scholarly journals Does Sharing Economy Have a Moral Capital? Comparing Semantic Networks in Social Media and News Media

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Elanor Colleoni ◽  
Nuccio Ludovico ◽  
Illia Laura ◽  
Ravindran Kiron

Sharing Economy organizations appear to enjoy positive moral capital associated with supporting local entrepreneurs, the economy, and the environment. However, they operate in a regulatory limbo allowing them to engage in business practices that would not be permitted in other sectors. Hence a question remains: Does Sharing Economy (SE) have a moral capital? To explore whether the sharing economy has a moral capital, we explored the discussions around Uber after a number of scandals in 2017 in news media and on Twitter. Our findings show that news media play a critical role in developing and maintaining a positive moral capital of Uber, while the general public on Twitter tend to be more negative and do not afford SE much moral capital.

2021 ◽  
Vol 07 (01) ◽  
pp. 45-65
Author(s):  
Alin Olteanu ◽  
Florian Rabitz ◽  
Augustė Nalivaikė

This paper compares the coverage of the H1N1 and Covid-19 pandemics in ten prominent US daily newspapers. We selected articles that reference disease-specific keywords, published in the period between the declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the World Health Organization and the first peak in laboratory- confirmed cases in the USA (20550 articles on Covid-19 and 1705 articles on H1N1). We analyzed the dataset via topic models and semantic networks, which, in a semiotic approach, are understood as iconic models. As the Covid-19 virus produced the first global pandemic in the age of social media, this comparative analysis illustrates how the news media changed the mediasphere in general. During the H1N1 pandemic (2009-2010), newly emerging social media were not mainstream, having a limited impact compared to 2020 at the outbreak of Covid-19. By 2020, social media have definingly changed the mediasphere. Given their affordance for the virulent transmission of media products, the rise of social media stirred the relativization of knowledge and mistrust towards traditional authority and legacy media. Paradoxically, this both democratizes public debate and opens opportunities for misinformation. In this context, the Covid-19 pandemic has been accompanied by a global infodemic, with adverse impact on global health. While the two pandemics are very different, comparing media representations in their early stages, when the viral spread was unpredictable, offers an insight into how the emergence of social media impacted traditional newspapers’ approach to events of global concern. The analysis reveals that ideological commitments are expressed through the same correlation of topics in both corpora but that, overall, the discourses have different structures. We argue that the remarkable stability of ideological discourses displays what McLuhan termed Narcissus narcosis, namely the numbness experienced socially during media changes.


Author(s):  
Eddy Suwito

The development of technology that continues to grow, the public increasingly facilitates socialization through technology. Opinion on free and uncontrolled social media causes harm to others. The law sees this phenomenon subsequently changing. Legal Information Known as Information and Electronic Transaction Law or ITE Law. However, the ITE Law cannot protect the entire general public. Because it is an Article in the ITE Law that is contrary to Article in the 1945 Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhibin Jiang ◽  
Fan Yang ◽  
Bu Zhong ◽  
Xuebing Qin

BACKGROUND The Covid-19 pandemic had turned the world upside down, but not much is known about how people’s empathy might be affected by the pandemic. OBJECTIVE This study examined 1) how empathy towards others might be influenced by the social support people obtained by using social media; and 2) how the individual demographics (e.g., age, income) may affect empathy. METHODS A national survey (N = 943) was conducted in China in February 2020, in which the participants read three real scenarios about low-income urban workers (Scenario I), small business owners in cities (Scenario II), and farmers in rural areas (Scenario III) who underwent hardship due to COVID-19. After exposure to others’ difficulties in the scenarios, the participants’ empathy and anxiety levels were measured. We also measured the social support they had by using social media. RESULTS Results show that social support not only positively impacted empathy, β = .30, P < .001 for Scenario I, β = .30, P < .001 for Scenario II, and β = .29, P < .001 for Scenario III, but also interacted with anxiety in influencing the degree to which participants could maintain empathy towards others, β = .08, P = .010 for Scenario I, and β = .07, P = .033 for scenario II. Age negatively predicted empathy for Scenario I, β = -.08, P = .018 and Scenario III, β = -.08, P = .009, but not for Scenario II, β = -.03, P = .40. Income levels – low, medium, high – positively predicted empathy for Scenario III, F (2, 940) = 8.10, P < .001, but not for Scenario I, F (2, 940) = 2.14, P = .12, or Scenario II, F (2, 940) = 2.93, P = .06. Participants living in big cities expressed greater empathy towards others for Scenario III, F (2, 940) = 4.03, P =.018, but not for Scenario I, F (2, 940) = .81, P = .45, or Scenario II, F (2, 940) = 1.46, P =.23. CONCLUSIONS This study contributes to the literature by discovering the critical role empathy plays in people’s affective response to others during the pandemic. Anxiety did not decrease empathy. However, those gaining more social support on social media showed more empathy for others. Those who resided in cities with higher income levels were more empathetic during the COVID-19 outbreak. This study reveals that the social support people obtained helped maintain empathy to others, making them resilient in challenging times.


Journalism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (8) ◽  
pp. 985-993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Cushion ◽  
Daniel Jackson

This introduction unpacks the eight articles that make up this Journalism special issue about election reporting. Taken together, the articles ask: How has election reporting evolved over the last century across different media? Has the relationship between journalists and candidates changed in the digital age of campaigning? How do contemporary news values influence campaign coverage? Which voices – politicians, say or journalists – are most prominent? How far do citizens inform election coverage? How is public opinion articulated in the age of social media? Are sites such as Twitter developing new and distinctive election agendas? In what ways does social media interact with legacy media? How well have scholars researched and theorised election reporting cross-nationally? How can research agendas be enhanced? Overall, we argue this Special Issue demonstrates the continued strength of news media during election campaigns. This is in spite of social media platforms increasingly disrupting and recasting the agenda setting power of legacy media, not least by political parties and candidates who are relying more heavily on sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to campaign. But while debates in recent years have centred on the technological advances in political communication and the associated role of social media platforms during election campaigns (e.g. microtargeting voters, spreading disinformation/misinformation and allowing candidates to bypass media to campaign), our collection of studies signal the enduring influence professional journalists play in selecting and framing of news. Put more simply, how elections are reported still profoundly matters in spite of political parties’ and candidates’ more sophisticated use of digital campaigning.


Author(s):  
Kevin Munger ◽  
Patrick J. Egan ◽  
Jonathan Nagler ◽  
Jonathan Ronen ◽  
Joshua Tucker

Abstract Does social media educate voters, or mislead them? This study measures changes in political knowledge among a panel of voters surveyed during the 2015 UK general election campaign while monitoring the political information to which they were exposed on the Twitter social media platform. The study's panel design permits identification of the effect of information exposure on changes in political knowledge. Twitter use led to higher levels of knowledge about politics and public affairs, as information from news media improved knowledge of politically relevant facts, and messages sent by political parties increased knowledge of party platforms. But in a troubling demonstration of campaigns' ability to manipulate knowledge, messages from the parties also shifted voters' assessments of the economy and immigration in directions favorable to the parties' platforms, leaving some voters with beliefs further from the truth at the end of the campaign than they were at its beginning.


2021 ◽  
pp. 144078332110001
Author(s):  
Stella Pennell

Airbnb is emblematic of a set of business practices commonly known as ‘the sharing economy’. It is a disruptive business model of homestay accommodation that has exploited conditions of growing precarity of work since 2008. Work precarity is particularly evident in regional tourist areas in New Zealand, which historically experience seasonal, part-time work and low wages. Airbnb draws specifically on the rhetoric of micro-entrepreneurism, with focus on individual freedom and choice: appealing concepts for those experiencing precarity. This article challenges the rhetoric of Airbnb and investigates notions of home, authenticity and hospitality that are reconceptualized under a specific regime of digital biopolitics. Drawing on research conducted in four regional tourist towns in New Zealand this article analyses the biopolitical interpellations that impact hosts’ subjectivities as entities in motion and considers the ways that the rationalities of Airbnb’s algorithms modulate the embodied behaviours of its hosts.


2020 ◽  
pp. 109019812098476
Author(s):  
Linqi Lu ◽  
Jiawei Liu ◽  
Y. Connie Yuan ◽  
Kelli S. Burns ◽  
Enze Lu ◽  
...  

Health information sharing has become especially important during the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic because people need to learn about the disease and then act accordingly. This study examines the perceived trust of different COVID-19 information sources (health professionals, academic institutions, government agencies, news media, social media, family, and friends) and sharing of COVID-19 information in China. Specifically, it investigates how beliefs about sharing and emotions mediate the effects of perceived source trust on source-specific information sharing intentions. Results suggest that health professionals, academic institutions, and government agencies are trusted sources of information and that people share information from these sources because they think doing so will increase disease awareness and promote disease prevention. People may also choose to share COVID-19 information from news media, social media, and family as they cope with anxiety, anger, and fear. Taken together, a better understanding of the distinct psychological mechanisms underlying health information sharing from different sources can help contribute to more effective sharing of information about COVID-19 prevention and to manage negative emotion contagion during the pandemic.


Author(s):  
Paola Pascual-Ferrá ◽  
Neil Alperstein ◽  
Daniel J. Barnett

Abstract Objective The aim of this study was to test the appearance of negative dominance in COVID-19 vaccine-related information and activity online. We hypothesized that if negative dominance appeared, it would be a reflection of peaks in adverse events related to the vaccine, that negative content would attract more engagement on social media than other vaccine-related posts, and posts referencing adverse events related to COVID-19 vaccination would have a higher average toxicity score. Methods We collected data using Google Trends for search behavior, CrowdTangle for social media data, and Media Cloud for media stories, and compared them against the dates of key adverse events related to COVID-19. We used Communalytic to analyze the toxicity of social media posts by platform and topic. Results While our first hypothesis was partially supported, with peaks in search behavior for image and YouTube videos driven by adverse events, we did not find negative dominance in other types of searches or patterns of attention by news media or on social media. Conclusion We did not find evidence in our data to prove the negative dominance of adverse events related to COVID-19 vaccination on social media. Future studies should corroborate these findings and, if consistent, focus on explaining why this may be the case.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Purvendu Sharma

PurposeThe present research aims to introduce and understand the promising nature of destination evangelism in the context of social media-based tourism communities (SMTCs). Further, factors that influence evangelism and information-seeking behaviors on SMTCs are examined.Design/methodology/approachA conceptual model is developed that features an interplay of destination distinctiveness, destination evangelism, travel commitment and information-seeking engagement. Data were collected from 215 active users of SMTCs and analyzed using structural equation models.FindingsThe research findings indicate that destination distinctiveness and information-seeking positively lead to destination evangelism. Information-seeking is found to mediate the relationship between (1) destination evangelism and travel commitment and (2) destination evangelism and distinctiveness.Research limitations/implicationsThe research offers meaningful insights into exploring constituents of destination evangelism. The research also understands and highlights the critical role of information-seeking engagement about distinct destinations.Practical implicationsThis research highlights key areas to build, improve and inspire destination evangelism on SMTCs.Originality/valueThis study offers a fresh contribution to tourism literature by investigating destination evangelism and its drivers. This is explained by closely uniting vital research streams of evangelism, tourism and engagement. It further highlights the dual mediating role of information seeking, suggesting that these engagements are critical to evangelizing destinations.


Significance The new rules follow a stand-off between Twitter and the central government last month over some posts and accounts. The government has used this stand-off as an opportunity not only to tighten rules governing social media, including Twitter, WhatsApp, Facebook and LinkedIn, but also those for other digital service providers including news publishers and entertainment streaming companies. Impacts Government moves against dominant social media platforms will boost the appeal of smaller platforms with light or no content moderation. Hate speech and harmful disinformation are especially hard to control and curb on smaller platforms. The new rules will have a chilling effect on online public discourse, increasing self-censorship (at the very least). Government action against online news media would undercut fundamental democratic freedoms and the right to dissent. Since US-based companies dominate key segments of the Indian digital market, India’s restrictive rules could mar India-US ties.


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