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Building a healthy campus climate, one that is respectful, inclusive, and supportive of intellectual growth for the entire university community, has always been a challenge faced by educators. From influencing students' thought to facilitating individual cases of bullying and harassment, the mainstream media is awash with stories about the role social media may play in fostering a hostile environment on college campuses. Work examining the challenges various social media pose to college campuses is underway: it is still young, though, and largely outside of the communication discipline. Even so, it is important for communication scholars to stake a claim in this space. Social media, as a technology, is here to stay and has clear implications for communication in all contexts--particularly considering that 70% of adults use it daily, despite the fact that most of these same individuals hold negative views regarding its effects (McKinnon & Dougherty, 2019). There are many challenges both in how social media is studied and how students are taught to engage with it. This article explores: (1) dangers posed within campus communities to which social media may contribute (i.e., cyberbullying, racial hostility, and stalking behaviors); (2) dangers posed by the evolving threat of coordinated disinformation; (3) challenges scholars face moving forward in how these dangers are researched and understood; and (4) necessary pedagogical changes needed to help students engage with the world through social media.

In this content analysis, we explored how students address instructor ideology in the university classroom through the social media platform Twitter. We employed Boolean search operators through Salesforce Marketing Cloud Radian6 software to gather tweets and identified English language tweets by how students referenced their instructor's ideology. Tweets originated in the United States (U.S.), the United Kingdom (U.K.), and Australia. Using qualitative coding procedures, we identified seven themes in the data that described how students wrote about instructor ideology on Twitter: "venting regarding instructor's ideology," "sharing classroom anecdote," "affirming instructor's beliefs/actions," "expressing grade concern," "articulating an opposing view," "reporting conflict," and "indicating confusion." Across categories, Twitter was employed primarily as a back-stage means to communicate expressive dissent regarding instructor ideology and also to demonstrate students' identity. We identified differences between categories based on the perceived ideology of the students' instructors as well as differences in the number of tweets per capita originating in each country.

The 2015–2017 Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA)'s coordinated information operation is one of the earliest and most studied of the social media age. A set of 38 city-specific inauthentic "newsfeeds" made up a large, underanalyzed part of its English-language output. We label 1,000 tweets from the IRA newsfeeds and a matched set of real news sources from those same cities with up to five labels indicating the tweet represents a world in unrest and, if so, of what sort. We train a natural language classifier to extend these labels to 268 k IRA tweets and 1.13 million control tweets. Compared to the controls, tweets from the IRA were 34% more likely to represent unrest, especially crime and identity danger, and this difference jumped to about twice as likely in the months immediately before the election. Agenda setting by media is well-known and well-studied, but this weaponization by a coordinated information operation is novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This exploratory study examined Twitter content addressing the controversial social advocacy movement, American Descendants of Slavery. We collected 1.7 million tweets using the hashtag #ADOS. A sample of these were qualitatively placed into categories: galvanizing support for ADOS, divisive support for ADOS, attack ADOS, or unrelated. Tweets were also categorized as nativist or not nativist. Findings showed that more than half of tweets using #ADOS had a divisive character and nearly ten percent were overtly nativist. No difference was found in user engagement with tweets related to either divisiveness or nativist content, suggesting the character of these tweets is not devised simply for greater amplification of their message. Implications and future directions for research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We document methods employed by Russia's Internet Research Agency to influence the political agenda of the United States from September 9, 2009 to June 21, 2018. We qualitatively and quantitatively analyze Twitter accounts with known IRA affiliation to better understand the form and function of Russian efforts. We identified five handle categories: Right Troll, Left Troll, News Feed, Hashtag Gamer, and Fearmonger. Within each type, accounts were used consistently, but the behavior across types was different, both in terms of "normal" daily behavior and in how they responded to external events. In this sense, the Internet Research Agency's agenda-building effort was "industrial" – mass produced from a system of interchangeable parts, where each class of part fulfilled a specialized function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the dangers posed within the college campus communities to which social media may contribute including cyberbullying, racial hostility, and stalking behaviors as well as dangers posed by the evolving threat of coordinated disinformation. The needed pedagogical changes to help students engage with the world through social media are explored. The essential role of standard digital media literacy interventions in addressing the influence of social media is also tackled.