scholarly journals Smart cities, social media platforms and security: online content regulation as a site of controversy and conflict

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chiara Poletti ◽  
Marco Michieli
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Online Content ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
A Site ◽  
Content Regulation

scholarly journals The existential stakes of platform governance and online content regulation: a critical conceptual model

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Charilaos Papaevangelou
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Governance Mechanism ◽  
Internet Governance ◽  
Online Content ◽  
Competing Interests ◽  
Platform Governance ◽  
Governance Model ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Content Regulation

This study introduces a comprehensive yet non-exhaustive overview of literature concerning the concepts of regulation and governance, and attempts to connect them to scholarly works that deal with social media platforms’ content regulation. The paper provides fundamental definitions of regulation and governance, along with a critique of polycentricity, in order to contextualise the discussion around platform governance and online content regulation. Regulation is framed here as a governance mechanism within a polycentric governance model where stakeholders have competing interests, even if sometimes they coincide. Moreover, where traditional governance literature conceptualised stakeholders as a triangle, this article proposes imagining them as overlapping circles of governance clusters with competing interests, going beyond the triad of public, private and non-governmental actors. Finally, the paper contends that that there exists a timely need to reimagine the way in which we understand and study phenomena appertaining to public discourse by adopting the platform governance perspective, which is framed as the advancement of internet governance. Finally, the article ascertains to study the governance of online content and social media platforms not as a sub-section of internet governance but as a conceptual evolution with existential stakes.

scholarly journals For lack of a better word: neo-identities in non-cisgender, non-straight communities on Tumblr

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Feraday
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Creation ◽  
A Site

Non-cisgender and non-straight identity language has long been a site of contention and evolution. There has been an increase in new non-cisgender, non-straight identity words since the creation of the internet, thanks to social media platforms like Tumblr. Tumblr in particular has been host to many conversations about identity and self-naming, though these conversations have not yet been the subject of much academic research. Through interviews and analysis of Tumblr posts, this thesis examines the emergence of new identity words, or neo-identities, used by non-cisgender and non-straight users of Tumblr. The work presents neo-identities as strategies for resisting and challenging cisheteronormative conceptions of gender and attraction, as well as sources of comfort and relief for non-cisgender/non-straight people who feel ‘broken’ and excluded from mainstream identity categories. This thesis also posits that Tumblr is uniquely suited for conversations about identity because of its potential for self-expression, community, and anonymity.

Facebook and cultural identity: Discourses on mediation among international students

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 303-322
Author(s):  
Delia Dumitrica
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Awareness Raising ◽  
Identity Discourses ◽  
And Performance ◽  
A Site ◽  
Media And Communication ◽  
Four Discourses

Abstract Digital mediation is implicated in the production of cultural identity in multiple ways. The representations produced and circulated on social media platforms, along with the ubiquitous nature of these platforms, become part and parcel of the production and performance of cultural identity. This paper investigates discourses of Facebook mediation and cultural identity among a sample of international undergraduates in media and communication at a major Dutch university. The analysis of 43 written student essays reveals four discourses: Facebook as a mirror of cultural identity, as a cultural mosaic, as a site of cultural difference and as an opportunity for critical reflection on the idea of cultural identity. Interestingly, these discourses are permeated by a recurrent vision of individual control of both mediation and cultural identity. This article discusses the ideological work entailed in these discourses, calling for more awareness raising on the ways in which social media actively construct social reality.

Uganda social media tax furore could resurge

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Freedom Of Speech ◽  
Online Content ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Mobile Money ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Over The Top ◽  
Post Online

Subject Uganda's social media tax. Significance Uganda in July began implementing a set of new taxes on internet-based services. These include a daily fee for use of ‘over-the-top’ (OTT) social media platforms (such as WhatsApp, Twitter or Facebook), and a tax on mobile money transactions. However, the measures have been fiercely opposed by the public and have drawn widespread condemnation as an infringement on freedom of speech. Impacts Nigeria is also mulling a social media tax; all sides will use the Uganda situation in ways that support their own views in that debate. Zambia’s government may use a proposed set of tough cybercrime laws to stifle dissent ahead of President Edward Lungu’s re-election bid. Tanzania will resist calls to reform new regulations requiring bloggers to pay for licenses to post online content.

scholarly journals What Makes News Sharable on Social Media?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy Xi Chen ◽  
Gordon Pennycook ◽  
David Gertler Rand
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Word Of Mouth ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
Online Content ◽  
Negatively Associated ◽  
Cognitive Reflection ◽  
News Consumption ◽  
Perceived Importance ◽  
Social Media Platforms

With the rise of social media, everyone has the potential to be both a consumer and producer of online content. As a result, the role that word of mouth plays in news consumption has been dramatically increased. Although one might assume that consumers share news because they believe it to be true, widespread concerns about the spread of misinformation suggest that truthfulness may actually not be a dominant driver of sharing online. Across two studies with 5,000 participants, we investigate what makes news sharable on social media. We find that sharing is positively predicted by two separate factors. One factor does involve the headline’s perceived accuracy, as well as its familiarity. The second, however, involves the headline’s perceived importance and emotional evocativeness. This second factor is negatively associated with the headline’s objective veracity, and less decision weight is put on the second factor by subjects with more cognitive reflection and political knowledge, and by subjects who are less politically conservative. These findings have important implications for news publishers, social media platforms, and society at large.

scholarly journals Gender of the Interface

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordan Kraemer
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Young People ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Interaction Design ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Class Status ◽  
Visually Based ◽  
A Site ◽  
Modes Of Interaction ◽  
Media Practices

For many cosmopolitan urban Germans and Europeans in Berlin in the late 2000s, social media platforms were a site where gender and class were enacted through articulations of emergent nerd masculinity or hip, ironic femininity. But these platforms, such as Facebook or Pinterest, encoded normative assumptions about masculinity and femininity in their visual and interaction design, excluding women and acceptable femininity as subjects of technological expertise. Sites that presented themselves as neutral spaces for connection and interaction, like Twitter or Facebook, instantiated gendered understandings of technology that rendered public space implicitly masculine, white, and middle class. Visually based sites like Pinterest and Etsy, in contrast, were marked as domains of feminine domesticity, representing not only a shift to visual communication but to visual modes of interaction that structured gender online. Although many young people resisted hegemonic notions of gender, their social media practices stabilized their class status as aspiring urban cosmopolitans. In this article, I consider how gender and class stabilized temporarily through material-semiotic engagements with technology interfaces.

scholarly journals REDDIT QUARANTINED: CONSEQUENCES OF DEALING WITH DISTRUST IN SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS THROUGH RESTRICTING ENGAGEMENT

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Copland
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Qualitative Data ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Activity Levels ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Media Companies ◽  
Social Media Site ◽  
Online Abuse ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
A Site

Online abuse has become a matter of trust for social media platforms, whose role as a facilitator of public debate has been called into question. In response social media companies have become more active in regulating and banning particular users and channels. Through the use of affordances theory, this paper examines one example of the regulation of content on a social media site, the revamp of the quarantining function on Reddit in late 2018. Quarantines are designed to halt participation within and growth of subreddits without banning them outright. The paper uses quantitative and qualitative data to examine the consequences of this revamp on two subreddits, r/Braincels and r/TheRedPill. Through studying activity levels on these subreddits the paper argues that quarantines did limit discussion within these subreddits. However, it also argues that the revamp had unintended consequences, in particular a growth in distrust between subreddit users and Reddit as a site, and a shift of users away from Reddit to less regulated sites. The paper argues that quarantining shifted the affordances of Reddit, in this instance resulting in greater discouragement of activity on particular subreddits. Using the mechanisms and conditions framework (Davis and Chouinard, 2016) the paper however argues that users adapted to and circumvented this discouragement to continue engaging in particular behavior. While quarantining had short term benefits, using an affordances framework this paper argues it had unintended consequences, ones which can result in a continued radicalization of actions and beliefs, furthering distrust in the online sphere.

scholarly journals Seeing the smart city on Twitter: Colour and the affective territories of becoming smart

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-427 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillian Rose ◽  
Alistair Willis
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Data Visualisation ◽  
Social Media Platform ◽  
Smart Learning ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Media Platform

This paper pays attention to the immense and febrile field of digital image files which picture the smart city as they circulate on the social media platform Twitter. The paper considers tweeted images as an affective field in which flow and colour are especially generative. This luminescent field is territorialised into different, emergent forms of becoming ‘smart’. The paper identifies these territorialisations in two ways: firstly, by using the data visualisation software ImagePlot to create a visualisation of 9030 tweeted images related to smart cities; and secondly, by responding to the affective pushes of the image files thus visualised. It identifies two colours and three ways of affectively becoming smart: participating in smart, learning about smart, and anticipating smart, which are enacted with different distributions of mostly orange and blue images. The paper thus argues that debates about the power relations embedded in the smart city should consider the particular affective enactment of being smart that happens via social media. More generally, the paper concludes that geographers must pay more attention to the diverse and productive vitalities of social media platforms in urban life and that this will require experiment with methods that are responsive to specific digital qualities.

scholarly journals Digital detritus: 'Error' and the logic of opacity in social media content moderation

First Monday ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah T. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
User Generated Content ◽  
Vietnam Era ◽  
The Status ◽  
Online Spaces ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Lead Users ◽  
The One ◽  
A Site ◽  
Moderation Process

The late 2016 case of the Facebook content moderation controversy over the infamous Vietnam-era photo, “The Terror of War,” is examined in this paper for both its specifics, as well as a mechanism to engage in a larger discussion of the politics and economics of the content moderation of user-generated content. In the context of mainstream commercial social media platforms, obfuscation and secrecy work together to form an operating logic of opacity, a term and concept introduced in this paper. The lack of clarity around platform policies, procedures and the values that inform them lead users to wildly different interpretations of the user experience on the same site, resulting in confusion in no small part by the platforms’ own design. Platforms operationalize their content moderation practices under a complex web of nebulous rules and procedural opacity, while governments and other actors clamor for tighter controls on some material, and other members of civil society demand greater freedoms for online expression. Few parties acknowledge the fact that mainstream social media platforms are already highly regulated, albeit rarely in such a way that can be satisfactory to all. The final turn in the paper connects the functions of the commercial content moderation process on social media platforms like Facebook to their output, being either the content that appears on a site, or content that is rescinded: digital detritus. While meaning and intent of user-generated content may often be imagined to be the most important factors by which content is evaluated for a site, this paper argues that its value to the platform as a potentially revenue-generating commodity is actually the key criterion and the one to which all moderation decisions are ultimately reduced. The result is commercialized online spaces that have far less to offer in terms of political and democratic challenge to the status quo and which, in fact, may serve to reify and consolidate power rather than confront it.

Listening at the local level: the role of radio in building community and trust

2019 ◽  
Vol 172 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-88
Author(s):  
Jocelyn Ellen Nettlefold
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Island State ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Building Community ◽  
A Site ◽  
Local Radio

This article examines the role of local radio in the contemporary media environment, specifically as a site for community engagement. Previous research finds journalistic organisations, at the local level, are critical to the functioning of society and more needs to be understood about their contemporary role amid destabilised and fragmented public discourse. In contrast to unrestrained and untrustworthy social media platforms, the mediation of local radio can assist in encouraging more inclusive, constructive, and respectful views from people from diverse sectors of society. Empirical research from a case study of a locally produced ABC Radio Community Conversation event exploring community tensions about built, heritage and environmental development in the Australian island state of Tasmania provides new insights into how the facilitation of local radio discussion can help build trust, public knowledge and enable greater participation. Listening and transparency from journalists about their practices is important, creating a space where people can connect in a civil and empathetic way not easily afforded by social media.

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