Measuring personal and academic differences in students’ perceived social media credibility

Purpose Social media is a popular source for information sharing in the contemporary world. Social media allow individuals to create, publish and diffuse contents directly. This openness has increased the risk of running into misinformation and raised questions about credibility of information shared. This study aims to examine the credibility of social media through the perceptions of university students. It also intends to see the difference in opinions based on their gender, academic disciplines and programs of study. Design/methodology/approach The study was based on a cross-sectional survey; a structured questionnaire was developed by consulting the relevant literature. Students were selected on convenient basis from all the programs of four universities of Faisalabad, Pakistan. Four hundred students were selected randomly from each university. Findings The findings indicated that students considered social media partially credible. Currency, community wellness, understandability and completeness of information were the highly rated facets, while factual and unbiased information was the low rated aspects. The perceived credibility of social media among the university students was the same across genders, programs of study and academic disciplines. Research limitations/implications The study may be helpful for social media service providers to address the concerns that students had in their perception regarding its credibility. Originality/value This study may likely benefit faculty members, researchers, librarians/information professionals and digital libraries to understand the students’ concerns about social media credibility from a developing country’s perspective. Such understanding will enable them to better address, educate and train university students at how to evaluate the quality of information on social media by offering information literacy programs. It is direly needed that university libraries should train the students to be proficient in assessing the quality of information by offering information or digital literacy programs. Moreover, the study may be helpful for social media service providers to address the concerns that students had in their perception regarding its credibility.

Analysis of Witnesses in the Steem Blockchain

Online Social Networking platforms (OSNs) have become part of people’s everyday life and their usage covers the deep-rooted need for communication among humans. During recent years, as people are questioning more and more OSN service providers, a new generation of proposals, based on blockchain became very popular thanks to the ethics adopted by these platforms. Steemit is the most important blockchain-based social networking site, which integrates, as main novelty an economic layer to the social media service. Steemit is implemented on top of Steem which, as in other blockchains, awards miners of the blocks with cryptocurrency. Steem miners, called witnesses, are not chosen based on the solution of a mathematical problem, as in Proof of Work based systems, but must be voted by other users. In this work, we decide to study the witnesses on Steem and their contribution to the social platform Steemit, and their social impact. We performed a set of analyses to shred light concerning their behaviour and to understand how they are socially perceived by other users. Analyses show an important social impact but, at the same time, some of them have a negative social impact. Their discussion is polarized towards content concerning Steem, Steemit, witnesses, and other platforms hosted on Steem.

Gesamtrechtsnachfolge, Datenschutzrecht und Vertragsgestaltung

Against the backdrop of the Federal Court of Justice's seminal ruling on the inheritability of a Facebook user account, this study examines whether and to what extent generalizable parameters can be developed for handling the digital estate and in which constellations the applicable law requires case-specific differentiation. For the analysis of a user’s digital assets the study will examine in particular the data protection law of the GDPR as well as the contractual leeway of the social media service providers under German T&C law.

Dari Selfish menuju Perilaku Produktif: Pergeseran Paradigma Pengguna Media Sosial

This study aims to find the causes of changes in trends in the use of social media. Social media which is a means for interaction, communication, conveying information effectively and efficiently, saves complex problems. The use of social media then develops not only in the aspect of communication, but also in the production area. Some groups create new jobs on social media and use it as a means to market their products, goods and services. This proves that there has been a shift in the tendency to utilize social media. To find the causes of this change in trend, this study used a qualitative method using Thomas Kuhn's shifting paradigm approach. Through this approach, this study finds that shifting trends are influenced by the dynamics of deviations in using social media that often occur. This deviation gave rise to a crisis that resulted in a significant change in people's behavior in their social reality, so that to overcome this problem, social media users changed their activities in using media to be more productive. The crisis was not only responded to by users but also by social media service providers. In this case, social media service providers begin to improve their quality and features by narrowing the target, so that users can use them specifically according to their needs.Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menemukan penyebab adanya perubahan kecenderungan dalam penggunaan media sosial. Media sosial yang merupakan sarana untuk melakukan interaksi, komunikasi, menyampaikan informasi secara efektif dan efisien, menyimpan problem yang kompleks. Pemanfaatan penggunaan media sosial kemudian berkembang tidak hanya dalam aspek komunikasi, akan tetapi masuk dalam wilayah produksi. Beberapa kalangan menciptakan lapangan pekerjaan baru dalam media sosial dan menjadikannya sebagai sarana untuk memasarkan produk, barang dan jasanya. Hal demikian membuktikan bahwa telah terjadi pergeseran kecenderungan dalam memanfaatkan media sosial. Untuk menemukan penyebab perubahan kecenderungan tersebut, penelitian ini menggunakan metode kualitatif dengan menggunakan pendekatan shifting paradigm Thomas Kuhn. Melalui pendekatan tersebut, penelitian ini menemukan bahwa pergeseran kecenderungan dipengaruhi oleh dinamika penyimpangan dalam menggunakan media sosial yang sering terjadi. Penyimpangan ini memunculkan krisis yang berdampak pada perubahan perilaku yang signifikan masyarakat dalam realitas sosialnya, sehingga untuk mengatasi problem tersebut, para pengguna media sosial mengubah aktivitas mereka dalam memanfaatkan media menjadi lebih produktif. Krisis tersebut tidak hanya direpon oleh pengguna akan tetapi juga direspon oleh para penyedia layanan media sosial. Dalam hal ini, penyedia layanan media sosial mulai meningkatkan kualitas dan fiturnya dengan menyempitkan sasaran, sehingga dapat dengan spesifik dimanfaatkan oleh para pengguna sesuai dengan kebutuhan mereka.

High Impact Extension Programming with Instagram

The social media service Instagram is a popular public platform, but often underused tool to reach new demographics, reduce barriers, and perpetuate science-based information in extension. In the U.S. Intermountain West, Instagram was the top-rated platform for sharing information by predominantly new and female farmers. This article provides recommendations on key behaviors, goal setting, and quantifying impact on Instagram for extension programming. Accounts should target one niche or market, a consistent and personal voice, and regular communication (new content at least three times weekly). Unique and productive connections between extension personnel, community leaders, farmers, students, and public influencers expands programming. Tracking program accounts, including the number of followers and engagement rates, can assess program impacts and target market needs.

Antecedents and Consequences of Trust in Public Sector Websites and Social Media

Rapidly developing information and communication technologies have an influence on the whole world and have become an ordinary part of everyday life. Not only people, but businesses and governments are affected by these changes. In this respect, governments use several online media platforms as their own digital face and thus keep pace with the developing technology. Considering the lacks in previous researches, the aim of this paper is to investigate the critical factors influencing the citizens' trust in public sector websites and social media and also the relationship among trust in the public sector, citizen satisfaction and trust in public sector websites and social media. By studying 607 citizens who are users of the website or social media service belonging to the municipalities in Turkey, we found that: (i) perceived quality, perceived usefulness, and facilitation conditions are the factors that affect the citizens' trust in public sector websites and social media, (ii) trust in the public sector websites and social media affects trust in the public sector and, (iii) trust in the public sector affects citizen satisfaction.

Mapping YouTube

Over the past 15 years, YouTube has emerged as a large and dominant social media service, giving rise to a ‘platformed media system’ within its technical and regulatory infrastructures. This paper relies on a large-scale sample of channels (n=36M+) to explore this media system along three main lines. First, we investigate stratification and hierarchization in broadly quantitative terms, connecting to well-known tropes on structural hierarchies emerging in networked systems, where a small number of elite actors often dominate visibility. Second, we inquire into YouTube’s channel categories, their relationships, and their proportions as a means to better understand the topics on offer and their relative importance. Third, we analyze channels according to country affiliation to gain insights into the dynamics and fault lines that align with country and language. Throughout the paper, we emphasize the inductive character of this research, by highlighting the many follow-up questions that emerge from our findings.

Weibo of China

This chapter studies the design case of Weibo from China and explores how a local social media service, which at first was regarded as a copycat of a Silicon Valley technology, arose in the Chinese social media market and beat its Western competitor on Wall Street with its culturally sensitive design features. It reviews Weibo’s two stages of development to explore the complicacy of technology design and the dynamic and dialogical structuring process behind the formation of a technological genre for microblogging. Through the case, it unpacks three sensitizing concepts of the culturally localized user engagement and empowerment (CLUE2) framework for coming up with empowering global designs: a genre of technology as normative and performative practice, a dialogic model of communication, and hybridity as creative mixing for empowerment. Together they outline a pathway to connect the macro and the micro in cross-cultural design: A rhetorical genre view helps us to see how a culturally sustaining technology functions as a technological genre, instantiating both normative and performative practice as local uptakes. The local uptake develops and evolves by following a dialogic model of communication in design practices to generate new meanings and produce new practices, and it forms through the process of hybridization as a creative mixing for agency. Various local uptakes make up an open, globally networked technology assemblage with dialogic relations flowing between.

Evolution of bot and human behavior during elections

Online social media have become one of the main communication platforms for political discussion. The online ecosystem, however, does not only include human users but has given a space to an increasing number of automated accounts, referred to as bots, extensively used to spread messages and manipulate the narratives others are exposed to. Although social media service providers put increasing efforts to protect their platforms, malicious bot accounts continuously evolve to escape detection. In this work, we monitored the activity of almost 245K accounts engaged in the Twitter political discussion during the last two U.S. voting events. We identified approximately 31K bots and characterized their activity in contrast with humans. We show that, in the 2018 midterms, bots changed the volume and the temporal dynamics of their online activity to better mimic humans and avoid detection. Our findings highlight the mutable nature of bots and illustrate the challenges to forecast their evolution.

How does Weibo keep users hooked? A Weibo addictive behavior study based on netnography

Purpose With the rapid development of social media in the past few years, some dark aspects of usage have appeared, e.g., Weibo addiction. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to address the question of how Weibo keeps users hooked. Design/methodology/approach The study utilizes the netnography method to explore the symptoms of Weibo addiction and how it is formed. Findings First, some Weibo users have typical symptoms of addictive behavior, such as withdrawal, loss of control and general living problems; second, narcissism plays an important role in the process of Weibo addiction and has a stronger effect on content generation than content consumption; third, some users use Weibo as a means to alleviate anxiety, but they can then become more anxious owing to addiction; and fourth, the effect of comments has two sides – on the one hand, comments are one kind of feedback to posts, satisfying posters’ social needs, while on the other hand, a storytelling system consists of one post and its comments, upon which some Weibo users become more dependent. Research limitations/implications This research is only a preliminary, exploratory study. Therefore, care should be taken when interpreting these findings. Practical implications This study should help social media service providers and users to pay attention to the risk of social media addiction. Social media service providers should take social responsibility, design more user-oriented guidelines for marketing ethics and launch more responsible marketing activities. Users should enhance self-control and better balance social media use and offline real life. Originality/value Netnography has not been widely used as an addictive behavior research technique. This study is further bolstered because it has also noticed the difference of addiction mechanisms between addictive micro-bloggers and their followers.