobilization fueled by digital enthusiasm, has potentially dire democratic and organizational consequences. Digital enthusiasm generated on social media platforms entails self-infatuation, here conceptualized as a form of individualized charismatic authority in the Weberian sense. This individualized form of charismatic authority is fundamentally focused on personalized engagement, and simultaneously interconnected through the technological affordances of social media platforms. If individualized charismatic authority becomes institutionalized as a legitimate and predominant manner of organizing, it may have large-scale implications for societal organizing at large by promoting populism. In sum, we argue that digital enthusiasm not only provides democratic opportunities for protest and contention in civil society, but that the fickleness of the individualized charismatic authority it generates may also put democratic procedures and respect for bureaucratic structures at risk.

Political Liberalization and Emerging Civil Society in Uzbekistan: The Cases of Public Reaction to Demolition Program and the Use of Forced Labor

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 340-355
Author(s):  
Dilnoza Ubaydullaeva
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Public Servants ◽  
Political Liberalization ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Public Reaction ◽  
Liberalization Policy

Abstract Conventional wisdom highlights civil society as an integral component of a democratic society. Due to the dominance of the state in all aspects of life, civil society was largely absent in Uzbekistan until the change of government in 2016. The new President Mirziyoyev’s liberalization policy towards media gave birth to a strong group of opinion formers visible on social media platforms, otherwise known as “bloggers”. This paper seeks to identify how Mirziyoyev’s liberalization policy affects Uzbekistan’s path to consolidate its democracy. It argues that the recent political liberalization showed early signs of the emergence of civil society groups. To support this argument, the paper uses the case of two unrelated incidents: large scale demolition of people’s properties by the khokimiyat in Urganch, and forced labor of public servants in the Bukhara region.

‘Welcome to #GabFam’: Far-right virtual community on Gab

2021 ◽  
pp. 146144482110245
Author(s):  
Greta Jasser ◽  
Jordan McSwiney ◽  
Ed Pertwee ◽  
Savvas Zannettou
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Social Networking ◽  
Virtual Community ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Social Networking Service ◽  
Shared Experiences ◽  
Funding Model ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Technological Affordances

With large social media platforms coming under increasing pressure to deplatform far-right users, the Alternative Technology movement (Alt-Tech) emerged as a new digital support infrastructure for the far right. We conduct a qualitative analysis of the prominent Alt-Tech platform Gab, a social networking service primarily modelled on Twitter, to assess the far-right virtual community on the platform. We find Gab’s technological affordances – including its lack of content moderation, culture of anonymity, microblogging architecture and funding model – have fostered an ideologically eclectic far-right community united by fears of persecution at the hands of ‘Big Tech’. We argue that this points to the emergence of a novel techno-social victimology as an axis of far-right virtual community, wherein shared experiences or fears of being deplatformed facilitate a coalescing of assorted far-right tendencies online.

Physical Distancing and Social Media Use in Emerging and Older Adults During COVID-19: Large Scale Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Survey Study (Preprint)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thabo J van Woudenberg ◽  
Roy Hendrikx ◽  
Moniek Buijzen ◽  
Julia CM van Weert ◽  
Bas van den Putte ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Emerging Adults ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Media Use ◽  
Longitudinal Survey ◽  
Social Media Use ◽  
Random Intercept ◽  
Social Media Platforms

BACKGROUND Although emerging adults play a role in the spread of COVID-19, they are less likely to develop severe symptoms after infection. Emerging adults’ relatively high use of social media as source of information raises concerns regarding COVID-19 related behavioral compliance (i.e., physical distancing) in this age group. OBJECTIVE Therefore, the current study investigated physical distancing in emerging adults in comparison to older adults and looked at the role of using social media for COVID-19 news and information in this regard. In addition, this study explored the relation between physical distancing and different social media platforms and sources. METHODS Secondary data of a large-scale national longitudinal survey (N = 123,848, 34.% male) between April and November 2020 were used. Participants indicated, ranging for one to eight waves, how often they were successful in keeping 1.5 meters distance on a 7-point Likert scale. Participants between 18 and 24 years old were considered young adults and older participants were identified as older adults. Also, a dummy variable was created to indicate per wave whether participants used social media for COVID-19 news and information. A subset received follow-up questions asking participants to indicate which platforms they have used and what sources of news and information they had seen on social media. All preregistered hypotheses were tested with Linear Mixed-Effects Models and Random Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel Models. RESULTS Emerging adults reported less physical distancing behaviors than older adults (b = -.08, t(86213.83) = -26.79, p < .001). Also, emerging adults were more likely to use social media for COVID-19 news and information (b = 2.48, SE = .11, Wald = 23.66, p = <.001), which mediated the association with physical distancing, but only to a small extend (indirect effect: b = -0.03, 95% CI = [-0.04; -0.02]). Opposed to our hypothesis, the longitudinal Random Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel Model showed no evidence that physical distancing was predicted by social media use of the previous wave. However, we did find evidence that using social media affected subsequent physical distancing behavior. Moreover, additional analyses showed that most social media platforms (i.e., YouTube, Facebook and Instagram) and interpersonal communication showed negative associations with physical distancing while others platforms (i.e. LinkedIn and Twitter) and Governmental messages showed no to a slightly positive associations with physical distancing. CONCLUSIONS In conclusion, we should be vigilant for physical distancing of emerging adults, but this study give no reason the to worry about the role of social media for COVID-19 news and information. However, as some social media platforms and sources showed negative associations, future studies should more carefully look into these factors to better understand the associations between social media use for news and information, and behavioral interventions in times of crisis.

A shift from science to politics : a content analysis of COVID-19 Videos on YouTube (Preprint)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chyun-Fung Shi ◽  
Matthew C So ◽  
Sophie Stelmach ◽  
Arielle Earn ◽  
David J D Earn ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Control Measures ◽  
Mitigation Measures ◽  
Health Campaigns ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Conflicting Information ◽  
Social Media Platforms

BACKGROUND The COVID-19 pandemic is the first pandemic where social media platforms relayed information on a large scale, enabling an “infodemic” of conflicting information which undermined the global response to the pandemic. Understanding how the information circulated and evolved on social media platforms is essential for planning future public health campaigns. OBJECTIVE This study investigated what types of themes about COVID-19 were most viewed on YouTube during the first 8 months of the pandemic, and how COVID-19 themes progressed over this period. METHODS We analyzed top-viewed YouTube COVID-19 related videos in English from from December 1, 2019 to August 16, 2020 with an open inductive content analysis. We coded 536 videos associated with 1.1 billion views across the study period. East Asian countries were the first to report the virus, while most of the top-viewed videos in English were from the US. Videos from straight news outlets dominated the top-viewed videos throughout the outbreak, and public health authorities contributed the fewest. Although straight news was the dominant COVID-19 video source with various types of themes, its viewership per video was similar to that for entertainment news and YouTubers after March. RESULTS We found, first, that collective public attention to the COVID-19 pandemic on YouTube peaked around March 2020, before the outbreak peaked, and flattened afterwards despite a spike in worldwide cases. Second, more videos focused on prevention early on, but videos with political themes increased through time. Third, regarding prevention and control measures, masking received much less attention than lockdown and social distancing in the study period. CONCLUSIONS Our study suggests that a transition of focus from science to politics on social media intensified the COVID-19 infodemic and may have weakened mitigation measures during the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is recommended that authorities should consider co-operating with reputable social media influencers to promote health campaigns and improve health literacy. In addition, given high levels of globalization of social platforms and polarization of users, tailoring communication towards different digital communities is likely to be essential.

scholarly journals Importance-Aware Learning for Neural Headline Editing

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 9282-9289
Author(s):  
Qingyang Wu ◽  
Lei Li ◽  
Hao Zhou ◽  
Ying Zeng ◽  
Zhou Yu
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Network Models ◽  
Language Models ◽  
Neural Network Models ◽  
Generation Task ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Editing Process ◽  
Different Levels

Many social media news writers are not professionally trained. Therefore, social media platforms have to hire professional editors to adjust amateur headlines to attract more readers. We propose to automate this headline editing process through neural network models to provide more immediate writing support for these social media news writers. To train such a neural headline editing model, we collected a dataset which contains articles with original headlines and professionally edited headlines. However, it is expensive to collect a large number of professionally edited headlines. To solve this low-resource problem, we design an encoder-decoder model which leverages large scale pre-trained language models. We further improve the pre-trained model's quality by introducing a headline generation task as an intermediate task before the headline editing task. Also, we propose Self Importance-Aware (SIA) loss to address the different levels of editing in the dataset by down-weighting the importance of easily classified tokens and sentences. With the help of Pre-training, Adaptation, and SIA, the model learns to generate headlines in the professional editor's style. Experimental results show that our method significantly improves the quality of headline editing comparing against previous methods.

scholarly journals The public accountability of social platforms: lessons from a study on bots and trolls in the Brexit campaign

2018 ◽  
Vol 376 (2128) ◽  
pp. 20180003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Bastos ◽  
Dan Mercea
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Information Warfare ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Application Programming ◽  
Access To Data ◽  
The Uk

In this article, we review our study of 13 493 bot-like Twitter accounts that tweeted during the UK European Union membership referendum debate and disappeared from the platform after the ballot. We discuss the methodological challenges and lessons learned from a study that emerged in a period of increasing weaponization of social media and mounting concerns about information warfare. We address the challenges and shortcomings involved in bot detection, the extent to which disinformation campaigns on social media are effective, valid metrics for user exposure, activation and engagement in the context of disinformation campaigns, unsupervised and supervised posting protocols, along with infrastructure and ethical issues associated with social sciences research based on large-scale social media data. We argue for improving researchers' access to data associated with contentious issues and suggest that social media platforms should offer public application programming interfaces to allow researchers access to content generated on their networks. We conclude with reflections on the relevance of this research agenda to public policy. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The growing ubiquity of algorithms in society: implications, impacts and innovations'.

Pushing Back, Through Media and Civil Society

Hate Spin ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cherian George
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
State Policy ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
News Organizations ◽  
Social Media Platforms

How a society responds to hate spin depends on not only its laws, but also its social norms—in particular, whether people consider bigotry to be socially acceptable or something to fight against, how comfortable they are with ideas and beliefs that are different, and whether their sense of national belonging is based on inclusive democratic values or an exclusive cultural identity. This chapter examines the role of non-state actors in shaping societies’ responses to hate spin. These players—secular and religious civil society groups, news organizations, and social media platforms, for example—are essential parts of any effort to build democracies that are respectful of religious differences. But, like state policy, media and civil society organizations are also often part of the problem, facilitating, encouraging, or even generating hate spin.

scholarly journals Fear of Missing Out as a Predictor of Problematic Social Media Use and Phubbing Behavior among Flemish Adolescents

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (10) ◽  
pp. 2319 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vittoria Franchina ◽  
Mariek Vanden Abeele ◽  
Antonius van Rooij ◽  
Gianluca Lo Coco ◽  
Lieven De Marez
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Media Use ◽  
Survey Study ◽  
Social Media Use ◽  
Fear Of Missing Out ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Large Scale Survey ◽  
Problematic Social Media Use ◽  
Use Of Social Media

Fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) refers to feelings of anxiety that arise from the realization that you may be missing out on rewarding experiences that others are having. FOMO can be identified as an intra-personal trait that drives people to stay up to date of what other people are doing, among others on social media platforms. Drawing from the findings of a large-scale survey study among 2663 Flemish teenagers, this study explores the relationships between FOMO, social media use, problematic social media use (PSMU) and phubbing behavior. In line with our expectations, FOMO was a positive predictor of both how frequently teenagers use several social media platforms and of how many platforms they actively use. FOMO was a stronger predictor of the use of social media platforms that are more private (e.g., Facebook, Snapchat) than platforms that are more public in nature (e.g., Twitter, Youtube). FOMO predicted phubbing behavior both directly and indirectly via its relationship with PSMU. These findings support extant research that points towards FOMO as a factor explaining teenagers’ social media use.

scholarly journals “Oh, She’s a Tumblr Feminist”: Exploring the Platform Vernacular of Girls’ Social Media Feminisms

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 205630511986744
Author(s):  
Jessalynn Keller
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Youth Engagement ◽  
Strategic Choices ◽  
Feminist Activism ◽  
Teenage Girls ◽  
Team Research ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Online Activism ◽  
Technological Affordances

As avid social media users, it is perhaps unsurprising that feminist teenage girls use their favorite platforms to engage in various forms of feminist activism. Yet, existing research has not explored how a growing number of social media platforms and their technological affordances uniquely shape how girls engage in online activism. I address this oversight by asking the following: Why are girls using particular platforms for feminist activism? How do certain platforms facilitate distinctive opportunities for youth engagement with feminist politics? and How might this shape the types of feminist issues and politics both made possible and foreclosed by some social media platforms? To answer these questions, I draw on ethnographic data gathered from a group of American, Canadian, and British teenage girls involved in various forms of online feminist activism on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. These data were collected as part of two UK-based team research projects. Using the concept of “platform vernacular,” I analyze how these girls do feminism across these different platforms, based on discursive textual analysis of their social media postings and interview reflections. I argue that teenage girls strategically choose how to engage with feminist politics online, carefully weighing issues like privacy, community, and peer support as determining factors in which platform they choose to engage. These decisions are often related to distinctive platform vernaculars, in which the girls have a keen understanding. Nonetheless, these strategic choices shape the kinds of feminisms we see across various social media platforms, a result that necessitates some attention and critical reflection from social media scholars.

scholarly journals Degrees of Freedom: Exploring Agency, Narratives, and Technological Affordances in the #TakeAKnee Controversy

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630511982612 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith E. Rosenbaum
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Degrees Of Freedom ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Structuration Theory ◽  
The Social ◽  
American National Identity ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Media Narratives ◽  
Technological Affordances

This study extends current research into social media platforms as counterpublic spaces by examining how the social media narratives produced by the #TakeAKnee controversy negotiate technological affordances and existing discourses surrounding American national identity. Giddens’ Structuration Theory is used to explore the nature of user agency on social media platforms and the extent to which this agency is constrained or enabled by the interplay between the systems and structures that guide social media use. Exploratory qualitative content analysis was used to analyze and compare tweets and Instagram posts using the #TakeAKnee hashtag shared in September 2017. Results showed that narratives are dominated by four themes, freedom, unity, equality and justice, and respect and honor. Users actively employ technological affordances to create highly personalized meanings, affirming that agency operates at the intersection of reflexivity and self-efficacy.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document