Social Media Matters (Asynchronous - Online Only)
Teaching Media Literacy through Fiction View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Thomas Leitch
The contemporary crisis in the public’s perception of the news media is marked by both an absence of trust (when so many sources bombard us with contradictory versions of the news, how can we trust any of them?) and a surfeit of trust (many citizens trust a limited number of news sources absolutely and dismiss their competitors as fake news). This crisis demands not more trust but different, more critical kinds of trust. Instead of teaching unwary citizens to tell real news from fake news so that they place unquestioning trust in trustworthy sources, we should be teaching them how to trust all sorts of announcements and utterances more critically, not asking simply, “Is this true?” or “Is this a trustworthy source?”, but “Who is producing this news? What are they asking me to believe? What is their agenda? What other claims have they made before, and how have those claims compared to competing claims? What kinds of trust are they soliciting, and how would I like to respond?” Questions like these are less often raised in discussions of fake news than in classrooms teaching literature and cinema, for it is in thinking about fiction that students are encouraged to develop more sophisticated kinds of trust than “This is true” and “This is just made up.” This study asks how the strategies used to teach fictional literacy can serve as a basis for teaching the critical literacy we need to respond to allegedly nonfictional texts.
"We Do Not Consent!”: The Persuasive Action Frames of a Protest Group Accused of Spreading Misinformation via Facebook View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Virginia H. Balfour
During the pandemic, social media fuelled the spread of disinformation and misinformation at scale, frustrating public health responses, and provoking civil disobedience. Grassroots protest groups played a critical role in the amplification process. Yet little is known about how these groups function, or the persuasive action frames they use to encourage followers to join their cause, share their message and take action. This paper outlines the persuasive communication used by a protest group accused of, and ultimately de-platformed for, spreading misinformation via Facebook. The group became the biggest of its kind in Australia, attracting 84,000 followers in just a few weeks. Mixed methods, including analysis of follower engagement trends and in-depth close reading of Facebook posts were used to determine the persuasive action frames used across the group’s lifecycle, and the role social media affordances played in the process. Distinctive frames were used to drive membership, foster unity, create a sense of identity, and broker information with similar groups. Social media affordances enhanced membership growth and message amplification, and also enabled the group to repeatedly evade platform censure. The paper highlights the power of social media to fuel grassroots protest groups' communication. It argues that by identifying the lifecycle of a protest group, and the persuasive communication used in the different phases of the lifecycle, critical inflection points can be identified where interventions could be made to slow or halt the progress of mis and disinformation, and the consequent offline harms they create.
Empowering the Public Sphere or Echoing Official Sources? : Journalists' Use of Twitter in Societies with Conflict View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Christiana Karayianni
In the segregated public sphere of Cyprus caused by the prolonged conflict between the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot communities, media and journalism’s role becomes crucial in contributing into a conducive environment to the peace efforts. This paper examines how the journalists of the two Cypriot communities have used Twitter to report the peace efforts in Cyprus during the period of intensification of the Cyprus peace process 01 September 2016 – 31 July 2017. The study uses network visualisation and analysis to map and examine the clusters that are created online within which information about the Cyprus peace process flows. The study investigates the relationships developed between journalists of the two communities as well as official and unofficial sources of the two rival sides during periods of ongoing negotiations. The study further analyses the Cypriot journalists’ use of Twitter to identify elements of “next journalism” (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2010), defined as service to the citizens rather than as a product that could potentially be conducive to the Cyprus peace process.
Who Are Connected by Numbers?: A Social Network Analysis of Quantified Self Community View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Bingyu Chen, Vivian Hsueh Hua Chen
This study used statistical and social network analysis to investigate on the characteristics and communication patterns at an online community about quantified self. Quantified self refers to self knowledge generated through numbers presented to users via tracking technology, including biological, physical, behavioral information relevant to themselves. Through these quantified self practices, individuals perceived a more sensible, calculatable, and manageable self. Quantified self participants share and discuss their self data and exchange knowledge online, constructing new communities which are connected by numbers. These communities care more about the scientific and professional analysis of the shared self data. Additionally, the self data are more sensitive since they are usually regarded as personal privacy. Therefore, this study aims to explore the uniqueness of these communities’ social network. “Quantified Self” is an online community encouraging its users to share their practices, opinions, and knowledge about self-tracking and health. “Quantified Self” has 5731users and 2193 threads till 21th April 2022. Employing statistical and social network analysis methods, two different communication networks, posting network and reading network, are designed to better analyze the communication patterns. Centrality, Closeness, betweenness and coreness are calculated in both networks, while post degree and read degree are calculated separately. The results suggest that the communication network is dominated by professionals, while the reading network is more decentralized with higher level of diversity of more kinds of active users. Although threads can last for a long-time discussion, the users are not suggested to participate consistently. Some typical cases are discussed.
The Smartphone Mandate: Data Collection and the Third Party App Party View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Adam Dean
This paper examines third party data collection in the smartphone universe. It begins by outlining the history of a publicly-funded and commercially-curated Internet in order to provide the foundation for analyzing how private companies compete to collect and sell user data through ubiquitous smartphone applications. The paper provides a historic overview of the public investment in the internet infrastructure, beginning with the national phone and cable wiring grids as well as Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the High Performance Computing Act of 1991. The paper then examines ubiquitous smartphone applications that are informally or formally mandated as part of our daily lives. Such ubiquitous mandatory applications include QR code scanners, maps and navigation services, text notification services and two-factor authentication software. The paper concludes with a proposal for users as regulators to protect basic privacy against monetization, or to dismantle the ubiquity of data harvesting smartphone applications.
Featured Online Crossdressing: Exploring Safety and Agency in Social Media View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anita Fuentes
Are there safe spaces for the construction of online communities with diverse gender identities and sexual desires? What makes some online spaces safer than others? And for whom? Does the architecture of these spaces influence the ways in which users navigate the Internet? We conducted a digital ethnography on a social media platform oriented towards the Spanish-speaking crossdresser community. Our analysis suggests that this platform acts as a digital counterpublic, as it allows users to inhabit a safe environment for self-expression, building support networks, organizing as a collective, and articulating their sexual intimacies. In addition, we found that the concept of online safety should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, in accordance with the feminist perspective, where online safety is always construed in a situated manner and conceives the subjects of study as active agents involved in the definition of the concept itself. The research process raised ethical questions of great relevance, suggesting that the same factors to be considered when conducting research in digital platforms should be contemplated when designing and navigating online safe spaces. We thus propose that, both in carrying out online qualitative research and in the construction of online safe spaces, the following aspects should be taken into consideration: the implications of the privacy settings offered by the platform, the vulnerability of the users that populate it, the sensitivity of the topics covered by the platform’s community, and an ongoing negotiation and reaffirmation of consent in the utilization of the users’ personal data.
