Small Platforms and the Gray Zones of Deep Extreme Speech

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sahana Udupa ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Technological Innovations ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Global Media ◽  
Media Attention ◽  
Media Companies ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
Policy Measures

Recent trends of migration to smaller social media platforms among right wing actors have raised a caution that an excessive focus on large, transnational social media companies might lose sight of the volatile spaces of homegrown and niche platforms, which have begun to offer diverse “alternative” avenues to extreme speech. Such trends, which drew global media attention during Trump supporters’ attempted exodus to Parler, are also gaining salience in Europe and the global South. Turning the focus to these developments, this article pries open three pertinent features of extreme speech on small platforms: its propensity to migrate between platforms, its embeddedness in domestic regulatory and technological innovations, and its evolving role in facilitating hateful language and disinformation in and through deep trust-based networks. Rather than assuming that smaller platforms are on an obvious trajectory toward progressive alternatives, their diverse entanglements with exclusionary extreme speech, I suggest, should be an important focal point for policy measures.

scholarly journals A simulated cyberattack on Twitter: Assessing partisan vulnerability to spear phishing and disinformation ahead of the 2018 U.S. midterm elections

First Monday ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Bossetta
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Private Information ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Breaking News ◽  
Media Companies ◽  
Midterm Elections ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Twitter Users

State-sponsored “bad actors” increasingly weaponize social media platforms to launch cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns during elections. Social media companies, due to their rapid growth and scale, struggle to prevent the weaponization of their platforms. This study conducts an automated spear phishing and disinformation campaign on Twitter ahead of the 2018 United States midterm elections. A fake news bot account — the @DCNewsReport — was created and programmed to automatically send customized tweets with a “breaking news” link to 138 Twitter users, before being restricted by Twitter.Overall, one in five users clicked the link, which could have potentially led to the downloading of ransomware or the theft of private information. However, the link in this experiment was non-malicious and redirected users to a Google Forms survey. In predicting users’ likelihood to click the link on Twitter, no statistically significant differences were observed between right-wing and left-wing partisans, or between Web users and mobile users. The findings signal that politically expressive Americans on Twitter, regardless of their party preferences or the devices they use to access the platform, are at risk of being spear phished on social media.

A market-based rationale for the privacy paradox

2021 ◽  
pp. 016344372110158
Author(s):  
Opeyemi Akanbi
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Market Structures ◽  
Media Companies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Privacy Paradox ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Privacy Risks ◽  
Social Collective

Moving beyond the current focus on the individual as the unit of analysis in the privacy paradox, this article examines the misalignment between privacy attitudes and online behaviors at the level of society as a collective. I draw on Facebook’s market performance to show how despite concerns about privacy, market structures drive user, advertiser and investor behaviors to continue to reward corporate owners of social media platforms. In this market-oriented analysis, I introduce the metaphor of elasticity to capture the responsiveness of demand for social media to the data (price) charged by social media companies. Overall, this article positions social media as inelastic, relative to privacy costs; highlights the role of the social collective in the privacy crises; and ultimately underscores the need for structural interventions in addressing privacy risks.

scholarly journals Quantifying and contextualizing the impact of bioRxiv preprints through automated social media audience segmentation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jedidiah Carlson ◽  
Kelley Harris
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Research Evaluation ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Audience Segmentation ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Game Developers ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Media Audience

AbstractEngagement with scientific manuscripts is frequently facilitated by Twitter and other social media platforms. As such, the demographics of a paper’s social media audience provide a wealth of information about how scholarly research is transmitted, consumed, and interpreted by online communities. By paying attention to public perceptions of their publications, scientists can learn whether their research is stimulating positive scholarly and public thought. They can also become aware of potentially negative patterns of interest from groups that misinterpret their work in harmful ways, either willfully or unintentionally, and devise strategies for altering their messaging to mitigate these impacts. In this study, we collected 331,696 Twitter posts referencing 1,800 highly tweeted bioRxiv preprints and leveraged topic modeling to infer the characteristics of various communities engaging with each preprint on Twitter. We agnostically learned the characteristics of these audience sectors from keywords each user’s followers provide in their Twitter biographies. We estimate that 96% of the preprints analyzed are dominated by academic audiences on Twitter, suggesting that social media attention does not always correspond to greater public exposure. We further demonstrate how our audience segmentation method can quantify the level of interest from non-specialist audience sectors such as mental health advocates, dog lovers, video game developers, vegans, bitcoin investors, conspiracy theorists, journalists, religious groups, and political constituencies. Surprisingly, we also found that 10% of the highly tweeted preprints analyzed have sizable (>5%) audience sectors that are associated with right-wing white nationalist communities. Although none of these preprints intentionally espouse any right-wing extremist messages, cases exist where extremist appropriation comprises more than 50% of the tweets referencing a given preprint. These results present unique opportunities for improving and contextualizing research evaluation as well as shedding light on the unavoidable challenges of scientific discourse afforded by social media.

Platform Politics: The Emergence of Alternative Social Media in India

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-276
Author(s):  
Prashanth Bhat
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Bharatiya Janata Party ◽  
The World ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Media Platform ◽  
Corporate Social ◽  
Widespread Dissemination

Widespread dissemination of hate speech on corporate social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube has necessitated technological companies to moderate content on their platforms. At the receiving end of these content moderation efforts are supporters of right-wing populist parties, who have gained notoriety for harassing journalists, spreading disinformation, and vilifying liberal activists. In recent months, several prominent right-wing figures across the world were removed from social media - a phenomenon also known as ‘deplatforming’- for violating platform policies. Prominent among such right-wing groups are online supporters of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India, who have begun accusing corporate social media of pursuing a ‘liberal agenda’ and ‘curtailing free speech.’ In response to deplatforming, the BJP-led Government of India has aggressively promoted and embraced Koo, an indigenously developed social media platform. This commentary examines the implications of this alternative social platform for the online communicative environment in the Indian public sphere.

Impact of Social Media and Technology Companies on Digital Journalism

2019 ◽  
pp. 147-170
Author(s):  
Şükrü Oktay Kılıç ◽  
Zeynep Genel
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
News Media ◽  
Business Models ◽  
The Other ◽  
Media Companies ◽  
Digital Journalism ◽  
The World ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Media And Technology ◽  
The Impact

A handful of social media companies, with their shifting strategies to become hosts of all information available online, have significantly changed the news media landscape in recent years. Many news media companies across the world have gone through reorganizations in a bid to keep up with new storytelling techniques, technologies, and tools introduced by social media companies. With their non-transparent algorithms favoring particular content formats and lack of interest in developing solid business models for publishers, social media platforms, on the other hand, have attracted widespread criticism by many academics and media practitioners. This chapter aims at discussing the impact of social media on journalism with the help of digital research that provides an insight on what storytelling types with which three most-followed news outlets in Turkey gain the most engagement on Facebook.

scholarly journals The COVID-19 Mental Health Content Moderation Conundrum

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 205630512094818 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ysabel Gerrard
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Safety Measures ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Media Companies ◽  
Personal Connections ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Time Record ◽  
Media Society ◽  
The Uk

At the time of writing (mid-May 2020), mental health charities around the world have experienced an unprecedented surge in demand. At the same time, record-high numbers of people are turning to social media to maintain personal connections due to restrictions on physical movement. But organizations like the mental health charity Mind and even the UK Government have expressed concerns about the possible strain on mental health that may come from spending more time online during COVID-19. These concerns are unsurprising, as debates about the link between heavy social media use and mental illness raged long before the pandemic. But our newly heightened reliance on platforms to replace face-to-face communication has created even more pressure for social media companies to heighten their safety measures and protect their most vulnerable users. To develop and enact these changes, social media companies are reliant on their content moderation workforces, but the COVID-19 pandemic has presented them with two related conundrums: (1) recent changes to content moderation workforces means platforms are likely to be less safe than they were before the pandemic and (2) some of the policies designed to make social media platforms safer for people’s mental health are no longer possible to enforce. This Social Media + Society: 2K essay will address these two challenges in depth.

scholarly journals The COVID States Project #60: COVID-19 vaccine misinformation: From uncertainty to resistance

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Ognyanova ◽  
David Lazer ◽  
Matthew Baum ◽  
James Druckman ◽  
Jon Green ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Vaccination Rates ◽  
Media Companies ◽  
Social Media Platforms

In mid-July 2021, President Biden emphatically claimed that social media platforms were “killing people” by facilitating the spread of vaccine misinformation. Not long after, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell similarly declared that misinformation was to be blamed for the low vaccination rates of Americans.The public debate that followed brought to the forefront a series of important questions. How prevalent is the public’s belief in vaccine misinformation? Is that belief associated with vaccine resistance? Are some social groups more susceptible to it than others? Are social media companies responsible for the higher levels of vaccine resistance among some of their users?This report focuses on the first three questions, exploring misinformation beliefs across social groups and their connection with vaccine attitudes. We address the last question in our previous report and in a post published by the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog.

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 Encountering #Feminism on Twitter: Reflections on a Research Collaboration between Social Scientists and Computer Scientists

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 763-779 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Kirkwood ◽  
Viviene Cree ◽  
Daniel Winterstein ◽  
Alex Nuttgens ◽  
Jenni Sneddon
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Research Collaboration ◽  
Learning Technologies ◽  
Media Analysis ◽  
Technological Innovations ◽  
Social Media Analysis ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Media Companies ◽  
Computer Scientists

The growth of social media presents an unparalleled opportunity for the study of social change. However, the speed and scale of this growth presents challenges for social scientists, particularly those whose methodologies tend to rely on the qualitative analysis of data that are gathered firsthand. Alongside the growth of social media, companies have emerged which have developed tools for interrogating ‘big data’, although often unconnected from social scientists. It is self-evident that collaboration between social scientists and social media analysis companies offers the potential for developing methods for analysing social change on large scales, bringing together their respective expertise in technological innovations and knowledge of social science. What is less well known is how such a partnership might work in practice. This article presents an example of such a collaboration, highlighting the opportunities and challenges that arose in the context of an exploration of feminism on Twitter. As will be shown, machine-learning technologies allow the analysis of data on a scale that would be impossible for human analysts, yet such approaches also heighten challenges regarding the study of social change and communication.

Social Media as a Tool for Consumer Engagement in Hospital Quality Improvement and Service Design: Barriers and Enablers for Implementation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louisa Walsh ◽  
Nerida Hyett ◽  
Jayne Howley ◽  
Nicole Juniper ◽  
Chi Li ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Quality Improvement ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Service Design ◽  
Hospital Service ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Consumer Engagement ◽  
Media Companies ◽  
Barriers And Enablers ◽  
Social Media Platforms

Background: Social media can be used to engage consumers in hospital service design and quality improvement (QI) activities, however its uptake may be limited by a lack of guidance to support implementation. This article presents the perceived barriers and enablers in using social media for consumer engagement derived from an interview study with public hospital stakeholders. Method: Semi-structured interviews with 26 Australian hospital service providers and consumer representatives. Data were analysed using a deductive content analysis method. Results: Data were collected between October 2019 and April 2020. Facebook was the platform most commonly used for consumer engagement activities. Barriers and enablers to social media-based consumer engagement were identified. The barrier themes were 1) fears and concerns; 2) lack of skills and resources for social media engagement; 3) lack of organisational processes and support; and 4) problems with social media platforms and the changing social media landscape. The enabler themes were: 1) hospitals facilitating access and use; 2) making discussions safe; 3) cultivating a social media community; and 4) building on success. Conclusion: Using social media to facilitate consumer engagement in hospital service design and QI activities is feasible and acceptable to service providers and consumers. Hospitals and their executives can create a supportive environment for social media-based engagement activities through developing clear governance systems and providing training and support to all users. Consumers need to be involved in co-designing social media-based activities and determining which forms of engagement are accessible and acceptable. For some consumers and service providers, barriers such as a lack of resources and distrust of social media companies might mean that social media-based engagement will be less acceptable for them. Because of this it is important that hospitals provide complementary methods of engagement (e.g., face-to-face) alongside social media-based methods.

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