Coronavirus as a Rhizome

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-55
Author(s):  
Teija Sederholm ◽  
Petri Jääskeläinen ◽  
Aki-Mauri Huhtinen
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Target Audience ◽  
Conspiracy Theory ◽  
Information Warfare ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Social Media Platforms

Disinformation and misinformation about COVID-19 have proliferated, particularly on social media. The purpose of this paper is to show the rhizomic nature of COVID-19-related dis- and misinformation having aspect of conspiracy theories, which are used on social media platforms to counter the official narratives about the origins of the virus. Consisting of 40 news-style articles, the data was used to find out how a conspiracy theory about the virus being a possible man-made bioweapon was presented to the audience. The results indicate that the rhizomatic structure of COVID-19 conspiracy theories makes it possible to vary the narratives based on the platform where it is published and the target audience. Information spreads in unexpected ways, and it is difficult to control or predict the spread of extremist content. This makes it possible for different actors, governments, and organizations to use information for their own purposes as a weapon of information warfare.

scholarly journals Social media and the spread of COVID-19 conspiracy theories in Nigeria

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 432-437
Author(s):  
Sarah Gambo ◽  
Woyopwa Shem
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Research Interest ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
The Social ◽  
Recent Outbreak ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Subject ◽  
National Orientation ◽  
And Control

Background: Amidst the recent outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, there seems to be an avalanche of conspiracy theories that abound on social media platforms, and this subject attracted a lot of research interest. This study aimed to examine the "social media and the spread Covid-19 conspiracy theories in Nigeria" in light of the above.  Methods: The study adopted a qualitative design in order to explore the subject matter thoroughly. Thirty-five participants were conveniently sampled, and interviews were conducted to retrieved data from the participants. Results: Findings of this study revealed that there is a prevalence of conspiracy theories that have saturated social media ever since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. It was also found that ignorance, religious fanaticism, lack of censorship, and insufficient counter information on social media platforms are some of the possible factors that aided the spread of Covid-19 conspiracy theories among Nigerian social media users. Conclusion: This study recommends, among other things, that there is a swift need to curtail the spread of conspiracy theories through consistent dissemination of counter-information by both individuals and agencies like the National Orientation Agency (NOA) and the Nigerian Centre for Disease and Control (NCDC).

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'.

Studying Celebrity Engagement on Social Media

2018 ◽  
pp. 86-106
Author(s):  
Tripti Dhote
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Special Reference ◽  
Target Audience ◽  
Intended Target ◽  
Communication Platform ◽  
Brand Credibility ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Brand Promotion ◽  
Digital Or

Leveraging a celebrity for instant recognition and visibility or building significant brand credibility and driving sales has been a long-established recipe for success over the years. Engaging a reputed face for brand promotion has ever been an exorbitant investment. Digital or social media as a communication platform has not only driven brands to create a desired recall without the burden of unreasonable spends, but has also strengthened and empowered celebrity engagement like never before by throwing a versatile array of options for individual branding and visibility. This chapter aims to explore and analyse the engagement of celebrity on different social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, Twitter etc. with special reference to Bollywood. It delves into understanding the engagement patterns; aspects of celebrity evoked; brand impact; media celebrity brand fit, and intended target audience whether it leads to action or Influences perceptions.

Multidimensional Mappings of Political Accounts for Malicious Political Socialbot Identification

2019 ◽  
pp. 263-348
Author(s):  
Shalin Hai-Jew
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Information Warfare ◽  
Russian Government ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Content Sharing ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Media Platform ◽  
Strategic Messaging ◽  
Geographical Locations ◽  
The U.S

Malicious political socialbots used to sway public opinion regarding the U.S. government and its functions have been identified as part of a larger information warfare effort by the Russian government. This work asks what is knowable from a web-based sleuthing approach regarding the following four factors: 1) the ability to identify malicious political socialbot accounts based on their ego neighborhoods at 1, 1.5, and 2 degrees; 2) the ability to identify malicious political socialbot accounts based on the claimed and linked geographical locations of their accounts, their ego neighborhoods, and their #hashtag networks; 3) the ability to identify malicious political socialbot accounts based on their strategic messaging (content, sentiment, and language structures) on respective social media platforms; and 4) the ability to identify and describe “maliciousness” in malicious political socialbot accounts based on observable behaviors on that account on three social media platform types: (a) microblogging, (b) social networking, and (c) crowd-sourced encyclopedia content sharing.

The Islamic State’s information warfare

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 258-280 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra A. Siegel ◽  
Joshua A. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Linguistically Diverse ◽  
Information Warfare ◽  
Core Network ◽  
Policy Goals ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Search Data ◽  
Online Strategy ◽  
Twitter Users

Abstract How successful is the Islamic State’s online strategy? To what extent does the organization achieve its goals of attracting a global audience, broadcasting its military successes, and marketing the Caliphate? Using Twitter and YouTube search data, collected throughout 2015 and early 2016, we assess how suspected ISIS accounts, sympathizers, and opponents behave across two social media platforms, offering key insights into the successes and limitations of ISIS’s information warfare strategy. Analyzing the tweet content and metadata from 16,364 suspected ISIS accounts, we find that a core network of ISIS Twitter users are producing linguistically diverse narratives, touting battlefield victories and depicting utopian life in the Caliphate. Furthermore, a dataset of over 70 million tweets, as well as analysis YouTube search data, indicates that although pro-ISIS content spreads globally and remains on message, it is far less prolific than anti-ISIS content. However, this anti-ISIS content is not necessarily anti-extremist or aligned with Western policy goals.

scholarly journals Impact of Influencers in Consumer Decision Process: The Fashion Industry

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Siti Nurfadila
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Decision Process ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Target Audience ◽  
Fashion Industry ◽  
Consumer Decision ◽  
Consumer Decision Process ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Impact

The popularity of influencers is continuous and doesn’t have a limited window of influence. Internet and social media play vital role in helping consumers find the items they are looking for. Obviously companies will keenly try to retain a strong presence in the social media platforms; otherwise the target audience can easily change suppliers. The present   study is intended to explore the influencer marketing techniques used by fashion industries and also the impact of influencers on the consumers buying decision process in fashion industry.

scholarly journals “Thought I’d Share First” and Other Conspiracy Theory Tweets from the COVID-19 Infodemic: Exploratory Study

10.2196/26527 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. e26527
Author(s):  
Dax Gerts ◽  
Courtney D Shelley ◽  
Nidhi Parikh ◽  
Travis Pitts ◽  
Chrysm Watson Ross ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Random Forest ◽  
Conspiracy Theory ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Random Forest Classification ◽  
Data Matching ◽  
Health Related ◽  
Evolution Of Ideas ◽  
Over Time

Background The COVID-19 outbreak has left many people isolated within their homes; these people are turning to social media for news and social connection, which leaves them vulnerable to believing and sharing misinformation. Health-related misinformation threatens adherence to public health messaging, and monitoring its spread on social media is critical to understanding the evolution of ideas that have potentially negative public health impacts. Objective The aim of this study is to use Twitter data to explore methods to characterize and classify four COVID-19 conspiracy theories and to provide context for each of these conspiracy theories through the first 5 months of the pandemic. Methods We began with a corpus of COVID-19 tweets (approximately 120 million) spanning late January to early May 2020. We first filtered tweets using regular expressions (n=1.8 million) and used random forest classification models to identify tweets related to four conspiracy theories. Our classified data sets were then used in downstream sentiment analysis and dynamic topic modeling to characterize the linguistic features of COVID-19 conspiracy theories as they evolve over time. Results Analysis using model-labeled data was beneficial for increasing the proportion of data matching misinformation indicators. Random forest classifier metrics varied across the four conspiracy theories considered (F1 scores between 0.347 and 0.857); this performance increased as the given conspiracy theory was more narrowly defined. We showed that misinformation tweets demonstrate more negative sentiment when compared to nonmisinformation tweets and that theories evolve over time, incorporating details from unrelated conspiracy theories as well as real-world events. Conclusions Although we focus here on health-related misinformation, this combination of approaches is not specific to public health and is valuable for characterizing misinformation in general, which is an important first step in creating targeted messaging to counteract its spread. Initial messaging should aim to preempt generalized misinformation before it becomes widespread, while later messaging will need to target evolving conspiracy theories and the new facets of each as they become incorporated.

scholarly journals The weaponization of web archives: Data craft and COVID-19 publics

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amelia Acker ◽  
Mitch Chaiet
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Social Media Analytics ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Provenance Information ◽  
Web Resources ◽  
Web Archives ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Factual Content ◽  
Human Actors

An unprecedented volume of harmful health misinformation linked to the coronavirus pandemic has led to the appearance of misinformation tactics that leverage web archives in order to evade content moderation on social media platforms. Here we present newly identified manipulation techniques designed to maximize the value, longevity, and spread of harmful and non-factual content across social media using provenance information from web archives and social media analytics. After identifying conspiracy content that has been archived by human actors with the Wayback Machine, we report on user patterns of “screensampling,” where images of archived misinformation are spread via social platforms. We argue that archived web resources from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and subsequent screenshots contribute to the COVID-19 “misinfodemic” in platforms. Understanding these manipulation tactics that use sources from web archives reveals something vexing about information practices during pandemics—the desire to access reliable information even after it has been moderated and fact-checked, for some individuals, will give health misinformation and conspiracy theories more traction because it has been labeled as specious content by platforms.

scholarly journals COVID-19 vaccination hesitancy, misinformation and conspiracy theories on social media: A content analysis of Twitter data

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tasmiah Nuzhath ◽  
Samia Tasnim ◽  
Rahul Kumar Sanjwal ◽  
Nusrat Fahmida Trisha ◽  
Mariya Rahman ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Latent Dirichlet Allocation ◽  
Vaccine Hesitancy ◽  
Preventive Strategy ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Mortality And Morbidity ◽  
Communication Plan ◽  
Twitter Data ◽  
Social Media Platforms

Background: The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has caused a significant burden of mortality and morbidity. A vaccine will be the most effective global preventive strategy to end the pandemic. Studies have maintained that exposure to negative sentiments related to vaccination on social media increase vaccine hesitancy and refusal. Despite the influence social media has on vaccination behavior, there is a lack of studies exploring the public's exposure to misinformation, conspiracy theories, and concerns on Twitter regarding a potential COVID-19 vaccination. Objective: The study aims to identify the major thematic areas about a potential COVID-19 vaccination based on the contents of Twitter data. Method: We retrieved 1,286,659 publicly available tweets posted within the timeline of July 19, 2020, to August 19, 2020, leveraging the Twint package. Following the extraction, we used Latent Dirichlet Allocation for topic modelling and identified 20 topics discussed in the tweets. We selected 4,868 tweets with the highest probability of belonging in the specific cluster and manually labeled as positive, negative, neutral, or irrelevant. The negative tweets were further assigned to a theme and subtheme based on the contentResult: The negative tweets were further categorized into 7 major themes: "safety and effectiveness,” "misinformation,” "conspiracy theories,” "mistrust of scientists and governments,” "lack of intent to get a COVID-19 vaccine,” "freedom of choice," and "religious beliefs. Negative tweets predominantly consisted of misleading statements (n=424) that immunization against coronavirus is unnecessary as the survival rate is high. The second most prevalent theme to emerge was tweets constituting safety and effectiveness related concerns (n=276) regarding the side effects of a potential vaccine developed at an unprecedented speed. Conclusion: Our findings suggest a need to formulate a large-scale vaccine communication plan that will address the safety concerns and debunk the misinformation and conspiracy theories spreading across social media platforms, increasing the public's acceptance of a COVID-19 vaccination.

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