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X-GTA (The Cross Topic German Twitter Archive) comprises an extensive assortment of over two billion German-language Tweets, captured in the period spanning from October 2018 to March 2023. Recognizing the significant role that Twitter has come to play as a data source for scholarly investigations, we initiated this project to aggregate German Tweets without subject restrictions, thereby generating a multifaceted dataset reflecting a broad spectrum of themes. Consequently, X-GTA does not merely facilitate comprehensive analyses of topic discourse on Twitter, but also empowers comparative studies of different themes and their temporal popularity shifts. This article elaborates on the methodologies employed in data collection, generation, management, and data access, and serves as a detailed guide to the information contained in the X-GTA dataset.

Recent years have witnessed debates about so-called “cancel culture” and more broadly about online accountability practices. Here we revisit this topic through a study of YouTube “drama,” a hybrid genre where creators provide commentary on the scandals, scams, and feuds between YouTube celebrities. Drawing on cultural studies scholarship, and based on qualitative interviews and content analysis, we argue that YouTube drama embodies a range of cultural and moral negotiations that take place on social media platforms. We conceptualize accountability practices on YouTube as an ongoing “platform drama” in which creators engage in perpetual and highly visible power struggles with celebrities, audiences, legacy media, other creators, and YouTube itself. Within the context of this “platform drama,” structural issues and interpersonal conflicts become blurred, as do accountability practices and monetized spectacles. We analyze “cancelation” on YouTube as a ritualistic practice in which structural tensions are publicly negotiated and performed, even as accountability itself remains largely elusive.

Since transition to higher education emerged as a research topic in the early 1970s, scholarly inquiry has focused on students without impairments and, what is more, little attention has been paid to the role of digital technologies. This article seeks to address this knowledge gap by looking at the university experiences of a group of first-year students with vision impairments from New Zealand, and the way they use digital tools, such as social media and mobile devices, to manage their transition-related challenges. The article summarises the findings from a longitudinal qualitative project which was methodologically informed by action research (AR). The article explores and discusses scholarly inquiry of transition to university and introduces a conceptual framework which includes five overlapping stages, the transition issues faced by the students and the roles played by digital technologies. The article updates and expands the theoretical understanding of transition to higher education and provides empirical evidence for practitioners to support the needs, inclusion, and participation of young people with disabilities in the tertiary setting., 25 pages

This paper analyses expert and regulatory perspectives on car driver-monitoring systems that measure bodies to infer and react to emotions, fatigue, and attentiveness. Developers of driver-monitoring systems promise increased safety on the road, alongside comfort for cabin occupants through personalisation and automation. The impetus is three-fold, namely: (1) European road safety policy seeks to vastly reduce road deaths using computational surveillance; (2) there is a growing interest around in cabin safety solutions that sense emotion and affective states of drivers and passengers; and (3) autonomous driving trends are changing the nature of interactions between vehicle and driver. Safety led applications are of special interest because they are backed by policy and standards initiatives including the European Union’s Vision Zero policy and the industry led New Car Assessment Programme (NCAP). Informed by 13 interviews with experts working in and around in-cabin sensing technologies, this paper first identifies and explores features of emergent in-cabin profiling through emotional artificial intelligence (AI) and biometric measures. It then examines how in-car sensing should be regulated by analysing data protection laws and the proposed EU AI Act. A deep ambivalence emerged from our participants around the emergence of emotional AI in cars, and how best to regulate these technologies.

Digital media provide individuals platforms to express political views. Despite the significant scholarly attention to how and why political expression occurs through technologies and to what effect, research remains fragmented in its theoretical frameworks. The present work synthesizes research on computer-mediated communication and political communication to offer a framework that describes theoretically (a) which technological affordances lead (b) to which psychological processes with (c) which politically relevant actions. We address these questions in the context of four different technological affordances. In doing so, we emphasize the psychological cost-benefit calculations that occur when deciding whether to engage in political expression online.

The digital traces that people leave through their use of various online platforms provide tremendous opportunities for studying human behavior. However, the collection of these data is hampered by legal, ethical, and technical challenges. We present a framework and tool for collecting these data through a data donation platform where consenting participants can securely submit their digital traces. This approach leverages recent developments in data rights that have given people more control over their own data, such as legislation that now mandates companies to make digital trace data available on request in a machine-readable format. By transparently requesting access to specific parts of this data for clearly communicated academic purposes, the data ownership and privacy of participants is respected, and researchers are less dependent on commercial organizations that store this data in proprietary archives. In this paper we outline the general design principles, the current state of the tool, and future development goals.

BACKGROUND: Traditionally, during crises the number of new blood donors increases. However, the current coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic created additional barriers to donate due to governmental prevention measures and increased personal health risks. In this report, we examined how the pandemic affected new donor registrations in the Netherlands, especially among groups with higher risk profiles for severe COVID-19. Additionally, we explored the role of media for blood donation and new donor registrations.STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS: We analyzed new donor registrations and attention for blood donation in newspapers and on social media from January until May 2020, in comparison to the same period in 2017 to 2019.RESULTS: After the introduction of nationwide prevention measures, several peaks in new donor registrations occurred, which coincided with peaks in media attention. Interestingly, people with a higher risk profile for COVID-19 (e.g., due to age or region of residence) were overrepresented among new registrants.DISCUSSION: In sum, the first peak of the current pandemic has led to increased new blood donor registrations, despite the associated increased health risks. Time and future studies will have to tell whether these new donors are one-off 'pandemic' donors or if they will become regular, loyal donors.

With the availability of large volumes of electronic communications data and the increasing sophistication of computational techniques, the development of automated approaches for different kinds of framing analysis is an important goal of researchers. There is as yet no standard method for the ‘unsupervised’ inductive identification of frames based upon the content of articles. Three groups of core approaches underlie a wide range of work in this area, and we compare three techniques based on these approaches against each other and against manual human analysts. The three techniques are a k-means clustering algorithm together with a sophisticated natural language processing (NLP)-based feature selection process; evolutionary factor analysis (EFA), a factor analysis approach; and the structural topic model (STM). We use two datasets – one very focused and one extremely broad – as examples of the kind of frame analysis problems readers may wish to attempt. Even in a highly targeted dataset, we find some distance between the frames generated by computational analysis and those manually produced by our human analysts. The details of each method have a substantial impact on frame quality and interpretation. We find that the STM approach is the most effective for our narrow-scope dataset, but that it returns definite topics, and not frames, when working on our very broad dataset. We also show that we can get results emphasizing different parts of the framing problem by combining parts of different methods as a multi-stage process, rather than viewing available methods as simple plug-and-play models.

Forthcoming in American Behavioral Scientist. The structured inequalities built into our sociotechnical institutions shape access to knowledge. During the COVID-19 pandemic, knowledge acquisition was shaped by news sources, class, and race. Through analysis of nationally representative data using logistic models, this study reveals how the use of different news sources differentially shapes access to accurate knowledge about COVID-19 topics for different demographics. Those who rely on informal and local news sources have the largest knowledge gaps about these topics, while those who seek information from national or international news outlets and politicians have the most accurate knowledge. Race and class influence knowledge of government operations, public health, and science of COVID-19. In particular, Black people, people with less education, and those with lower incomes are significantly less likely to have accurate knowledge about COVID-19, all else equal. These findings have implications for knowledge dissemination that impacts public health, as well as for how news media target different audiences in an increasingly fractured landscape.

Misinformation online poses a range of threats, from subverting democratic processes to undermining public health measures. Proposed solutions range from encouraging more selective sharing by individuals, to platform removal of false content and accounts that create or promote it. How, whether, and which strategies to implement depends on their relative and combined ability to reduce viral misinformation spread at plausible levels of enforcement. Here we provide a framework to evaluate interventions aimed at reducing viral misinformation online both in isolation and when used in combination. We begin by deriving a generative model of viral misinformation spread, inspired by research on infectious disease. Applying this model to a large corpus of misinformation events that occurred during the 2020 US election, we reveal that commonly proposed interventions--including removal of content, virality circuit breakers, nudges, and banning---are unlikely to be effective in isolation without extreme censorship or major breakthroughs in how to control misinformation. However, our framework demonstrates that a combined approach can achieve a substantial ~50% reduction in the spread of misinformation. Our results challenge claims that combating misinformation will require new ideas or high costs to user expression. Instead, we highlight a practical path forward as misinformation online continues to threaten vaccination efforts, equity, and democratic processes around the globe.

This report is a high-level summary analysis of the 2017 GitHub Open Source Survey dataset, presenting frequency counts, proportions, and frequency or proportion bar plots for every question asked in the survey., Comment: 58 pages

In light of the growing politicization of social media, the spiral of silence theory and its predictions on the conditions under which individuals express political opinions have gained increasing scholarly attention. This study contributes to this line of research by identifying the influence of a central characteristic of social media: message persistence. It was expected that high technical durability of political messages reduces users’ propensity to voice their opinion, moderating the silence effect. A pre-registered experiment ( N = 772) revealed a small-to-medium persistence effect in three out of four topical contexts. While perceived congruence with the opinion climate was not associated with the likelihood of opinion expression, the latter could be explained by a mental cost-benefit calculus that was shaped by message persistence. Theoretical implications are discussed referring to (a) a situational approach regarding silencing processes on social media and (b) its connection to a behavioral calculus of human communication.

A variety of social movements across the world and the political spectrum are now taking advantage of peer production mechanisms such as collaboration, co-production, and self-organisation. This essay investigates the consequences of peer production for social protest, looking at how peer production reshuffles and remediates social change activism today. It explores the convergences and tensions between peer networks and contemporary social movements ranging from informal coalitions and amorphous grouping to traditional social movement organisations. First, it traces the historical trajectory of peer production as it has come to permeate the progressive social movements of the last three decades, linking distinct approaches to organizing to technological innovation. Second, it reflects on the so-called social affordances (and constraints) of digital infrastructure and their role in fostering specific modes of creativity and convergence apt to support protest actors. Third, it explores three types of consequences of peer production for social movements, namely cultural production and norm change, collective identity, and the commons. The chapter then examines three tensions that might emerge in the process of embedding peer production mechanisms and values in instances of collective action, namely: individual vs. collective engagements, peer networks vs. social movement organizations, and self-organized vs. commercial infrastructure.

In the recent decades, privacy scholarship has made significant progress. Most of it was achieved in monodisciplinary works. However, privacy has a deeply interdisciplinary nature. Most importantly, societies as well as individuals experience privacy as being influenced by legal, technical, and social norms and structures. In this article, we hence attempt to connect insights of different academic disciplines into a joint model, an Interdisciplinary Privacy and Communication Model. The model differentiates four different elements: communication context, protection needs, threat and risk analysis, as well as protection enforcement. On the one hand, with this model, we aim to describe how privacy unfolds. On the other hand, the model also prescribes how privacy can be furnished and regulated. As such, the model contributes to a general understanding of privacy as a theoretical guide and offers a practical basis to address new challenges of the digital age.

When addressing public concerns such as the existence of politically like-minded communication spaces in social media, analyses of complex political discourses are met with increasing methodological challenges to process communication data properly. To address the extent of political like-mindedness in online communication, we argue that it is necessary to focus not only on ideological homogeneity in online environments, but also on the extent to which specific political questions are discussed in a uniform manner. This study proposes an innovative combination of computational methods, including natural language processing and social network analysis, that serves as a model for future research examining the evolution of opinion climates in online networks. Data were gathered on YouTube, enabling the assessment of users’ expressed opinions on three political issues (i.e., adoption rights for same-sex couples, headscarf rights, and climate change). Challenging widely held assumptions on discursive homogeneity online, the results provide evidence for a moderate level of connections between dissimilar YouTube comments but few connections between agreeing comments. The findings are discussed in light of current computational communication research and the vigorous debate on the prevalence of like-mindedness in online networks.

Social media has become a relevant content dissemination channel in recent years. Each user has the capacity to potentially reach others, and in this way, social media challenges the traditional distribution of content through mass media. The advertising industry has had to adapt to this new ecosystem and develop audiovisual pieces specifically tailored to this environment as part of their communication strategies. These pieces aim at achieving not only views but to engage viewers in sharing content with their contacts. Recent research indicates that there are certain aspects of human behaviour related to emotions and motivations that have an impact on the decision to share information, news and content with others. However, there are few studies analysing how the features of the content shared influence that decision. This article presents the content analysis results of the 100 most widely shared advertising viral videos around the world from 2011 to 2015 according to Adweek. The analysis was conducted from an emotional perspective in order to establish the common features of the most shared videos and to identify the frequency in which emotional narrative resources are used.

Este artigo visa analisar a correlação entre as citações e o Altmetric Attention Score dos artigos do Centro de Pesquisa, Inovação e Difusão em Neuromatemática (CEPID NeuroMat) extraindo os dados das métricas utilizadas no Google Scholar. O estudo aborda apenas os artigos que possuem score altmétrico da plataforma Altmetric.com e visa compreender se as citações científicas estão relacionadas ao impacto social de uma pesquisa.

Scholarship on (mis)information does not easily translate into recommendations for policy-makers and policy influencers who wish to judge the accuracy of science-related truth claims. This is partly due to much of this literature being based on lab experiments with captive audiences that tell us little about the durability or scalability of any potential intervention in the real world. More importantly, the “accuracy” of scientific truth claims is much more difficult to define than many scholars in this space acknowledge. Uncertainties associated with the nature of science, sociopolitical climates, and media systems introduce compounding error in assessments of claim accuracy. We, therefore, need a more nuanced understanding of misinformation and disinformation than those often present in discussions of the “infodemic.” Here, we propose a new framework for evaluating science-related truth claims and apply it to real-world examples. We conclude by discussing implications for research and action on (mis)information, given that distinguishing between true and false claims is not as easy as it is sometimes purported to be.

This article reports the effectiveness of technology that provides eco-feedback, along with priming, anchoring and goal-setting, to reduce shower lengths in two randomized field experiments developed in six tourism accommodations across Denmark, Spain, and the UK. Shower length is found to be 13.56% shorter when real-time continuous eco-feedback is provided compared to a control. The presence of messages using priming, anchoring, and goal-setting techniques further reduces shower duration, with the largest reduction in shower length, of 21.27% over the control, being achieved by a message priming selfless values with low anchor/goal-setting, which reflects a high effort target. The study validates, and expands, the Feedback Intervention Theory and, methodologically, uses smart technology to collect actual shower data unobtrusively. This article advances the sustainability agenda in relation to water conservation and pro-environmental behavior change, emphasizing the higher effectiveness of combining technology with behavioral change to foster pro-environmental behavior, compared to technology alone.

This report presents the outcomes of a project aimed at developing and testing a prototype tool that supports and speeds-up the work of fact-checkers and de-bunkers by surfacing and ranking potentially problematic information circulated on social media with a content-agnostic approach. The tool itself is the result of a multi-year research activity carried on within the Mapping Italian News Research Program of the University of Urbino Carlo Bo to study the strategies, tactics and goals of influence operations aimed at manipulating the Italian public opinion by exploiting the vulnerabilities of the contemporary media ecosystem. This research activity led to developing original studies, public reports, new methods, maps and tools employed to study the activity of Italian nefarious social media actors aimed at amplifying the reach and impact of problematic information by coordinating their efforts. Tracking these actors proved instrumental to observe the “infodemic” unraveling during the early days of COVID-19 outbreak in Italy. Combining this existing knowledge with a range of original tools and data sources provided by Meta’s Facebook Open Research Initiative (Fort) and by The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) at Poynter, the report: documents those early days by highlighting a list of widely viewed and interacted links circulated on Facebook; traces the establishment, growth and evolution of Italian covid-skeptic coordinated networks on Facebook; presents a comprehensive and updated map of the activities performed by these networks of nefarious social media actors; unveils a set of original tactics and strategies employed by these actors to adjust their operations to the mitigation efforts adopted by social media platforms to reduce the spread of problematic information; describes the circulation of three specific piece of problematic information; provides an overview of the outcomes of the testing phase (carried out in collaboration with Facta.news) of a prototype tool that surfaces and ranks potentially problematic information circulated on social media with a content-agnostic approach.

Books are important in the social sciences. Monographs and edited books allow for presenting original research based on methodologies or forms of collaboration that the format of the journal article does not serve as appropriately. Books are also used to engage directly with society. This chapter first introduces book publishing in the social sciences as a diversity of genres, purposes, and audiences. We then limit the scope to peer-reviewed scholarly book publishing and describe how publication patterns differ among the disciplines of the social sciences in the dimensions of books versus journal articles and national versus international publishing. Then we focus on the structure of the scholarly book publishing market with particular attention to developments towards open access publishing. The chapter ends with our suggestions for principles that can guide proper evaluation of book publishing in the social sciences.

The study has examined the similarities and differences in the coverage of two Palestinian news agencies Ma’an and Palestinian Information Center (PIC) on the reactions of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s regarding relocating the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The study has also aimed to explore the use of four function of framing by Entman 1993 in the news stories of both agencies. Qualitative content analysis has been adopted to achieve the aim of this study. The total sampling number was 9 news stories; 3 stories have been retrieved from Ma’an, and the other 6 have been retrieved from PIC. The time frame has started from December 5, 2017 which marked the day of informing Abbas by Trump’s decision to move the Embassy until December 22 2017 which was a day after gaining a sweeping victory in UN by President Abbas through a resolution that rejected the decision. Both of the news agencies were supportive to President Abbas in their coverage and none of them has any negative coverage about him. From the sampling number it can be seen that PIC has paid more attention for the coverage of this issue than Ma’an. However, PIC has ignored the success of President Abbas for achieving UN resolution against Trump’s decision. Morover, all the news stories has included “define the problem” while excluded “diagnose causes” functions. However both “make moral judgment” and “suggest remedies” have been included in all news stories of Ma’an, and only half of news stories of PIC. Keywords: Abbas, Trump, US embassy, Jerusalem, Palestine

The issue of deliberate forest fires that set illegally in Indonesia by plantation companies in their slash-and-burn forests to clear lands for lucrative palm oil plantations and its caused transboundary haze became a hot issue for discussion. These fires have a negative influence on Indonesia and its neighbourhood countries, especially on their financial and human resources such as environment, economy, properties, and people. Using the right strategies in responding to any crisis determines the success of its management and coping with that crisis with minimal losses. This study aimed to examine the communication crisis response by Indonesia to this crisis by using image repair theory. Also, this study examined how image repair strategies were used by Indonesia. This study analysed the content of news stories from the website of the New Straits Times newspaper. The time frame of this study was from 2015 to 2019. A total of 87 news stories have pertained to Indonesian response, and 37 stories included image repair strategies. Among the strategies of image repair theory, corrective action strategy was the most dominant with 70%, followed by 10.8% for each shift the blame and attack accuser. The least used strategies were mortification and simple denial with 5.4% and 2.7% respectively. Keywords: Indonesia, crisis communication, image repair, transboundary haze, deliberate fires.

This study explores the influence of education, length of service, professionalism, and ethics on the professional values of public relations practitioners in Malaysia. A total of 427 questionnaires were distributed to public relations practitioners in Malaysia, and 322 questionnaires werereturned. The study included 61% female respondents, and 39% male respondents. The study analyzed and identified the influence of professionalism and ethics on professional values of public relations practitioners. Additionally, the study examined whether education and experience influence professional values through professionalism, and code of ethics. Six hypotheses were tested to answer the researchquestions. The results from this study fully supported the hypotheses indicating that professionalism and ethics had an influence on professional values of public relations practitioners. The results also showed that education influenced both professionalism and ethics, and length ofservice influenced both professionalism and ethical practice.Keywords: Professional values, public relations, practitioners, professionalism, code of ethics

A breadth of literature has examined how gig workers use online forums. The past literature focuses primarily on how gig workers for mainstream corporate platforms leverage forums. Yet, marginalization, stigma, censorship, and criminalization all shape how people, including gig workers, use digital technology. In this work, we seek to take a first step toward understanding how marginalized, stigmatized, digitally censored, and in some cases criminalized gig workers leverage the affordances of online public forums to build community and increase their welfare. To do so, we conduct a qualitative analysis of 4,000 posts and 25,851 comments shared over four months in a large online public forum used by sex workers for peer support. Sex workers sit at the intersection of multiple marginalized communities, and thus offer a lens into the broader use of forums by marginalized labor communities. Our findings offer insight into how these workers use moderation to preserve their safety and community. Further, we highlight similarities and differences between how this community utilizes the forum platform and prior scholarship on the use of online forums by gig workers.

Over the past decade, smartphones have permeated all domains of adolescents’ everyday lives, with research dominated by “smartphone addiction.” This study compares one of the most used measures of smartphone addiction with a new alternative measure, the Smartphone Pervasiveness Scale for Adolescents (SPS-A), which focuses on the frequency of smartphone use at key social and physiological moments of daily life. A sample of 3,289 Italian high school students was used to validate the two constructs and compare their suitability for research on academic performance. SPS-A was moderately correlated with smartphone addiction, showed measurement invariance (across ethnic origins, parental education, and gender), and negatively predicted language and math test scores. SPS-A is a nonpathologizing instrument suitable for analyzing the role of smartphone use in academic achievement in combination with students’ social backgrounds.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought Zoom explosive growth and a major privacy and security crisis in March 2020. This research advances a producer’s perspective that directs attentions to institutional and organizational actors and draws on theories of privacy management and organizational crisis communication to examine Zoom’s response to its privacy and security crisis. We primarily use data from 14 weekly Ask Eric Anything webinars from April 8 to July 15, 2020 to illustrate the strategies of Zoom’s crisis response, especially organizational representation, the contours of its analytic account acknowledging and reducing responsibility, and patterns of corrective and preventive action for user education and product improvement. Results demonstrate the usefulness of the producer’s perspective and shed light on how Zoom navigated the privacy and security crisis through mobilizing networks of executives, advisors, consultants, and clients for expertise, endorsement, and collaboration. Moreover, its response strategies have built on and contributed to Zoom’s organizational mission and culture, reframing the crisis as a growth opportunity for prioritizing privacy and security rather than mere growing pains. Zoom’s nimble, reasonable, collaborative, interactive and curated organizational response to its privacy and security crisis as an unintended consequence of its sudden rise to prominence amid a global pandemic offers a useful model for tech firms’ crisis response at a crucial moment for the tech industry around the world. Implications are relevant to understanding the socio-technical and economic consequences of this ongoing global pandemic.

The term ‘radiophobia’ has been a cornerstone in the nuclear discourse over the past 70 years, and has been used extensively to dismiss fears of radiation as being emotional overreactions to a risk that is actuarially very low, stemming from public ignorance. Despite its longevity in nuclear discourse, little attention has been afforded to the term, its history, and the factors that underpin the extreme divergence in risk perception that the term de facto refers to, threatening to severely hamper any efforts to redress said divergence. This article will explore these factors, mostly sociopsychological in nature, and conclude that the powerful affective imagery associated with radiation, compounded by various heuristics and biases, renders public discomfort with ionising radiation from nuclear power plants rational – despite the actuarial safety record of nuclear energy globally. The article will note that. whilst its often ostracising usage towards the public should render the term obsolete, radiophobia can still be regarded as a useful concept to try and explain the extreme risk perception divergence that exists between nuclear experts and the public. In order for a more constructive discourse, a paradigm shift that acknowledges the complex historical and sociopsychological factors that have shaped radiation into becoming a uniquely feared process will be required. Such an acknowledgement will likely be a prerequisite for any efforts towards normalising humanity’s relationship with radiation, and would require considerable changes in communication practices.

Computational methods are increasingly popular in criminal justice research. As more criminal justice data becomes available in big data and other digital formats, new means of embracing the computational turn are needed. In this article, we propose a framework for data collection and case sampling using computational methods, allowing researchers to conduct thick qualitative research – analyses concerned with the particularities of a social context or phenomenon – starting from big data, which is typically associated with thinner quantitative methods and the pursuit of generalizable findings. The approach begins by using open-source web scraping algorithms to collect content from a target website, online database, or comparable online source. Next, researchers use computational techniques from the field of natural language processing to explore themes and patterns in the larger data set. Based on these initial explorations, researchers algorithmically generate a subset of data for in-depth qualitative analysis. In this computationally driven process of data collection and case sampling, the larger corpus and subset are never entirely divorced, a feature we argue has implications for traditional qualitative research techniques and tenets. To illustrate this approach, we collect, subset, and analyze three years of news releases from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police website (N = 13,637) using a mix of web scraping, natural language processing, and visual discourse analysis. To enhance the pedagogical value of our intervention and facilitate replication and secondary analysis, we make all data and code available online in the form of a detailed, step-by-step tutorial.

COVID-19 misinformation became accessible and profitable through socialmedia platforms, such as YouTube. Here we investigate if Brazilian YouTubechannels previously identified as vaccine misinformation spreaders would alsomisinform their audience about COVID-19. Our analysis sample consists of6 months of content (3,318 videos) from 50 Brazilian YouTube channels.We establish a protocol to classify the types of COVID-19 misinformationspread by the content creators, describing how the channels evade contentmoderation—disguising, replicating, and dispersing misinformation—and whattactics the content creators use to profit. Our analysis shows that thesechannels exploited COVID-19 misinformation to promote themselves,profiting in the process.

This chapter provides an overview of computational communication science (CCS) as an emerging and exemplary subfield of computational social science. Based on lessons from working group sessions with 34 experts, we address recent challenges and desiderata of CCS research while reflecting upon its future development and expansion. Four major fields of action proved particularly relevant in these discussions: First, challenges related to a reflected but integrated CCS methodology; second, challenges related to a further elaboration on the theoretical perspectives on CCS; third, challenges related to the formation and further institutionalization of CCS as fundamental basis for further scientific exchange, progress and standardization; and fourth, implications for empirical communication research, particularly highlighting the relevance of wicked problems as research incubators driving further progress.

Humanitarian campaigns are proposing fun and simpler ways to support their causes with the help of advanced communication technologies and corporate sponsorships. It has become common to do good by shopping, running, texting and playing games. Despite some criticisms, such campaigns proposing simple and fun actions are becoming more dominant in the development and aid sector because of their ability to engage a wider public. This study aims to problematise the increasing role of corporations as moral educators and in the entertaining humanitarian campaigns focused on the Self at the expense of suppressing the Other. It focuses on the potentially destructive aspects of seemingly creative and entertaining humanitarian appeals supported by commercial forces by investigating the case of Barcodrop – an ethically packaged bottled water brand. This study begins by reviewing the relevant literature on post-humanitarianism, corporate social responsibility, contemporary consumer culture and bottled water. It then moves on to examine three research questions: What types of relationships are mediated and reproduced through the campaign? How does the campaign shape certain social practices and norms? How does this newly emerged post-humanitarian style work to mask political issues and serve particular ideologies? This is achieved by taking a case-study approach involving two qualitative analysis techniques social semiotics and critical discourse analysis. The combined approach illuminates opaque power relations and the ideology embedded in a stylish campaign. Based on the analysis, the study suggests that the unequal relationship of the heroic Self and the vulnerable Other is reproduced through the campaign. The promotion of simple and fun reinforces the narcissistic nature of contemporary consumers, which requires subordination of others. In addition, the Barcodrop campaign appears to normalise the consumer choice as an ethical practice by explicitly linking scanning and sharing. It also transforms the act of altruism to a playful activity of consumers while excluding distant sufferers, which makes participants loyal mediator of the brand. Furthermore, post-humanitarian aesthetic techniques effectively prevent the audience from understanding the complexities that surround water issues and legitimatise corporate ideology at the expense of solidarity.

Labor platform scams are an opportunity to integrate scholarship about governance across social media and labor platforms. Labor platforms have borrowed governance mechanisms from social media to cultivate trust among users and remove problematic content. However, while these platforms may share governance strategies, labor platforms mediate employment relationships between workers and clients with different amounts of power. Based on a multi-stakeholder ethnography of carework labor platforms, online careworker forums, and interviews, this study describes scams on carework labor platforms. Labor platforms narrate workers into the role of technology consumers, constricting their own obligations to workers. Workers’ explanations of scams vary, with some contesting and others aligning with platform narratives. Some workers seek support in online forums, which remediate the harm of scams for some, but also enroll workers in unpaid labor. These scams challenge the assumption of antagonism between the interests of workers and platform companies and highlights the consumerization of work.

Traveling to different destinations is a big part of our lives. We visit a variety of locations both during our daily lives and when we're on vacation. How can we find the best way to navigate from one place to another? Perhaps we can test all of the different ways of traveling between two places, but another method is to use mathematics and computation to find a shortest path. We discuss how to construct a shortest path and introduce Dijkstra's algorithm to minimize the total cost of a path, where the cost may be the travel distance, travel time, or some other measurement. We also discuss how to use shortest paths in the real world to save time and increase traveling efficiency., Comment: This is an article for teens and pre-teens. Let us know if you have any comments

The ways in which privacy is defined, perceived, and enacted are contingent on cultural, social, political, economic, and technological structures. Privacy research, however, is often conducted in settings that do not account for variations in how privacy is perceived and enacted. A comparative perspective explicitly addresses this shortcoming by requiring the contextualization of privacy through investigating structural similarities and differences. This paper outlines a comparative privacy research framework, which proposes five interrelated structures (cultural, social, political, economic, and technological) as fruitful units of comparison and disentangles how these structures affect and interact with privacy processes at the micro-, meso-, and macro levels. We conclude by proposing a comparative privacy research agenda, which acknowledges the embeddedness of privacy in such structural settings, and informs efforts to address privacy as a valued outcome through policy formation, education, and research.

Sooner after the pandemic was declared and nowadays, some scientists, researchers and media have tended to associate Covid 19 with the results of climate change and give insights about how it needs to be interpreted in economic, social, political, communicational dimensions for combat against climate change, as well as what has been learnt/can be learnt from it, and what else can be carried out by being followed what has been learnt, etc. The essay relies on a view of what we learnt from the pandemic on the matter of climate change, and whether some approaches might be derived from what we experienced and learnt from the pandemic, and, most importantly, those would be applicable to combating the climate change as well as the current approaches related to the subject.

In times of crisis such as the Corona pandemic citizens need to stay informed about recent events, the latest political decisions, or mandatory protection measures. To this end, many people use various types of media, and increasingly social media. However, because social media are particularly engaging, some find it hard to disconnect and cannot stop doomscrolling. In this preregistered study, I investigate whether using social media for COVID-19 related reasons affects psychological well-being. To answer this question I analyzed data from the Austrian Corona Panel Project, which consists of 24 waves with overall 3,018 participants. I ran three random effects within between models, controlling for several stable and varying confounders. Results showed that the effects of COVID-19 related social media use on well-being were very small, arguably too small to matter. The findings suggest that fears that social media use during times of crisis impairs well-being are likely to be unfounded.

A growing body of literature is advancing the impact of financial inclusion and digital finance on marginalized populations. However, mainstream scholarship has not focused on understanding the potential drivers and challenges of digital approaches to financial inclusion. This study aims to investigate the mismatch between assumptions implicit in the financial inclusion discourse and ideas of access and use of digital technologies and seeks to move the discourse forward through a comprehensive framework for digital financial inclusion. Our study showed that the social dynamics of financial engagement with new technologies require a move beyond a simple individualistic adopter/non-adopter binary framework and ‘supply oriented’ financial infrastructure. We conclude that although digital services have eased and bridged the gap of physical access to financial services, such services have not been utilised due to lack of basic connectivity, financial literacy and social awareness. This article theoretically contributes to digital financial services adoption literature by offering a significant critical overview and a new perspective on both digital finance and financial inclusion mechanisms.

The state-led investment in digital infrastructure under the ruling party’s political agenda of “Digital Bangladesh” has given rise to scholarly and policy debates, especially around issues of digital surveillance and media censorship. Such concerns have intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article analyzes contemporary Bangladesh in the context of emerging trends related to the digitalization of society. In particular, I employ the concept of “digital pitfalls” to explore the state’s use of surveillance and the politics of fear to limit freedom of expression and silence critical voices in the digital age.

Wikipedia, a collaborative crowd-sourced platform, is the largest, most visited online encyclopedia. Since it spreads information freely in more than 300 languages, many users, tools, and dashboards rely on its content. Hence, there is a need to maintain its fairness and completeness. However, previous research has indicated the existence of a significant gender gap in Wikipedia biographical articles. We already know that a minimal proportion of those articles portray women and there are gender asymmetries in the textual content of these articles, but little has been reported about the visual aspects (e.g., image volume or image quality) of the gender gap. Here, we analyze all biographies available on Wikipedia across 300 occupations in the ten most widely spoken languages, and undertake quantitative and qualitative analysis of gender differences in the written and visual content. The cross-lingual results indicate that (1) much of the male bias in content arises when editors select which personalities should have a Wikipedia page, (2) the trends in written and visual content are quite dissimilar, (3) men biographies tend to have more images across languages, and (4) female biographies average better visual quality. A more granular analysis is performed on English Wikipedia, distinguishing trends in occupations and qualitatively analyzing science and technology biographies. The overall results shed light on the kinds of visual biases that emerge in the collaborative creation of Wikipedia and yield guidelines for future management of contributions on the platform.

This study assesses the impact and effectiveness of the National Information and Communications Technology Policy (NIP) in Bangladesh, which is a key legal framework for ‘Vision 2021’ and ‘Digital Bangladesh’. It investigates the extent to which digital inclusion can be achieved by the NIP strategies, as well as exploring the conceptualisation of digital inclusion, which undergirds the contemporary debate on the digital divide and inclusion. The study employs a qualitative approach using policy goal-means analysis to explore critical scrutiny of the internal rationality and logic of the NIP based on three distinct criteria of the digital inclusion analytical framework: ICT access, use and skills. The analysis argues that the policy is ambiguous and techno-centric, with a narrow digitisation frame of reference, which does not comprehensively address the issues associated with digital inclusion. Policy needs to be consistent and relevant to a person’s daily life, giving the user a sense of empowerment and skill. The article concludes that a focus on a skill-based approach and the context of societal challenges of Bangladesh is crucial to ensuring digital inclusion.

We present and analyze a database of 1.13 million public Instagram posts during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, which erupted in response to George Floyd’s public murder by police on May 25. Our aim is to understand the growing role of visual media, focusing on a) the emergent opinion leaders and b) the subsequent press concerns regarding frames of legitimacy. We perform a comprehensive view of the spatial (where) and temporal (when) dynamics, the visual and textual content (what), and the user communities (who) that drove the social movement on Instagram. Results reveal the emergence of non-institutional opinion leaders such as meme groups, independent journalists, and fashion magazines, which contrasts with the institutionally reinforcing nature of Twitter. Visual analysis of 1.69 million photos show symbols of injustice are the most viral coverage, and moreover, actual protest coverage is framed positively, in contrast with combatant frames traditionally found from legacy media. Together, these factors helped facilitate the online movement through three phases, culminating with online international solidarity in #BlackOutTuesday. Through this case study, we demonstrate the precarious nature of protest journalism, and how content creators, journalists, and everyday users co-evolved with social media to shape one of America’s largest-ever human rights movements.

In their meta-analysis on how privacy concerns and perceived privacy risk are related to online disclosure intentionand behavior, Yu et al. (2020) conclude that “the ‘privacy paradox’ phenomenon (...) exists in our research model” (p. 8). In this comment, we contest this conclusion and present evidence and arguments against it. We find five areas of problems: (1) Flawed logic of hypothesis testing; (2) erroneous and implausible results; (3) questionable decision to use only the direct effect of privacy concerns on disclosure behavior as evidence in testing the privacy paradox; (4) overinterpreting results from MASEM; (5) insufficient reporting and lack of transparency. To guide future research, we offer three recommendations: Going beyond mere null hypothesis significance testing, probing alternative theoretical models, and implementing open science practices. While we value this meta-analytic effort, we caution its readers that, contrary to the authors’ claim, it does not offer evidence in support of the privacy paradox.

Using novel data, we provide the first panoramic view of US Black movement protest events as reported in US newswires between 1994 and 2010 and put our quantitative data into dialog with qualitative accounts. Struggles during these years presaged the Black Lives protest waves of 2014-2016 and 2020. Protests increased after the 1995 Million Man March into 2001, but dropped abruptly after the 9/11 attacks. Collective action increased again at the end of the 2000s. Protests in response to police violence and other criminal legal issues were major arenas of struggle and news coverage. Also common were issues of national identity including celebrations of Black history and Black solidarity, protests about Confederate symbols, and protests about White hate groups and hate crimes. While Black people protested about a wide variety of issues, newswires focused disproportionately on incidents of police violence and perceived threats of Black violence. There is substantial continuity in issues, organizations, and activism between this earlier period and the Black Lives Movement of 2014-2020. Content warning: parts of this article describe incidents of police violence.This is a preprint of an article forthcoming in Sociological Science.

One of todays most controversial and consequential questions is whether the rapid, worldwide uptake of digital media is causally related to a decline in democracy. We conducted a systematic review of causal and correlational evidence (N=498 articles) on the link between digital media and different political variables, such as trust, polarization or news consumption. We further focused on the subset of articles that employed causal inference methods. Across methods, the articles report associations between digital media use and most political variables. Some associations, such as increases in political participation and information consumption, are likely to be beneficial for democracy and were often observed in the Global South and emerging democracies. Other consistently reported associations, such as declining political trust, advantages for populists, and growing polarization, are likely to be detrimental to democracy and were more pronounced in established democracies. We conclude that while the impact of digital media on democracy depends on the specific political variable and the political system in question, several variables show clear directions of associations. We believe that the evidence calls for further research efforts and vigilance by governments and civil societies to better understand and actively design the intimate interplay of digital media and democracy.

Scholars have been debating the credibility of citizen journalism, with some arguing that it is a legitimate news source and others arguing that it should only be considered user-generated content (UGC). This study seeks to determine whether citizen media should be considered news. This study revisits the relationship tested by Tse and Spiezio (2021) that uses content analysis of 400 news headlines from Taiwanese citizen media outlet Peopo and local media outlet Public Television Service to compare the news values. The findings indicated that citizen media in Taiwan pay different attention to news values than mainstream media. The differences in news values between the two media agencies suggested that citizen media in Taiwan cannot be considered news. However, citizen media has its own unique values, including more stories featuring Common Man, and provides more Good News than the mainstream media. The function of citizen media in Taiwan is seen as complementary to the mainstream media.

Smartphones afford users the ability to select their own mobile application repertoires through the installation of various applications. We report a quantitative descriptive study of the types of applications that people commonly use, the amount of time they spend with these applications, the application combinations that they construct, the consistency of these combinations over time, and the differences in these outcomes by demographic characteristics. Using a longitudinal dataset collected from a U.S. adult sample during the COVID-19 pandemic, the study leverages behavioral data collected via data donations to identify key application adoption patterns and shows that peoples’ mobile application repertoires are concentrated around a set of popular applications that is relatively consistent over time. However, within this set there is considerable diversity between individuals and applications, suggesting that quantifying smartphone usage with a single metric— ‘screentime’ —is unlikely to capture the full extent of media that users engage with.

In this paper we outline and demonstrate the critical simulation approach to understanding the data operations of visual social media platforms. We situate this approach within the field of platform studies and position it as a ‘hybrid digital method’, before describing its application for descriptive, forensic and speculative purposes in two current research projects: one that uses machine vision combined with mixed-methods qualitative research to explore Instagram’s algorithmic visual culture; and one that combines automated data donation and machine vision to explore Facebook’s ad targeting practices.

This research shows how face masks became politicized during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. While differences in mask wearing behaviors between liberals and conservatives declined over the course of the pandemic, masks remained controversial in the American public sphere. We argue that political divisions over masks cannot be understood by looking to partisan differences in mask wearing behaviors alone. Instead, we show how the mask became a political symbol enrolled into larger patterns of affective polarization, defined by animosity toward the opposing party. This study relies primarily on a combination of qualitative coding and computational text analysis of a large corpus of opinion articles published during the first 10 months of 2020 (n = 7,970). It also relies on supplemental analyses of social media data (from Twitter), the transcripts of major news networks, and longitudinal survey data. We show that backlash against mask refusal—rather than mask refusal itself—was the primary way that masks took on political significance in the American public sphere. Anti-mask discourse consistently occupied a marginal role in the public sphere, while backlash against mask refusal came to prominence and did not decline even as mask wearing behaviors normalized and partly depolarized. We argue that the mask refusal backlash discourse appealed primarily to liberals and show that it was particularly resonant with national political discourses. Beyond the case, this research demonstrates how to use media data to understand how a new set of issues and objects becomes integrated into broader patterns of political polarization.