Social media, computational propaganda, and control in China and beyond

2021 ◽  
pp. 122-138
Author(s):  
Gillian Bolsover
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
And Control

scholarly journals Quantifying Media Effects, Its Content, and Role in Promoting Community Awareness of Chikungunya Epidemic in Bangladesh

Epidemiologia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-94
Author(s):  
Mst. Marium Begum ◽  
Osman Ulvi ◽  
Ajlina Karamehic-Muratovic ◽  
Mallory R. Walsh ◽  
Hasan Tarek ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Study Objective ◽  
The Public ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Related Information ◽  
Vector Borne ◽  
Media Outlet ◽  
And Control

Background: Chikungunya is a vector-borne disease, mostly present in tropical and subtropical regions. The virus is spread by Ae. aegypti and Ae. albopictus mosquitos and symptoms include high fever to severe joint pain. Dhaka, Bangladesh, suffered an outbreak of chikungunya in 2017 lasting from April to September. With the goal of reducing cases, social media was at the forefront during this outbreak and educated the public about symptoms, prevention, and control of the virus. Popular web-based sources such as the top dailies in Bangladesh, local news outlets, and Facebook spread awareness of the outbreak. Objective: This study sought to investigate the role of social and mainstream media during the chikungunya epidemic. The study objective was to determine if social media can improve awareness of and practice associated with reducing cases of chikungunya. Methods: We collected chikungunya-related information circulated from the top nine television channels in Dhaka, Bangladesh, airing from 1st April–20th August 2017. All the news published in the top six dailies in Bangladesh were also compiled. The 50 most viewed chikungunya-related Bengali videos were manually coded and analyzed. Other social media outlets, such as Facebook, were also analyzed to determine the number of chikungunya-related posts and responses to these posts. Results: Our study showed that media outlets were associated with reducing cases of chikungunya, indicating that media has the potential to impact future outbreaks of these alpha viruses. Each media outlet (e.g., web, television) had an impact on the human response to an individual’s healthcare during this outbreak. Conclusions: To prevent future outbreaks of chikungunya, media outlets and social media can be used to educate the public regarding prevention strategies such as encouraging safe travel, removing stagnant water sources, and assisting with tracking cases globally to determine where future outbreaks may occur.

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 Ontology Meter for Twitter Fake Accounts Detection

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 410-419
Author(s):  
Mohammed Jabardi ◽  
◽  
Asaad Hadi ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Decision Rules ◽  
Application Programming Interface ◽  
Detection Accuracy ◽  
Online Fraud ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Consumer Data ◽  
Application Programming ◽  
And Control

One of the most popular social media platforms, Twitter is used by millions of people to share information, broadcast tweets, and follow other users. Twitter is an open application programming interface and thus vulnerable to attack from fake accounts, which are primarily created for advertisement and marketing, defamation of an individual, consumer data acquisition, increase fake blog or website traffic, share disinformation, online fraud, and control. Fake accounts are harmful to both users and service providers, and thus recognizing and filtering out such content on social media is essential. This study presents a new approach to detect fake Twitter accounts using ontology and Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) rules. SWRL rules-based reasoner is utilized under predefined rules to infer whether the profile is trust or fake. This approach achieves a high detection accuracy of 97%. Furthermore, ontology classifier is an interpretable model that offers straightforward and human-interpretable decision rules.

Visible Privacy: Norms, Preferences, and Strategies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Ryan Vickery
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
User Interface ◽  
Young People ◽  
Individual Choice ◽  
And Control ◽  
Online Identities

This chapter critiques the ways privacy is constructed as an individual choice or responsibility and instead draws attention to the ways privacy and identity are collective and networked via social media. Through an analysis of the ways Facebook’s algorithms and user interface have changed over the years, the chapter traces how young people’s expectations and privacy practices are often at odds with commercial platforms. Additionally it considers how corporate platforms conceive of privacy from a privileged perspective that overlook the risks marginalized young people, and specifically people of colour, face online. Young people employ creative strategies for maintaining degrees of visibility including deliberate disassociation from peers and managing different online identities for different purposes and control of privacy.

Project Management 2.0

2016 ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hamid Nach
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Organizational Change ◽  
Project Management ◽  
Human Resources ◽  
Web 2.0 ◽  
Management Practice ◽  
Management Framework ◽  
Business Functions ◽  
Use Of Social Media ◽  
And Control

With growing maturity of social media over the last few years, many companies started using these tools to interact with customers and employees. Business functions such as Sales, Marketing and Human Resources have innovatively embedded these technologies to support their processes and became, as such, an instrument for renewal. The use of social media in Project Management, however, seems to be very limited. The profession lags behind having difficulty keeping pace with the rapidly evolving web 2.0 driven technological innovations which are delivering on their promise to foster collaboration. The paper discusses the potential of social media in the project management practice. As the move towards harnessing the power of social media within the Project Management framework requires adequate organizational change, the study also addresses the implications of such an initiative on structure, culture, and control.

Museums and Web 2.0

2011 ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Werner Schweibenz
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Web 2.0 ◽  
User Participation ◽  
Significant Problem ◽  
Crucial Question ◽  
And Control ◽  
Do So

Many museums want to use Web 2.0 applications or feel the pressure to do so. In doing so, they might encounter a significant problem as Web 2.0 is based on the notion of radical trust and unrestricted, equal participation, two concepts that are contrary to the museum’s traditional concepts of authority, communication and participation. Until recently, museums presumed control of their content. The crucial question is how much control of its content the museum can afford to lose, since they depend on their reputation for expertise and trustworthiness. The paper analyses the role of authority, its influence on traditional and future museum communication and its effects on participation and trust. The challenge for museums is to find a way to cede authority and control over content without losing status as trustworthy institutions and to open up for social media and user participation in order to attract new audiences and maintain existing ones.

Dancing with Postmodernity

2010 ◽  
pp. 343-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henk Eijkman
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Web 2.0 ◽  
Knowledge System ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Learning Space ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Control Knowledge ◽  
And Control ◽  
Oriented Approach ◽  
The Web

This chapter addresses a significant theoretical gap in the Web 2.0 (or “Web 2.0+,” as it is referred to by the author) literature by analyzing the educational implications of the “seismic shift in epistemology” (Dede, 2008, p. 80) that is occurring. As already identified in Chapter 2, there needs to be a consistency between our own epistemic assumptions and those embedded in Web 2.0. Hence the underlying premise of this chapter is that the adoption of social media in education implies the assumption of a very different epistemology—a distinctly different way of understanding the nature of knowledge and the process of how we come to know. The argument is that this shift toward a radically altered, “postmodernist,” epistemic architecture of participation will transform the way in which educators and their students create and manage the production, dissemination, and validation of knowledge. In future, the new “postmodern” Web will increasingly privilege what we may usefully think of as a socially focused and performance-oriented approach to knowledge production. The expected subversion and disruption of our traditional or modernist power-knowledge system, as already evident in the Wikipedia phenomenon, will reframe educational practices and promote a new power-knowledge system, made up of new, social ways in which to construct and control knowledge across the Internet. The chapter concludes by advocating strategies for critical engagement with this new epistemic learning space, and posing a number of critical questions to guide ongoing practice.

scholarly journals Prediction of Number of Cases of 2019 Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Using Social Media Search Index

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (7) ◽  
pp. 2365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lei Qin ◽  
Qiang Sun ◽  
Yidan Wang ◽  
Ke-Fei Wu ◽  
Mingchih Chen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Estimation Error ◽  
Subset Selection ◽  
Selection Method ◽  
Lasso Regression ◽  
Forward Selection ◽  
Optimal Method ◽  
Outbreak Areas ◽  
Novel Coronavirus ◽  
And Control

Predicting the number of new suspected or confirmed cases of novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is crucial in the prevention and control of the COVID-19 outbreak. Social media search indexes (SMSI) for dry cough, fever, chest distress, coronavirus, and pneumonia were collected from 31 December 2019 to 9 February 2020. The new suspected cases of COVID-19 data were collected from 20 January 2020 to 9 February 2020. We used the lagged series of SMSI to predict new suspected COVID-19 case numbers during this period. To avoid overfitting, five methods, namely subset selection, forward selection, lasso regression, ridge regression, and elastic net, were used to estimate coefficients. We selected the optimal method to predict new suspected COVID-19 case numbers from 20 January 2020 to 9 February 2020. We further validated the optimal method for new confirmed cases of COVID-19 from 31 December 2019 to 17 February 2020. The new suspected COVID-19 case numbers correlated significantly with the lagged series of SMSI. SMSI could be detected 6–9 days earlier than new suspected cases of COVID-19. The optimal method was the subset selection method, which had the lowest estimation error and a moderate number of predictors. The subset selection method also significantly correlated with the new confirmed COVID-19 cases after validation. SMSI findings on lag day 10 were significantly correlated with new confirmed COVID-19 cases. SMSI could be a significant predictor of the number of COVID-19 infections. SMSI could be an effective early predictor, which would enable governments’ health departments to locate potential and high-risk outbreak areas.

‘Networks that work too well’: intervening in algorithmic connections

2018 ◽  
Vol 168 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily van der Nagel
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Comprehensive Understanding ◽  
Human Actions ◽  
Data Points ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Disparate Data ◽  
And Control

Within the emerging field of critical algorithm studies, this article theorises that forced connections happen when algorithms exacerbate human actions in connecting otherwise disparate data points on digitally networked platforms to the subject of the data’s detriment. Although social media users may not have a comprehensive understanding of how algorithms work to make some content visible, when users form their own explanatory theories about these algorithms, they often intervene in these connections. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s notion of strategies as the manipulations in which platforms engage to profile and control their users, and tactics as everyday acts of resistance, this article investigates two tactics within algorithmic cultures – Voldemorting, or not mentioning words or names in order to avoid a forced connection; and screenshotting, or making content visible without sending its website traffic – to demonstrate users’ understandings of the algorithms that seek to connect individuals to other people, platforms, content and advertisers, and their efforts to wrest back control.

Playing to the Crowd

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy K. Baym
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Qualitative Methods ◽  
Digital Communication ◽  
Professional Musicians ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Online Audiences ◽  
Personal Connections ◽  
And Control ◽  
Depth Interviews ◽  
Increased Pressure

In Playing to the Crowd, Nancy K. Baym examines the shift toward more personal connections with audiences, offering an entirely new approach to media cultures and industries as she does. The book argues that workers in many fields are under increased pressure get online and connect with others to further their careers, a trend that musicians have long led. Using a dialectical framework, the book draws on in depth-interviews with a range of professional musicians and other qualitative methods to show how the rise of digital communication platforms transformed artist-fan relationships into something that can feel personal. Part I explores music as a means of communication and as a commodity, drawing out the tension between its social and commercial values. Part II looks at audiences, showing how they developed fandoms in the 20th century, how those fandoms came online, and the tension between participation and control musicians experience when they encounter online audiences. Part III looks at relationships, examining how, in contrast to the concert hall environment in which musicians and audiences may one have met, social media create a new potential and pressure for everyday, intimate relating and how musicians manage the tensions between closeness and distance this creates. Ultimately, the book argues that the relational labor musicians do is a significant mode of work, one which requires resources, skills, and strategies we must all understand.

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