Facebook confessions: Corporate abdication and Silicon Valley dystopianism

2020 ◽  
pp. 146144482093354
Author(s):  
Tero Karppi ◽  
David B Nieborg

This article investigates the public confessions of a small group of ex-Facebook employees, investors, and founders who express regret helping to build the social media platform. Prompted by Facebook’s role in the 2016 United States elections and pointing to the platform’s unintended consequences, the confessions are more than formal admissions of sins. They speak of Facebook’s capacity to damage democratic decision-making and “exploit human psychology,” suggesting that individual users, children in particular, should disconnect. Rather than expressions of truth, this emerging form of corporate abdication constructs dystopian narratives that have the power shape our future visions of social platforms and give rise to new utopias. As such, and marking a stark break with decades of technological utopianism, the confessions are an emergent form of Silicon Valley dystopianism.

Journalism ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 146488491987032 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shixin Ivy Zhang

Inspired by the concepts of Arrested War and actor–network theory, this study has traced and analyzed four main actors in the wars and conflicts in the social media age: social media platform, the mainstream news organizations, online users, and social media content. These four human and nonhuman actors associate, interact, and negotiate with each other in the social media network surrounding specific issues. Based on the case study of Sino-Indian border crisis in 2017, the central argument is that social media is playing an enabling role in contemporary wars and conflicts. Both professional media outlets and web users employ the functionalities of social media platforms to set, counter-set, or expand the public agenda. Social media platform embodies a web of technological and human complexities with different actors, factors, interests, and relations. These actor-networks and the macro social-political context are influential in the mediatization of conflict in the social media era.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 378-391 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vikas Gupta

Purpose This study aims to evaluate the role of social media on the hotel decision-making process of consumers during the evaluation stage of searching, identifying the alternatives and selecting a hotel in India. It will help the stakeholders in the hotel industry of India to make the social media platform more efficient for consumers by providing inputs on the factors consumers consider while making online hotel purchase. Design/methodology/approach This study involves an exploratory qualitative approach which includes 32 face-to-face, semi-structured, in-depth individual interviews with the social media platform users. The selection of interviewees for this study has been done on the basis of a non-random purposive sampling approach. Findings The findings reveal that social media plays an important role in affecting the way consumers search, decide and book hotels. It also suggests that social media helps consumers in collecting information about products and services, assessing alternatives and making their choices. It confirms that while negative facets exist, the positive benefits outweigh the negative aspects of using social media when selecting a hotel. The results also reveal the impact of circumstantial influence related to social media on hotel selection, on the basis of content source and the level of trust and accuracy in the content. Practical implications This study has some strategic implications for hospitality marketing and management related to a better understanding of the influence of social media on the hotel customer decision-making process. The study shows that a variety of social media with associated content sources and levels add to the complexity of hotel-related information search and decision behaviour. Originality/value The study makes a contribution by addressing the existing gaps and bridging the arena of consumer behaviour and social media literature in a hotel context and sheds light on how consumer decisions while selecting a hotel are influenced through social media. The core contribution is the generation of factors through in-depth interviews which are based on real-life scenarios relating to the influence of social media on hotel decision-making.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brittany E. Harris

The public is increasingly relying on Twitter for climate change information; however, to date, this social media platform is poorly understood in terms of how climate change information is shared. This study evaluates discussions on Twitter during the 2015 United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP21) to elucidate the social media platform’s role in communicating climate change information. For a five-day period, links embedded in a sample of tweets containing “#climatechange” were characterized, Twitter users were classified by the types of links they typically shared, and their degree centralities (the number of connections for each user) were measured. There was little skeptical content across all user categories; however, news links were more likely than non-news to contain content that is skeptical of climate change. Users who typically shared skeptical news links and users who typically shared non-skeptical non-news links exhibited a relatively high number of connections with other users.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Jaiprakash Vinodkumar Verma ◽  
Sudeep Tanwar ◽  
Sanjay Garg ◽  
Abhay Dinesh Rathod

A pre-analysis is always important for crucial decision making in many events where reviews, feedback, and comments posted by different stakeholders play an important role. Summaries generated by humans are mostly based on abstractive summarization. It sometimes changes the meaning of the text. This paper proposes a customized extractive summarization approach to generate a summary of large text extracted from social media viz. Twitter, YouTube review, feedback, comments, etc. for a movie. The proposed approach where PageRank with k-means clustering was used to select representative sentences from a large number of reviews and feedback. Cluster heads were selected based on the customization of PageRank. The proposed approach shows improved results over the graph-based TextRank approach with and without synonyms. It can be applied to predict trends for items other than movies through the social media platform.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brittany E. Harris

The public is increasingly relying on Twitter for climate change information; however, to date, this social media platform is poorly understood in terms of how climate change information is shared. This study evaluates discussions on Twitter during the 2015 United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP21) to elucidate the social media platform’s role in communicating climate change information. For a five-day period, links embedded in a sample of tweets containing “#climatechange” were characterized, Twitter users were classified by the types of links they typically shared, and their degree centralities (the number of connections for each user) were measured. There was little skeptical content across all user categories; however, news links were more likely than non-news to contain content that is skeptical of climate change. Users who typically shared skeptical news links and users who typically shared non-skeptical non-news links exhibited a relatively high number of connections with other users.


Author(s):  
Farahana Binti Nadzri

In this era of information or also known as Computer Age, Digital Age, or New Media Age, the public is not only able to access information with a stroke of their fingers but also create vast information for others. The newer generations of smartphones, computers, and tablets have made information omnipresent and easily accessible through the social media platform. But are the authorities and experts using this platform effectively to reach out to the public and dispel misinformation and pseudoscience? With citizen journalists in the rise, there is a greater demand for experts to make their voice heard. Social media has become an “official” source of information on science for many. These include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tick Tock, LinkedIn, YouTube and many more. According to a survey done by Global Web Index, internet users are spending an average of 2 hours and 22 minutes per day on social media. It influences public opinion and decision making process. Organic food, alternative treatment for cancer and other diseases, genetically modified foods, slimming products and vaccination are some of the trending science news in social media. It is time health and medical experts step up and use the social media platform to provide science-based information to the public and dispel fake news, misinformation and fear mongering. This talk will present the different types of social media platforms, their demographics and distinct characters of each platform. The different strategies to maximize the media impression will also be discussed.International Journal of Human and Health Sciences Supplementary Issue: 2019 Page: 27


Author(s):  
Giandomenico Di Domenico ◽  
Annamaria Tuan ◽  
Marco Visentin

AbstractIn the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, unprecedent amounts of fake news and hoax spread on social media. In particular, conspiracy theories argued on the effect of specific new technologies like 5G and misinformation tarnished the reputation of brands like Huawei. Language plays a crucial role in understanding the motivational determinants of social media users in sharing misinformation, as people extract meaning from information based on their discursive resources and their skillset. In this paper, we analyze textual and non-textual cues from a panel of 4923 tweets containing the hashtags #5G and #Huawei during the first week of May 2020, when several countries were still adopting lockdown measures, to determine whether or not a tweet is retweeted and, if so, how much it is retweeted. Overall, through traditional logistic regression and machine learning, we found different effects of the textual and non-textual cues on the retweeting of a tweet and on its ability to accumulate retweets. In particular, the presence of misinformation plays an interesting role in spreading the tweet on the network. More importantly, the relative influence of the cues suggests that Twitter users actually read a tweet but not necessarily they understand or critically evaluate it before deciding to share it on the social media platform.


Modern Italy ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 335-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierluigi Erbaggio

Based on Roberto Saviano's book Gomorra (2006), production of the TV series Gomorra – La serie (2014) was met with scepticism as many feared it would glamorise organised crime and, consequently, attract young people toward Camorra affiliation. The series' bleak portrayal of criminals and criminality was offered as a response to such concerns. Despite the preoccupations, Gomorra – La serie was hugely successful and, because of its quality, was sold to other countries. In Italy, the series' success can be measured by the popularity of its Twitter hashtag #GomorraLaSerie. Engaged with Henry Jenkins' theories of media convergence and based on a corpus of tweets bearing this official hashtag, this article proposes a quantitative analysis and advances conclusions regarding the Italian TV audience and second-screen viewing practices. Additionally, through a qualitative study of Saviano's tweets about the series, it examines the writer's use of the social media platform as a tool of narrative continuity. Finally, the article highlights a few examples of fan-generated media and concludes with remarks regarding Saviano's problematic position at the centre of a transmedia object.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Katie Elson Anderson

Purpose This paper aims to provide information and promote discussion around the social media platform TikTok. Design/methodology/approach Research, literature review. Findings Libraries and library and information professionals should be aware of the potential of TikTok for engagement and information sharing. Originality/value Adds to the research on the social media platform TikTok.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Akhmad Roja Badrus Zaman ◽  
Mahin Muqaddam Assarwani

Advances in technology and information provide new opportunities for preachers to be able to take part in spreading Islamic teachings through various social media platforms. One of the preachers who took the role to preach through social media was Habib Husein Jafar al-Hadar. This article examines Habib Husein Jafar’s missionary activities on the social media platform he uses, Youtube. The researcher analyzes the data by observing virtually and visually (virtual ethnography) on the da’wa content displayed by Habib Husein Jafar through Youtube. The study shows that: 1) the attention to the spiritual enlightenment efforts of the younger generation is the basis of the selection of the social media platform Youtube - because based on previous research, the users of this social media platform are 18-29 years of age; 2) starting from the da’wa consumers who are primarily young people, the content they present is suitable to their needs and lifestyle and 3) by using the concept of the circuit of culture analysis, Habib Husein Jafar in various ranges can reconstruct people’s perception of one’s definition of holiness. It is not limited based on normative appearance - cloaked and sacrificed, for example - but more on the substantive side, namely by behaving and having knowledgeable skills. With the variety of content, he could visualize himself as a pious young man by not abandoning his social status as a young person.


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