scholarly journals AS IN LIFE, SO IN DEATH: EMPLOYEE VALUES AND CONTENT PRESERVATION DURING PLATFORM CLOSURE

Author(s):  
Frances Corry

Despite dominant cultural narratives about platform vitality, whether their immense global penetration or companies’ overwhelming political and economic power, platform history is marked by shutdown and failure. Companies and sites shutter with an understated regularity. As they go, they often delete large swaths of user content, with consequences for the memory practices of both individuals and communities. In turn, this paper examines the ethical approaches that platform employees bring to the process of platform shutdown and user content deletion. This phenomenon is analyzed using 52 interviews with employees from now-shuttered platforms. Drawing on literature on values in technology, technological breakdown and decline, as well as from critical approaches to the study of platforms, this paper articulates the ways that platform employees understand the ethics of social media data deletion, and how these ethics come to shape what remains of these platforms after they close.

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-159
Author(s):  
Anthony-Paul Cooper ◽  
Emmanuel Awuni Kolog ◽  
Erkki Sutinen

This article builds on previous research around the exploration of the content of church-related tweets. It does so by exploring whether the qualitative thematic coding of such tweets can, in part, be automated by the use of machine learning. It compares three supervised machine learning algorithms to understand how useful each algorithm is at a classification task, based on a dataset of human-coded church-related tweets. The study finds that one such algorithm, Naïve-Bayes, performs better than the other algorithms considered, returning Precision, Recall and F-measure values which each exceed an acceptable threshold of 70%. This has far-reaching consequences at a time where the high volume of social media data, in this case, Twitter data, means that the resource-intensity of manual coding approaches can act as a barrier to understanding how the online community interacts with, and talks about, church. The findings presented in this article offer a way forward for scholars of digital theology to better understand the content of online church discourse.


2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen M. Carley ◽  
L. R. Carley ◽  
Jonathan Storrick

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anika Oellrich ◽  
George Gkotsis ◽  
Richard James Butler Dobson ◽  
Tim JP Hubbard ◽  
Rina Dutta

BACKGROUND Dementia is a growing public health concern with approximately 50 million people affected worldwide in 2017 and this number is expected to reach more than 131 million by 2050. The toll on caregivers and relatives cannot be underestimated as dementia changes family relationships, leaves people socially isolated, and affects the finances of all those involved. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to explore using automated analysis (i) the age and gender of people who post to the social media forum Reddit about dementia diagnoses, (ii) the affected person and their diagnosis, (iii) relevant subreddits authors are posting to, (iv) the types of messages posted and (v) the content of these posts. METHODS We analysed Reddit posts concerning dementia diagnoses. We used a previously developed text analysis pipeline to determine attributes of the posts as well as their authors to characterise online communications about dementia diagnoses. The posts were also examined by manual curation for the diagnosis provided and the person affected. Furthermore, we investigated the communities these people engage in and assessed the contents of the posts with an automated topic gathering technique. RESULTS Our results indicate that the majority of posters in our data set are women, and it is mostly close relatives such as parents and grandparents that are mentioned. Both the communities frequented and topics gathered reflect not only the sufferer's diagnosis but also potential outcomes, e.g. hardships experienced by the caregiver. The trends observed from this dataset are consistent with findings based on qualitative review, validating the robustness of social media automated text processing. CONCLUSIONS This work demonstrates the value of social media data sources as a resource for in-depth studies of those affected by a dementia diagnosis and the potential to develop novel support systems based on their real time processing in line with the increasing digitalisation of medical care.


Author(s):  
Philip Habel ◽  
Yannis Theocharis

In the last decade, big data, and social media in particular, have seen increased popularity among citizens, organizations, politicians, and other elites—which in turn has created new and promising avenues for scholars studying long-standing questions of communication flows and influence. Studies of social media play a prominent role in our evolving understanding of the supply and demand sides of the political process, including the novel strategies adopted by elites to persuade and mobilize publics, as well as the ways in which citizens react, interact with elites and others, and utilize platforms to persuade audiences. While recognizing some challenges, this chapter speaks to the myriad of opportunities that social media data afford for evaluating questions of mobilization and persuasion, ultimately bringing us closer to a more complete understanding Lasswell’s (1948) famous maxim: “who, says what, in which channel, to whom, [and] with what effect.”


METRON ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Mariani ◽  
Andrea Marletta

AbstractSocial media has become a widespread element of people’s everyday life, which is used to communicate and generate contents. Among the several ways to express a reaction to social media contents, the “Likes” are critical. Indeed, they convey preferences, which drive existing markets or allow the creation of new ones. Nevertheless, the appreciation indicators have some complex features, as for example the interpretation of the absence of “Likes”. In this case, the lack of approval may be considered as a specific behaviour. The present study aimed to define whether the absence of Likes may indicate the presence of a specific behaviour through the contextualization of the treatment of missing data applied to real cases. We provided a practical strategy for extracting more knowledge from social media data, whose synthesis raises several measurement problems. We proposed an approach based on the disambiguation of missing data in two modalities: “Dislike” and “Nothing”. Finally, a data pre-processing technique was suggested to increase the signal of social media data.


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