Characterizing QAnon: Analysis of YouTube comments presents new conclusions about a popular conservative conspiracy

First Monday ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Taninecz Miller
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Computational Social Science ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Science Methods ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Global Affairs ◽  
Party State

QAnon has become an important phenomenon in American politics due to both its relative popularity as well as its adoption/endorsement by political elites. However, this conspiracy theory/social movement has received sparse investigation in the social sciences. This gap is particularly noticeable in regards to the QAnon movement’s overall beliefs and perceptions of global affairs. This piece addresses these research gaps by using repeatable inductive computational social science methods to analyze a sample of comments from YouTube, a platform popular with QAnon followers. This investigation affirms previous observations regarding QAnon’s narratives connecting the U.S. government (particularly prominent Democrats) and alleged sexual violence against children, anti-semitism/fundamentalist Christian theology, and pro-Trump sentiments, and also reaveals several novel conclusions regarding QAnon. These novel observations include: [1] that the QAnon community sustains substantial discussion of international affairs, largely revolving around China, Russia and Israel (in order of prominence); [2] that discussion of China in QAnon comments received more “likes” than other international topics; and [3] that a nexus of conjectures tying former presidential candidate, Senator, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the Chinese party-state dominate these China-centric comments. Aside from these novel conclusions regarding QAnon, this paper also seeks to make a contribution to repeatable social science analysis of YouTube comments more generally.

scholarly journals Citizen Social Science in practice: a critical analysis of a mental health community-based project

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabelle Bonhoure ◽  
Anna Cigarini ◽  
Julian Vicens ◽  
Josep Perelló
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Citizen Science ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Computational Social Science ◽  
Mental Condition ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Health Community ◽  
The Social

“Citizen Social Science” is a fast-growing term within Citizen Science world but not many experiences have been shared in the literature to better shape its meaning. This article discusses novel possibilities of these participatory practices through the critical analysis of a concrete community-based project. We here embrace under the “Social” tag of Citizen Social Science both Computational Social Science methodologies and the Social concerns expressed by the mental health community. The interpretation place persons with a mental condition, as well as caregivers and relatives, at the center of the research cycle by taking the role of Competent Experts In-The-Field. A synergetic relation between Citizen Science, Mental Health research and Computational Social Science also imply a conceptual shift in comparison to standard approaches such as the inclusion of research subjects as active co-designers or the consideration of communitarian spaces as most natural experimental spaces. We here describe how these concepts are put into practice during the whole duration of a research project that has studied the social interactions inside the Community Mental Health Care ecosystem. Important steps entail the creation of a Knowledge Coalition, including a diversity of relevant actors with diverse knowledge and expertise, that is later involved in co-designing the research and in embedding experimental settings in communitarian spaces. The experience allows us to open a wider discussion on the possibilities and limitations of Citizen Social Science practices. Having in mind the ethical debate raised by Citizen Science Public Health and Patients’ driven research, we propose a set of values and practices to be agreed on. We also analyse the participation of the scientists in these kind of projects, which forces them to adopt the role of “camaleons” when executing diverse and versatile tasks. We additionally advocate for a more extended collective interpretation of the results in order to produce socially robust knowledge and enhance actions and policies grounded on these results. Exemplified with the experience herein presented, a more horizontal process that include the enhancement of participation and the revision of the notion of experiment offer new opportunities for Social Sciences from a multidisciplinary perspective.

scholarly journals Computational Social Science of Disasters: Opportunities and Challenges

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Burger ◽  
Oz ◽  
Kennedy ◽  
Crooks
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Data Science ◽  
Open Data ◽  
Computational Social Science ◽  
Crisis Informatics ◽  
Disaster Research ◽  
Social Responses ◽  
Digital Revolution ◽  
The Social

Disaster events and their economic impacts are trending, and climate projection studies suggest that the risks of disaster will continue to increase in the near future. Despite the broad and increasing social effects of these events, the empirical basis of disaster research is often weak, partially due to the natural paucity of observed data. At the same time, some of the early research regarding social responses to disasters have become outdated as social, cultural, and political norms have changed. The digital revolution, the open data trend, and the advancements in data science provide new opportunities for social science disaster research. We introduce the term computational social science of disasters (CSSD), which can be formally defined as the systematic study of the social behavioral dynamics of disasters utilizing computational methods. In this paper, we discuss and showcase the opportunities and the challenges in this new approach to disaster research. Following a brief review of the fields that relate to CSSD, namely traditional social sciences of disasters, computational social science, and crisis informatics, we examine how advances in Internet technologies offer a new lens through which to study disasters. By identifying gaps in the literature, we show how this new field could address ways to advance our understanding of the social and behavioral aspects of disasters in a digitally connected world. In doing so, our goal is to bridge the gap between data science and the social sciences of disasters in rapidly changing environments.

scholarly journals Engels@200: Friedrich Engels and Digital Capitalism. How Relevant Are Engels’s Works 200 Years After His Birth?

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-51
Author(s):  
Christian Fuchs
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Computational Social Science ◽  
Digital Capitalism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Critical Social Science ◽  
Friedrich Engels ◽  
Scientific Socialism

This paper takes Friedrich Engels 200th birthday on 28 November 2020 as occasion to ask: How relevant are Friedrich Engels’s works in the age of digital capitalism? It shows that Engels class-struggle oriented theory can and should inform 21st century social science and digital social research. Based on a reading of Engels’s works, the article discusses how to think of scientific socialism as critical social science today, presents a critique of computational social science as digital positivism, engages with foundations of digital labour analysis, the analysis of the international division of digital labour, updates Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England in the age of digital capitalism, analyses the role of trade unions and digital class struggles in digital age, analyses the social murder of workers in the COVID-19 crisis, engages with platform co-operatives, digital commons projects and public service Internet platforms are concrete digital utopias that point beyond digital capital(ism). Engels’s analysis is updated for critically analysing the digital conditions of the working class today, including the digital labour of hardware assemblers at Foxconn and Pegatron, the digital labour aristocracy of software engineers at Google, online freelance workers, platform workers at capitalist platform corporations such as Uber, Deliveroo, Fiverr, Upwork, or Freelancer, and the digital labour of Facebook users. Engels’s 200th birthday reminds us of the class character of digital capitalism and that we need critical digital social science as a new form of scientific socialism.

scholarly journals Pushing back the frontiers or still running around the same circles? ‘Interpretative archaeoastronomy’ thirty years on

2011 ◽  
Vol 7 (S278) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clive L. N. Ruggles
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Personal Perspective ◽  
Science Methods ◽  
Methodological Issues ◽  
Hard Science ◽  
The Social ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Future

AbstractThis personal perspective on the development of archaeoastronomy over the last thirty years focuses on interpretative and methodological issues, picking up for example from the debate between Schaefer and Aveni at Oxford VII. How far we have actually progressed in the last three decades? Are we at last starting to achieve the correct fusion between the social science questions that our discipline addresses and the ‘hard science’ methods that are often involved in tackling them? In this paper I argue that the need for our hypotheses to be solidly grounded in social theory, which has rightly been recognised by most archaeoastronomers in recent years, is not an excuse for avoiding the need to be scientifically rigorous in assessing them against the actual evidence. I conclude that identifying robust methodologies for weighing together the different types of data with which the cultural astronomer is faced in different sitations, so as to infer the ‘best’ interpretation, remains at once the most challenging and the most pressing issue facing our ‘interdiscipline’ in the future.

scholarly journals Critical Naïveté?

2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-293
Author(s):  
Peter Brickey LeQuire ◽  
Daniel Silver
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Talcott Parsons ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Eric Voegelin

AbstractBetween 1940 and 1944, sociologist Talcott Parsons and political scientist Eric Voegelin engaged in a vigorous correspondence, discussing the origins of totalitarianism and modern anti-Semitism, the legacy of Max Weber, patterns of secularization set in motion by the Protestant Reformation, the methodology and goals of social science, and more. This article introduces and explicates the surprisingly amicable and intellectually rich exchange between these two seemingly different thinkers. Although the letters hold obvious historical interest, their variegated topics are also closely thematically related, revealing an inner logic that we interpret as a theoretical search for “critical naïveté”. This logic, we argue, is relevant to contemporary discussions about the social, political, and scientific legacies of world-transcendent spiritual traditions.

scholarly journals Digital bioethics: introducing new methods for the study of bioethical issues

2021 ◽  
pp. medethics-2021-107387
Author(s):  
Manuel Schneider ◽  
Effy Vayena ◽  
Alessandro Blasimme
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Data Science ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Computational Social Science ◽  
Empirical Bioethics ◽  
Public Square ◽  
The Social ◽  
Bioethical Issues

The online space has become a digital public square, where individuals interact and share ideas on the most trivial to the most serious of matters, including discussions of controversial ethical issues in science, technology and medicine. In the last decade, new disciplines like computational social science and social data science have created methods to collect and analyse such data that have considerably expanded the scope of social science research. Empirical bioethics can benefit from the integration of such digital methods to investigate novel digital phenomena and trace how bioethical issues take shape online.Here, using concrete examples, we demonstrate how novel methods based on digital approaches in the social sciences can be used effectively in the domain of bioethics. We show that a digital turn in bioethics research aligns with the established aims of empirical bioethics, integrating with normative analysis and expanding the scope of the discipline, thus offering ways to reinforce the capacity of bioethics to tackle the increasing complexity of present-day ethical issues in science and technology. We propose to call this domain of research in bioethics digital bioethics.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document