scholarly journals Citizen Perceptions of Fake News in Spain: Socioeconomic, Demographic, and Ideological Differences

Publications ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 35
Author(s):  
David Blanco-Herrero ◽  
Javier J. Amores ◽  
Patricia Sánchez-Holgado
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Young People ◽  
Adult Population ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Age And Gender ◽  
Ideological Differences ◽  
Relevant Role ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Citizen Perceptions ◽  
And Gender

Although the phenomenon of disinformation and, specifically, fake news has become especially serious and problematic, this phenomenon has not been widely addressed in academia from the perspective of consumers, who play a relevant role in the spread of this content. For that reason, the present study focuses on determining how this phenomenon is perceived by citizens, as the strategies to counteract fake news are affected by such opinions. Thus, the main objective of this study was to identify in which media the perception and experience of fake news is greatest and thus determine what platforms should be focused on to counteract this phenomenon. A survey was conducted in October 2020, among the Spanish adult population and was completed by a total of 423 people (with 421 valid answers). Among its main findings, this study determined that social media platforms are the type of media in which the greatest amount of fake news is perceived, which confirms the suggestions of previous studies. Furthermore, the experienced presence of fake news seems to be primarily affected by age and gender, as there was a higher level of skepticism observed among young people and women. Additionally, the use of media seems to be positively correlated with the perceived and experienced presence of fake news.

‘That’s not necessarily for them’: LGBTIQ+ young people, social media platform affordances and identity curation

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (8) ◽  
pp. 1261-1278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Hanckel ◽  
Son Vivienne ◽  
Paul Byron ◽  
Brady Robards ◽  
Brendan Churchill
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Young People ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Family Work ◽  
Gender Diverse ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Media Platform ◽  
And Gender ◽  
And Control

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and other non-heterosexual and gender diverse (LGBTIQ+) young people utilise a range of digital media platforms to explore identity, find support and manage boundaries. Less well understood, however, is how they navigate risk and rewards across the different social media platforms that are part of their everyday lives. In this study, we draw on the concept of affordances, as well as recent work on curation, to examine 23 in-depth interviews with LGBTIQ+ young people about their uses of social media. Our findings show how the affordances of platforms used by LGBTIQ+ young people, and the contexts of their engagement, situate and inform a typology of uses. These practices – focused on finding, building and fostering support – draw on young people’s social media literacies, where their affective experiences range from feelings of safety, security and control, to fear, disappointment and anger. These practices also work to manage boundaries between what is ‘for them’ (family, work colleagues, friends) and ‘not for them’. This work allowed our participants to mitigate risk, and circumnavigate normative platform policies and norms, contributing to queer-world building beyond the self. In doing so, we argue that young people’s social media curation strategies contribute to their health and well-being.

scholarly journals Social media platforms as a photo-elicitation tool in research on alcohol intoxication and gender

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 288-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Laws ◽  
Geoffrey Hunt ◽  
Tamar M. J. Antin
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Young People ◽  
Social Networking ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Alcohol Intoxication ◽  
Photo Elicitation ◽  
Photo Sharing ◽  
Interview Guide ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
And Gender

Aim: This methodological article aims to describe the use of comparative social media platforms within a photo-elicitation (PE) activity as part of a multi-method interview-based study on the gendered meanings of alcohol intoxication among young adults (aged 18–25 years, n = 200). Method: Early interviews revealed social media as a particularly engaging topic for participants, and discussions of social media exposed relevant issues that often were not discussed in other sections of the interview guide. By embedding photos of young people drinking within three social media platforms with photo-sharing capabilities – Instagram, SnapChat and Facebook – we elicited narrative data revealing important aspects of the meanings of intoxication and providing information on how participants manage and judge drinking behaviours shared through online social networking systems (SNS). Conclusions: Given that social media use and photo-sharing are so common, familiar, and endemic among young people, to ignore this feature of contemporary social interaction would have limited our exploration of meanings of intoxication. We suggest that embedding existing methods, such as photo-elicitation, into social media contexts that are salient for youth may be a valuable strategy for providing a more comprehensive approach for investigating contemporary social issues.

scholarly journals Level of Acceptance of News Stories on Social Media Platforms Among Youth in Nigeria

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-225
Author(s):  
Festus Prosper Olise ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Sampling Technique ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Multi Stage ◽  
States Data ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Media Platform ◽  
And Gender

This study investigates the level of acceptance of news stories on social media platforms among youth in Nigeria following the assumption that the proliferation of news stories on social media promotes the circulation of both factual and fake news. The sample consisted of 600 youth; however, 583 validly participated in the study. The participants were equitably selected in six States in Nigeria that represented the six geo-political zones of the country. The multi-stage sampling technique was employed to evenly select the youth from the major cities/towns in the States. Data generated were analysed and presented through descriptive and inferential statistics using SPSS version 20 software. Results show that the youth accepted entertainment news stories more than any other type of news stories on social media platforms. The majority of the youth considered Twitter as the most acceptable social media platform for receiving news stories in Nigeria. Findings also revealed that despite their love to read news stories on social media platforms, the youth’s level of acceptance of it was low. Furthermore, the age and gender of the youth were found to directly influence their level of acceptance of news stories on social media platforms. The study concluded that the multi-dimensional inter-play that characterised the low level of acceptance of news stories on social media platforms among the youth in Nigeria does not portend ominous signs. Keywords: Acceptance, mainstream media, news stories, social media platforms, youth.

scholarly journals Kěài ‘cute’ in Mandarin

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yu-Chieh Chen ◽  
Jen-i Li
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Abstract Entity ◽  
Internet Communication ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Age And Gender ◽  
Abstract Entities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
And Gender

Abstract The word kěài in Mandarin is semantically rich. However, little research has been devoted to examining its meanings and uses, let alone possible innovative usage following the popularity of social media platforms. Hence, this study aims to examine in detail (a) the descriptive range, meanings and functions of kěài, and (b) possible changes of its usage in Internet communication. To achieve these goals, a total of 800 tokens of kěài were collected and analyzed–400 from the Sinica Corpus and 400 from two widely used social media platforms, representing the data before and after social media platforms became popular. Our major findings are as follows: First, although human beings and non-human objects are what kěài mostly describes, its descriptive range is shifting to more abstract entities for much higher percentages of Abstract Entity and Event are found on the social media platforms. Second, the influence of age and gender factors has weakened. Third, although most of the non-human cases are described as kěài due to their external features, most of the human cases in the Sinica Corpus are called kěài for their external features while on the social media platforms, for their non-external features. Fourth, kěài conveys positive meanings most of the time, and the three most frequently found meanings of kěài in the Sinica Corpus are different from those on the social media platforms. Fifth, kěài is found to serve as hedges in both sets of data, but it is also used to show surprise on the social media platforms.

scholarly journals Positive Organisational Arts-Based Youth Scholarship: Redressing Discourse on Danger, Disquiet, and Distress during COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (11) ◽  
pp. 5655
Author(s):  
Ann Dadich ◽  
Katherine M. Boydell ◽  
Stephanie Habak ◽  
Chloe Watfern
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Young People ◽  
Health And Wellbeing ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Positive Experiences ◽  
Difficult Times

This methodological article argues for the potential of positive organisational arts-based youth scholarship as a methodology to understand and promote positive experiences among young people. With reference to COVID-19, exemplars sourced from social media platforms and relevant organisations demonstrate the remarkable creative brilliance of young people. During these difficult times, young people used song, dance, storytelling, and art to express themselves, (re)connect with others, champion social change, and promote health and wellbeing. This article demonstrates the power of positive organisational arts-based youth scholarship to understand how young people use art to redress negativity via a positive lens of agency, peace, collectedness, and calm.

scholarly journals Intelligent Detection of False Information in Arabic Tweets Utilizing Hybrid Harris Hawks Based Feature Selection and Machine Learning Models

Symmetry ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 556
Author(s):  
Thaer Thaher ◽  
Mahmoud Saheb ◽  
Hamza Turabieh ◽  
Hamouda Chantar
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Feature Selection ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
User Profile ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Classification Model ◽  
Fake News ◽  
False Information ◽  
Social Media Platforms

Fake or false information on social media platforms is a significant challenge that leads to deliberately misleading users due to the inclusion of rumors, propaganda, or deceptive information about a person, organization, or service. Twitter is one of the most widely used social media platforms, especially in the Arab region, where the number of users is steadily increasing, accompanied by an increase in the rate of fake news. This drew the attention of researchers to provide a safe online environment free of misleading information. This paper aims to propose a smart classification model for the early detection of fake news in Arabic tweets utilizing Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, Machine Learning (ML) models, and Harris Hawks Optimizer (HHO) as a wrapper-based feature selection approach. Arabic Twitter corpus composed of 1862 previously annotated tweets was utilized by this research to assess the efficiency of the proposed model. The Bag of Words (BoW) model is utilized using different term-weighting schemes for feature extraction. Eight well-known learning algorithms are investigated with varying combinations of features, including user-profile, content-based, and words-features. Reported results showed that the Logistic Regression (LR) with Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) model scores the best rank. Moreover, feature selection based on the binary HHO algorithm plays a vital role in reducing dimensionality, thereby enhancing the learning model’s performance for fake news detection. Interestingly, the proposed BHHO-LR model can yield a better enhancement of 5% compared with previous works on the same dataset.

Governing Fake News: The Regulation of Social Media and the Right to Freedom of Expression in the Era of Emergency

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-41
Author(s):  
Donato VESE
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
Public Law ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Right ◽  
Media Censorship

Governments around the world are strictly regulating information on social media in the interests of addressing fake news. There is, however, a risk that the uncontrolled spread of information could increase the adverse effects of the COVID-19 health emergency through the influence of false and misleading news. Yet governments may well use health emergency regulation as a pretext for implementing draconian restrictions on the right to freedom of expression, as well as increasing social media censorship (ie chilling effects). This article seeks to challenge the stringent legislative and administrative measures governments have recently put in place in order to analyse their negative implications for the right to freedom of expression and to suggest different regulatory approaches in the context of public law. These controversial government policies are discussed in order to clarify why freedom of expression cannot be allowed to be jeopardised in the process of trying to manage fake news. Firstly, an analysis of the legal definition of fake news in academia is presented in order to establish the essential characteristics of the phenomenon (Section II). Secondly, the legislative and administrative measures implemented by governments at both international (Section III) and European Union (EU) levels (Section IV) are assessed, showing how they may undermine a core human right by curtailing freedom of expression. Then, starting from the premise of social media as a “watchdog” of democracy and moving on to the contention that fake news is a phenomenon of “mature” democracy, the article argues that public law already protects freedom of expression and ensures its effectiveness at the international and EU levels through some fundamental rules (Section V). There follows a discussion of the key regulatory approaches, and, as alternatives to government intervention, self-regulation and especially empowering users are proposed as strategies to effectively manage fake news by mitigating the risks of undue interference by regulators in the right to freedom of expression (Section VI). The article concludes by offering some remarks on the proposed solution and in particular by recommending the implementation of reliability ratings on social media platforms (Section VII).

scholarly journals Private Self-consciousness, Self-reflection, Insight and Alcohol Consumption Among Young People and Adults

Psico-USF ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 633-644
Author(s):  
Cristyan Karla Nogueira Leal ◽  
Gabriel Gonzaga Barbosa de Faria ◽  
Mariane Lima DeSouza
Keyword(s):  
Alcohol Consumption ◽  
Young People ◽  
Drinking Behavior ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
The Self ◽  
Age And Gender ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Risk Levels ◽  
Age And Gender Differences ◽  
And Gender

Abstract Private self-consciousness is a relevant metacognitive capacity in the self-regulation process, with possible implications in alcohol consumption. This research verified the influence of self-reflection and insight, dimensions of private self-consciousness, on drinking behavior. A total of 523 Brazilians, aged from 20 to 39 years old, participated in a survey by answering the Self-Reflection and Insight Scale and the AUDIT test. The results showed that women have higher levels of self-reflection, whereas men have higher levels of insight. With regard to alcohol consumption, young people drink at higher risk levels than adults. Self-reflection and insight were negatively correlated with alcohol consumption. Age and gender differences in the intensity of the correlation between variables and the influence of environmental factors on the regulation of drinking behavior are discussed.

scholarly journals Age- and gender-dependent differences in attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccination and underlying psychological processes

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toshiko Tanaka ◽  
Tsuyoshi Nihonsugi ◽  
Fumio Ohtake ◽  
Masahiko Haruno
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Scientific Evidence ◽  
Herd Immunity ◽  
Psychological Processes ◽  
Japanese People ◽  
Age And Gender ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Positive Effect

Abstract The most promising way to prevent the explosive spread of COVID-19 infection is to achieve herd immunity through vaccination. It is therefore important to motivate those who are less willing to be vaccinated. To address this issue, we conducted an online survey of 6232 Japanese people to investigate age- and gender- dependent differences in attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccination and the underlying psychological processes. We asked participants to read one of nine different messages about COVID-19 vaccination and rate their willingness to be vaccinated. We also collected their 17 social personality trait scores and demographic information. We found that males 10-20 years old showed the minimum willingness to be vaccinated. We also found that prosocial traits are the driving force for young people, but the motivation in older people also depends on risk aversion and self-interest. Furthermore, an analysis of 9 different messages demonstrated that for young people (particularly males), the message emphasizing the majority’s intention to vaccinate and scientific evidence for the safety of the vaccination had the strongest positive effect on the willingness to be vaccinated, suggesting that the herding effect arising from the “majority + scientific evidence” message nudges young people to show their prosocial nature in action.

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