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Preventing Trivialization of Global Social Justice Discourse: A Framework of Critical Social Media Literacy
Abstract
Growing scholarship emphasizes social media as potential platforms to facilitate social justice discourse, while others document simultaneous polarization and trivialization. With the objective of supporting educators, students, and community members, this article conceptualizes a framework of critical social media literacy (CSML) based upon Freirean pedagogy. While social media platforms exist in diverse formats, social media numbers in the form of likes, shares, and views emerge as common elements to influence social justice ideologies. Building upon this preliminary conceptualization, the framework proposes that students may benefit from understanding how social media numbers can: grant automatic, unfounded legitimacy; be mobilized toward not social justice but the pursuit of profit; be a prerequisite for visibility of content; replace critical thinking as ubiquitous metrics; lead to false sense of disorienting dilemmas; facilitate antagonization of nuanced perspectives; encourage conformity; and be directly purchased. Implications on conformity—and expanded thinking for students—conclude the study.
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Photovoice, a participatory action research method, has evolved little over the past two decades. The ubiquity of smartphones and their utility as digital cameras make them a natural fit for photovoice projects. The use of social media to post photographs and comment also has the potential to be a platform for photovoice activities. Using these technologies for photovoice promotes capturing daily life in vivo without the need of additional equipment. These technologies also allow the research team to see photos posted daily and track comments without waiting for scheduled interviews or group meetings and elevates the discussion into the public sphere to facilitate wider engagement. These strategies may also produce more photos and narratives than traditional methods by leveraging technology people use daily. Study participants noted these technologies facilitated wider understanding, awareness, and discussions of neighborhood issues.
Concerns over the harmful effects of social media have directed public attention to media literacy as a potential remedy. Current conceptions of media literacy are frequently based on mass media, focusing on the analysis of common content and evaluation of the content using common values. This article initiates a new conceptual framework of social media literacy (SoMeLit). Moving away from the mass media-based assumptions of extant approaches, SoMeLit centers on the user’s self in social media that is in dynamic causation with their choices of messages and networks. The foci of analysis in SoMeLit, therefore, are one’s selections and values that influence and are influenced by the construction of one’s reality on social media; and the evolving characteristics of social media platforms that set the boundaries of one’s social media reality construction. Implications of the new components and dimensions of SoMeLit for future research, education, and action are discussed.
Recent years have seen an increase in the use of secondary data in climate adaptation research. While these valuable datasets have proven to be powerful tools for studying the relationships between people and their environment, they also introduce unique oversights and forms of invisibility, which have the potential to become endemic in the climate adaptation literature. This is especially dangerous as it has the potential to introduce a double exposure where the individuals and groups most likely to be invisible to climate adaptation research using secondary datasets are also the most vulnerable to climate change. Building on significant literature on invisibility in survey data focused on hard-to-reach and under-sampled populations, we expand the idea of invisibility to all stages of the research process. We argue that invisibility goes beyond a need for more data. The production of invisibility is an active process in which vulnerable individuals and their experiences are made invisible during distinct phases of the research process and constitutes an injustice. We draw on examples from the specific subfield of environmental change and migration to show how projects using secondary data can produce novel forms of invisibility at each step of the project conception, design, and execution. In doing so, we hope to provide a framework for writing people, groups, and communities back into projects that use secondary data and help researchers and policymakers incorporate individuals into more equitable climate planning scenarios that “leave no one behind.”
This article presents a social semiotic analysis of emoji-language semiosis. Combining the theoretical architecture of Systemic Functional Linguistics and methodology of Multimodal Discourse Analysis, we propose an analytical framework that can identify how emoji make meaning both individually and in interaction with language. Using the web-based coding software WebAnno, we apply this framework to a dataset of text messages and social media posts. The results identify typical realisations of particular semiotic features by emoji as well as noteworthy dynamics in how emoji interact with language to realise meaning. We observe (1) how emoji and language jointly construing ideational meaning realise intermodal taxonomies (where hyper/hyponyms are distributed across modes) and particular fields of discourse (domains of experiential meaning), (2) how resources in one mode can serve to foreground particular regions of meaning potential in other modes, and (3) how attitudinal meaning realised by emoji appears to differ from the prosodic patterning of linguistic attitude.
On 6 May 2020, photos were leaked from a conversation in which Brendan Leipsic of the National Hockey League’s Washington Capitals, his brother Jeremy of the University of Manitoba Bisons and several others made vulgar, misogynistic comments about women and about other hockey players’ girlfriends and wives. Following the release of the conversation and the subsequent dismissal of both Leipsic brothers from their respective teams, many took to Twitter to explain their thoughts on this situation. This study analyses nearly 1000 Twitter replies to the Leipsic situation and explores how these responses are shaped by questions of masculinity, accountability, legality, privacy and hockey culture. Contrasting responses to both the scandal and the institutional response to it are emblematic of larger contemporary questions regarding narratives of ‘cancel culture’, ‘woke capitalism’, acceptable masculinities and interactions between them.
This study illuminates reformed literacy expectations via close examination of the recently released 2019 Ontario (Canada), First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Secondary curricular document. A summative latent content analysis of the renewed provincial curriculum found overwhelming support for critical literacy development. The Ontario government uses the term literacy 84 times in the transformed curricula, prompting this study to ask: What are the literacies and how should these be attained in First Nations, Métis, and Inuit secondary level education? This study found required literacies expected in grades nine through 12, included English literacy and skills, media, financial, and critical literacies.
Studies point to the positive role Twitter can play in social justice campaigns. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, this paper looks in detail at one such case: a racist call-out in Canada, which trended on Twitter in many countries leading to its coverage in mainstream media outlets. It had the characteristics, labelled at the time by critics, of ‘cancel culture’, where there were calls for sackings and boycotts. This analysis demonstrates that there should be caution in regard to how social media platforms such as Twitter are able to lead in such matters of social justice. The paper shows how its affordances can work against coherent and careful discussion, fostering fast, simplified, contradictory commentary, where individual tweets load a range of different concerns onto a specific instance. In this particular case, this results in an individualization of racism, which therefore becomes decontextualized and depoliticized. While those tweeting revel in and enjoy their shared moral position, actual endemic structural racism in society remains invisible, and they misrepresent, arguably, the key question that this racist outburst raises.
Flags are important national symbols that have transcended into the digital world with inclusion in the Unicode character set. Despite their significance there is little information about their role in online communication. This paper examines the role of flag emoji in political communication online by analyzing 640,676 tweets by the most important political parties and Members of Parliament in Germany and the USA. We find that national flags are frequently used in political communication, and are mostly used in-line with political ideology. As offline, flag emoji usage in online communication is associated with external events of national importance. This association is stronger in the USA than in Germany. The results also reveal that the presence of the national flag emoji is associated with significantly higher engagement in Germany irrespective of party, whereas it is associated with slightly higher engagement for politicians of the Republican party and slightly lower engagement for Democrats in the USA. Implications of the results and future research directions are discussed.
Aims
Social media use is widespread in teens. But, few studies have developed recommendations on how social media can be used to promote teen health. The Philadelphia Ujima™ Coalition funded by the Office on Women’s Health conducted a needs assessment to explore social media as a health communication tool. This study aimed to identify (1) social media utilization practices, (2) strategies to effectively engage teens on social media, and (3) recommendations for teen health promotion on social media.
Methods
A cross-sectional mixed methods study design was used, in which a survey was administered to 152 youth (ages: 13–18 years). In addition, four focus groups were conducted with 26 teens to elaborate on the quantitative findings.
Results
We found that while 94.6% of teens use social media, only 3.5% reported using it to seek health-related information. However, when asked about specific topics (i.e., fitness, sexual health, nutrition), 66.7% to 91.7% reported health information seeking. Although, many teens were not able to identify reliable sources of information. Teens felt health messages should be attractive and tailored.
Conclusion
Social media holds promise as an effective health communication tool; however, information must be reliable and composed of attractive messages tailored to meet teens’ diverse needs. The findings from this study are indicative of the critical need to further explore how social media platforms enhance usage in health promotion.
This article expands on my presidential address to further bolster the case that sociology has, from its inception, been engaged in social justice. I argue that a critical review of our discipline and our Association’s vaunted empiricist tradition of objectivity, in which sociologists are detached from their research, was accomplished by a false history and sociology of sociology that ignored, isolated, and marginalized some of the founders. In the past half-century, scholar-activists, working-class sociologists, sociologists of color, women sociologists, indigenous sociologists, and LGBTQ sociologists have similarly been marginalized and discouraged from pursuing social justice issues and applied research within our discipline. Being ignored by academic sociology departments has led them to create or join homes in interdisciplinary programs and other associations that embrace applied and scholar-activist scholarship. I offer thoughts about practices that the discipline and Association should use to reclaim sociology’s social justice tradition.
Since the 2010s, we witness the rise of populism and nationalism as part of a reaction against the global policies of the last 30 years in Western liberal democracies and beyond. This article seeks to unpack the rise of populism and nationalism and its relationship to social media. We review the relevant literature relating to the globalization paradigm and assess how it has influenced communication studies. The rise of the globalization theory coincides with key advancements in the post-Cold War world, such as the growth of international trade, the global movement of people, the increase in the number of international laws and forums, economic liberalism, as well as the rise of the internet and global digital communication networks. But while the global era denotes a cosmopolitan vision, economic insecurity, growing inequality in wealth distribution, as well as cultural change and shifts in traditional values and norms have brought about a broader concern that globalization is associated with a shift of power to transnational elites, whose impact upon common people’s life and experiences is not fully acknowledged. Contemporary populism has been associated with nationalism, but also with the active use of social media platforms as alternative communication sites to mainstream media which is seen as having been captured by elite consensus politics. This complicates the relationship between truth and free expression in an age of social media, meaning that we need to account for the role of such platforms in the rise of populism and ‘post-truth’ politics, as well as its scope to advance the goals and strategies of progressive social movements.
Development of information technology has very much affected the way teachers teach and students learn. Digital devices have become a routine not only for playing games and communicating with classmates but also for the education and knowledge. This has provided opportunities for enriching the learning environment. The classroom today is a very challenging environment. The reason may be the changing focus of the environment which has shifted from the teachers to the learners. Many educators attempt to adopt new instructional approaches to encourage and motivate students to learn; social media can be one of the best approaches. The objective of this chapter is to understand the importance of social media as new teaching pedagogy in higher education institutes. A framework has been proposed to assimilate specific social media channels in teaching pedagogy in higher education. The framework will be useful in identifying how social media platforms can be integrated into teaching pedagogy for higher educational institutes so that the students may be benefited the most.
This article presents the findings of a corpus linguistic analysis of the hashtags #mansplaining, #manspreading, and #manterruption, three lexical blends which have recently found widespread use across a variety of online media platforms. Focusing on the social media and microblogging site Twitter, we analyze a corpus of over 20,000 tweets containing these hashtags to examine how discourses of gender politics and gender relations are represented on the site. More specifically, our analysis suggests that users include these hashtags in tweets to index their individual evaluations of, and assumptions about, “proper” gendered behavior. Consequently, their metadiscursive references to the respective phenomena reflect their beliefs of what constitutes appropriate (verbal) behavior and the extent to which gender is appropriated as a variable dictating this behavior. As such, this article adds to our knowledge of the ways in which gendered social practices become sites of contestation and how contemporary gender politics play out in social media sites.
Social media have become primary forms of social communication and means to maintain social connections among young adult women. Although social connectedness generally has a positive impact on psychological well-being, frequent social media use has been associated with poorer psychological well-being. Individual differences may be due to whether women derive their self-worth from feedback on social media. The associations between reasons for social media use, whether self-worth was dependent on social media feedback, and four aspects of psychological well-being (including stress, depressive symptoms, resilience, and self-kindness) were assessed among 164 U.S. undergraduate women who completed an online questionnaire. Results indicated that having one’s self-worth dependent on social media feedback was associated with using social media for status-seeking. Women whose self-worth was dependent on social media feedback reported lower levels of resilience and self-kindness and higher levels of stress and depressive symptoms. Additionally, women whose self-worth was highly dependent on social media feedback and who were seeking social status in their online interactions reported higher levels of stress. The present findings suggest that women whose self-worth is dependent on social media feedback are at higher risk for poorer psychological well-being, which has implications for practice and policy regarding women’s mental health.
With the evolution of social media the world has witnessed an information explosion. The role of social media in influencing the consumer behavior is huge, but the studies conducted in these areas are insignificant. Scholars have identified different variables over time to study social media marketing, but functionality-based approach was only investigated by Babac (Impact of social-media use on brand equity of magazine brands: A qualitative study of Vogue Turkey, Unpublished Master’s thesis, 2011) and Tresna and Wijaya (iBuss Management, 3: 37–48, 2015). Tresna and Wijaya’s (iBuss Management, 3: 37–48, 2015) study was based on Instagram, therefore, their scale could not be used for Facebook, because of the difference in website functionalities. Most of the social media marketing activities are carried on Facebook and to measure these marketing efforts a research instrument is needed. Therefore, this study is an attempt to develop a measurement scale to assess the influence of social media functionalities.
In order to identify the factors of social media, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was run on a sample of 122 respondents in SPSS 20. EFA was run on 34 items and seven items were removed in the first round. In the second round EFA was run on the remaining 27 items and five items were dropped. Third time when EFA was run, all 22 items loaded well on the seven factors of social media with a cumulative variance of 82.95 percent. The scales reliability was tested by using Cronbach’s alpha which was above the threshold. Further the scale was also tested for convergent and discriminant validity, that indicated positive results. Therefore, 22 items scale to measure seven functionalities of social media websites was found to be reliable and valid.
This study is unique because, a measurement scale to investigate the influence of social media functionalities of Facebook is developed. Previous study was based on Instagram and only six functionalities were measured, whereas this study has filled that gap by providing a full-fledged scale to measure the seven functionalities of social media. This scale can be further used to study the impact of these seven functionalities on various dimensions of consumer-based brand equity, purchase intentions, and brand experience.
This article argues that the type of individualized social media activism that has been conceptualized as ‘connective action’ has affinities to populism, and may have detrimental consequences for democratic procedures and the bureaucratic structures that enable them. We trace the normative allure of individualized digital engagement to the libertarian roots of techno-utopianism and argue that this, in combination with a form of mobilization fueled by digital enthusiasm, has potentially dire democratic and organizational consequences. Digital enthusiasm generated on social media platforms entails self-infatuation, here conceptualized as a form of individualized charismatic authority in the Weberian sense. This individualized form of charismatic authority is fundamentally focused on personalized engagement, and simultaneously interconnected through the technological affordances of social media platforms. If individualized charismatic authority becomes institutionalized as a legitimate and predominant manner of organizing, it may have large-scale implications for societal organizing at large by promoting populism. In sum, we argue that digital enthusiasm not only provides democratic opportunities for protest and contention in civil society, but that the fickleness of the individualized charismatic authority it generates may also put democratic procedures and respect for bureaucratic structures at risk.
Research shows a clear intersection between humor and political communication online as “big data” analyses demonstrate humorous content achieving disproportionate attention across social media platforms. What remains unclear is the degree to which politics are fodder for “silly” content production vis-à-vis humor as a serious political tool. To answer this question, we scraped Twitter data from two cases in which humor and politics converged during the 2016 US presidential election: Hillary Clinton referring to Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables” and Donald Trump calling Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman” during a televised debate. Taking a “small data” approach, we find funny content enacting meaningful political work including expressions of opposition, political identification, and displays of civic support. Furthermore, comparing humor style between partisan cases shows the partial-but incomplete-breakdown of humor’s notoriously firm boundaries. Partisan patterns reveal that the meeting of humor and social media leave neither unchanged.
The city of Denver, Colorado recently outlawed camping in all open space. Part of a broad effort to accelerate the profit potential of prime urban land through real estate speculation and commerce, the camping ban has dislocated homeless people from the city’s marginal spaces. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Denver, this article develops a tripartite approach to public space—prime, everyday, and marginal—to analyze challenging ways in which people who are homeless in Denver must now manage their exposure to others in everyday public spaces. In addition to eliminating places of hard-won safety and security, this singular new code disrupts hygiene, mobility, and sociability routines, thus throwing already precarious lives into further disarray by rendering housing status visible. To demonstrate how everyday social justice springs from interaction between different people co-present in public space, we foreground the voices of Denver’s homeless people, those most impacted by quality of life laws. Evicting individuals from marginal spaces and rendering them visibly homeless in everyday and prime spaces, the ban deprives them of a fundamental right to the city: anonymity.
An analysis of 640 posts from the social media platforms of 14 students at a historically Black university revealed that entertainment accounted for 68% of their social media content, “uplift” 17%, and empowerment 14%. Educators worry that students may be squandering online resources that could help improve their lives when they choose entertainment over uplift and empowerment. The study examines why entertainment trumps uplift and empowerment, and more broadly, how it may serve as a catalyst to combat disinformation.
Interior design practitioners continue to adopt social media technologies as part of the early stages of the inspiration design process. This prominence of social media is also interwoven in the practices of design students. However, the way interior design students perceive and use social media such as Pinterest® as a part of their design process has been underexplored. Drawing on interviews with 25 interior design students in a Council for Interior Design Accredited program, the findings from this study illustrate how students are developing their own norms and guidelines for their search strategies, evaluation of sources, and navigation of attribution on Pinterest. An understanding of interior design students’ perceptions of Pinterest is situated through a connected design learning and information literacy approach, which places values on student-driven interests, media knowledge, and technologies as opportunities to amplify design learning experiences across digital–physical environments. Although Pinterest has social networking features, the interviews revealed that interior design students do not view Pinterest as a social media platform and instead think of Pinterest as a digital tool used alongside other design software. From a connected design learning approach, this finding suggests an opportunity for educators to guide students on how to leverage some of the social features to expand their own professional design networks. With an ever-changing media ecology that provides opportunities for sharing creative work and requires adeptness at managing visibility and flows of information, insights for building more intentional learning environments around how students use Pinterest in interior design are provided.
Influencers are omnipresent on social media platforms. They occupy important digital real estate across a range of topical domains including beauty, fashion, and gaming. While researchers have contributed important work on the respective role that authenticity plays for influencers’ success and have described a burgeoning industry within the larger domain of social media entertainment, comparably little is known about what happens when influencers get involved in politics, when they harness their digital clout to promote political causes and social issues, and thereby become political influencers. This introduction to the special issue on political influencers provides a definition of what makes someone a political influencer. It theoretically locates political influencers within the larger field of media and communication scholarship, and delineates the term from other, related concepts such as that of opinion leader. Building on eight contributions focused across more than six countries and nine platforms, the article showcases important strands of current and future research. It provides the foundation for a more systemic understanding of political influencers on social media, situating them within a media ecology complicated by a diverse array of traditional and nontraditional actors, tactics, and dynamics. The article concludes with recommendations for future research.
This article examines the contemporary phenomenon of decolonial Māori memes, created by young urban Māori to advance the project of decolonizing Aotearoa (New Zealand). We weave Kaupapa Māori (philosophy and practice of Māori people) theory with Foucauldian visual analysis and critical multimodality to analyze 154 memes posted on three Instagram accounts from 2019 to 2021. We demonstrate how the Māori meme creators use discursive strategies to advance decolonization locally, drawing on Māori concepts and practices, including kotahitanga (solidarity), whanaungatanga (relationship-building), whakapapa (ancestry), tino rangatiratanga (self-determination), and use of te reo Māori (the Māori language). We distinguish two functional categories: boundary-marking memes that reference racist Pākehā (New Zealander with European ancestry) behaviors that perpetuate colonization, and solidarity-building memes that reference Māori acts of decolonization. We argue that the humor of the memes provides a potential decolonization roadmap for New Zealanders via its critique of Pākehā actions and cultivation of kotahitanga among Māori.
Students process information in two modes: cognitive and experiential. Case studies and stories are generally used as tools for experiential information processing. This article uses memes as an instructional tool to deliver information for experiential information processing in a public speaking course. The effectiveness of memes as an instructional tool is assessed through a questionnaire in terms of their overall effectiveness and its memorability, concreteness, and course orientation. The findings suggest that memes can be used effectively as instructional tools like stories to make the students understand, discuss, and engage with course content.
Leaders set the tone and the culture for their schools. The purpose of this phenomenology study is to examine how the increase in racial diversity among urban middle school teachers impacts the school's culture. The author utilized the Invitational Education model as a conceptual framework. The researcher conducted a total of 28 interviews with teachers, leaders, and students. Findings indicated that students were mostly the ones benefiting from the increase in racial diversity among teachers. Challenges pertained to the educators’ lack of cultural proficiency which negatively affected the school culture. This study contributes to the leadership literature and offers recommendations to leaders and policy makers.
Increasing attention has been placed to the societal downsides of social media, and appropriately so. Less attention has been paid to the qualities to which social media should aspire. We contend that this is critically important. Not only must social media, and social media scholars, identify and reduce negative outcomes, but we must also critically engage with what is desirable. The purpose of this theoretical essay is to propose a normative framework for digital public spaces. We lay out four categories, and 14 sub-categories, of normative ideals to which social media could aspire. It is our hope that chronicling these qualities will allow scholars to more critically reflect on their normative assumptions when they research social media and will encourage practitioners to think about how social media could be built with these ideals in mind.
Protests and counter-protests seek to draw and direct attention and concern with confronting images and slogans. In recent years, as protests and counter-protests have partially migrated to the digital space, such images and slogans have also gone online. Two main ways in which these images and slogans are translated to the online space is through the use of emoji and hashtags. Despite sustained academic interest in online protests, hashtag activism, and the use of emoji across social media platforms, little is known about the specific functional role that emoji and hashtags play in online social movements. In an effort to fill this gap, the current paper studies both hashtags and emoji in the context of the Twitter discourse around the Black Lives Matter movement.
This study experimented the effect of using visual multimedia intervention to improve users’ social media literacy skills to combat fake news. We carried out a quasi-experiment in one public university in Nigeria and randomly divided 470 participants into equal parts to form a control and experimental group. The respondents in the experimental group were exposed to 8 weeks of training using visual multimedia to improve their social media literacy skills to fight fake news. We realised that those exposed to social media literacy skills training via visual multimedia demonstrated a better knowledge of social media, better recognition of fake news, a higher tendency to verify information and a lesser inclination to share false news. Implications for research and practice were discussed.
The rise of online media has incentivized users to adopt various unethical and artificial ways of gaining social growth to boost their credibility within a short time period. In this paper, we introduce ABOME, a novel multi-platform data repository consisting of artificially boosted online media entities (also known as blackmarket-driven collusive entities), which are prevalent but often unnoticed in online media. ABOME allows quick querying of collusive entities across platforms. These include details of collusive entities involved in blackmarket services to gain artificially boosted appraisals in the form of likes, retweets, views, comments, follows and subscriptions. ABOME contains data related to tweets and users on Twitter, YouTube videos and YouTube channels. We believe that ABOME is a unique data repository which can be used as a benchmark to identify and analyze blackmarket-driven fraudulent activities in online media. We also develop SearchBM, an API and a web portal to identify blackmarket entities.
In a digital media environment where content distribution is shaped by technology companies’ algorithms and user behaviors, news organizations try to post content that can prompt user engagement in forms such as comments, shares, and likes or reactions. This study employs a content analysis of 1,600 messages and analyses of engagement metrics for 157,962 messages to examine to what extent and how Facebook messages of US and Israeli news organizations differ in the engagement modes they generate: commenting versus sharing versus liking/reacting. Drawing on the participation paradigm in audience research, news value theory, and literature on engagement enhancers, the study shows that certain content characteristics are associated with each of the examined engagement modes in more than one country while other content characteristics are associated with particular modes, but not with all of them. It offers a nuanced understanding of user interaction with news-related content and helps think about content units as more engaging or less engaging than others, or as engaging in different ways.
This article intends to systematically examine and review the current studies on social media marketing in the small and medium enterprise sector. The research also intends to synthesise and organise the unique aspects covered in these studies and further understand how these various issues related to social media marketing were addressed in these studies. The review covers 48 articles, collected from peer-reviewed journals from 2009 to 2019. These articles are then classified in different categories based on the central theme of research, research design of the study, theoretical model used in the study, country of study and social media platform used in the research. The findings of the review provide an overview of the categories as well as the most widely used subcategory for each classification, along with upcoming trends and tendencies in social media marketing.
This study investigates the socio-demographic predictors for misinformation sharing and authenticating behavior among Malaysian young adults, based on data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic through a self-reporting survey. A total of 833 Malaysians aged between 18 and 35 years old were recruited. Results indicate that 64.5% (n = 537) of the respondents authenticated suspicious news, 16% (n = 133) shared misinformation knowingly, while 30% (n = 250) did so unknowingly. Frequency of sharing news (β = 0.229, p < 0.001), frequency of social media use (β = 0.135, p = 0.03), frequency of access to online news portals (β = - 0.141, p = 0.007) and the ability to identify misinformation (β = -0.161, p < 0.001) significantly predicted misinformation sharing. Conversely, only frequency of sharing news (β = -0.425; p < 0.001) and importance of reading real news (β = 0.873; p < 0.001) predicted authentication behavior. Findings suggest that the majority of the misinformation sharing behavior is accidental instead of intentional, and proposes several strategies that can be adopted to mitigate the wide spread of misinformation including seminars and trainings to improve an individual's social media literacy, critical thinking and analytical skill and also one's social responsibility as a good citizen.
Black individuals use social media at higher rates than their racial counterparts, and these relationships often promote favorable group-based outcomes. However, quantitative examinations of these relationships are lacking. Using a cross-sectional U.S. Black adult sample ( N = 295) and applying social identity gratifications, the present work examines individuals’ social media use, racial adherence, perceptions of group vitality, and motivations toward collective action. Results suggest that racial adherence positively mediates the relationship between identity-focused social media use and perceptions of group vitality. Moreover, this relationship is positively related to individuals’ motivations to engage in collective action on behalf of Black communities.
This article argues that social media companies’ power to regulate communication in the public sphere illustrates a novel type of domination. The idea is that, since social media companies can partially dictate the terms of citizens’ political participation in the public sphere, they can arbitrarily interfere with the choices individuals make qua citizens. I contend that social media companies dominate citizens in two different ways. First, I focus on the cases in which social media companies exercise direct control over political speech. They exercise quasi-public power over citizens because their regulation of speech on social media platforms implies the capacity to arbitrarily interfere with citizens’ democratic contestation in the political system. Second, companies’ algorithmic governance entails the capacity to interfere with citizens’ choices about what mode of discursive engagement they endorse in their relationships with fellow citizens. By raising the cost of deliberative engagement, companies narrow citizens’ choice menu.
The higher education system globally is inherently inequitable. Discriminatory practices and oppressive power dynamics are particularly prevalent in the South African higher education landscape, which is characterized by a legacy of colonialism and apartheid. As a result, although students from a wide range of backgrounds are increasingly participating in higher education, many students who do not fit the dominant status quo question their belonging within these spaces. Students’ experiences of alienation within higher education can have profoundly negative physical, pyschosocial, and education outcomes. However, students also display agency in negotiating the exclusionary institutional cultures within their universities and succeed despite these experiences. Photovoice methodology can be a useful tool for critiquing and highlighting such agentic practices, and for foregrounding the voices of students. In this research brief, we reflect on two photovoice projects that sought to examine the complexity of students’ experiences of belonging and alienation in higher education in South Africa. Our findings illustrate that although students may experience alienation on campus, they may also create spaces of belonging, “speak back” to, and challenge the exclusions inherent to campus life.
Photovoice can be more than a research method for communities to identify and mitigate social oppressions. Photovoice has the potential for emancipatory outcomes and the transformation of power relations. This article serves as a primer for beginning researchers who are new to the emancipatory power of the photovoice method or for advanced researchers who would like to re-imagine their current use of the photovoice method to an emancipatory approach that elevates and empowers. Our purpose is to provide a framework for deciding structures, processes, and outcomes of emancipatory photovoice. We specifically prescribe steps with respect to power relations among partners, design prompts or heuristics, and the anticipated and unanticipated outcomes. We base our perspectives on over a decade of photovoice research experiences. Emancipatory photovoice research, if implemented thoughtfully, can facilitate power sharing, collective learning, healing, and growth.
YouTube sells advertisements on the posted videos, which in turn enables the content creators to monetize their videos. As an unintended consequence, this has proliferated various illegal activities such as artificial boosting of views, likes, comments, and subscriptions. We refer to such videos (gaining likes and comments artificially) and channels (gaining subscriptions artificially) as “collusive entities.” Detecting such collusive entities is an important yet challenging task. Existing solutions mostly deal with the problem of spotting fake views, spam comments, fake content, and so on, and oftentimes ignore how such fake activities emerge via collusion. Here, we collect a large dataset consisting of two types of collusive entities on YouTube— videos submitted to gain collusive likes and comment requests and channels submitted to gain collusive subscriptions.
We begin by providing an in-depth analysis of collusive entities on YouTube fostered by various blackmarket services . Following this, we propose models to detect three types of collusive YouTube entities: videos seeking collusive likes, channels seeking collusive subscriptions, and videos seeking collusive comments. The third type of entity is associated with temporal information. To detect videos and channels for collusive likes and subscriptions, respectively, we utilize one-class classifiers trained on our curated collusive entities and a set of novel features. The SVM-based model shows significant performance with a true positive rate of 0.911 and 0.910 for detecting collusive videos and collusive channels, respectively. To detect videos seeking collusive comments, we propose CollATe , a novel end-to-end neural architecture that leverages time-series information of posted comments along with static metadata of videos. CollATe is composed of three components: metadata feature extractor (which derives metadata-based features from videos), anomaly feature extractor (which utilizes the time-series data to detect sudden changes in the commenting activity), and comment feature extractor (which utilizes the text of the comments posted during collusion and computes a similarity score between the comments). Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of CollATe (with a true positive rate of 0.905) over the baselines.
While learning involves the acquisition of skills and the development of repertoires, some educators harbor even more profound learning goals, seeking to enable learning that is transformative. Theorizing about transformative learning posits that it is precipitated by a disorienting dilemma. Disorienting dilemmas may be thought of as times when new information causes a person to call into question their values, beliefs, or assumptions. Transformative learning can occur through rich, experiential learning experiences or life events, and it can also occur in the classroom. While much has been written about transformational learning, the teacher’s role in the process is undertheorized.
Background
The health information is an important factor for improving people's health behaviors. On the other hand, media literacy plays an important role in the search and selection of valid information and resources about health. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate the correlation between health literacy and media literacy.
Method
This study was a cross-sectional study. Random cluster sampling was used to select 700 citizens in Kerman, Iran. Health literacy for Iranian adults’ questionnaire and media literacy questionnaire were used to collect the data.
Results
Health literacy of 53.2% of the citizens was insufficient. Media literacy of 38.6% of the citizens was moderate and it was high in 61.3%. A significant positive correlation was found between health literacy and media literacy.
Conclusion
The media literacy was an important determinant factor for health literacy. The development and increase of media literacy can also increase health literacy.
In this interdisciplinary roundtable discussion, five scholars interested in political communication work through the democratic dilemmas created when privately owned social media platforms are used as digital public squares by elected officials in the United States. This conversation unfolds in the context of ongoing legal cases that challenge politicians’ efforts to block select interlocutors and bar them from participation. We grapple with the tension between politicians’ use of social media to broadcast their own messages as a form of publicity with the desire by some members of the public that politicians be transparent online by allowing the electorate to question or even criticize them. Through this discussion, we weigh the importance of the right to criticize the government and its leaders alongside the realities of contentious content on social media platforms that are rife with abusive content, in a cultural context marked by social inequalities.
In this study, we examined students’ perceptions of peer aggression occurring within their school environment and how these perceptions are interconnected with both social media rumination and distress. Social media usage is associated with a range of negative mental health and interpersonal outcomes for adolescents. Social media use can increase youth’s vulnerability to peer victimization and psychosocial difficulties. In addition, ruminating when sad or stressed has been linked to elevated distress for youth experiencing peer aggression. Yet rumination specifically regarding social media activities has not been investigated in relation to peer aggression and distress, nor has the degree to which students perceive peer aggression occurring at school been included in these investigations. Participants were 169 high school students (age, M = 15.89, SD = .87), largely identifying as Black/African American and female, who completed surveys as part of a larger program working with at-risk youth in a Midwestern, urban city. We found that social media rumination mediated the relationship between perceptions of bullying at school and feelings of distress, but mediation was not supported when examining student perceptions of cyberbullying frequency and youth distress. In the case of bullying, rumination may disrupt other forms of coping—such as positive cognitive distractions—that would ameliorate symptoms of distress. Furthermore, we present evidence that social media rumination is experienced by, and has different influences on, youth. We highlight the need for differentiated intervention and prevention efforts regarding these two forms of peer aggression. Future research may be justified to examine these possibilities.
Following the 2017 UK general election, there was much debate about the so-called ‘youthquake’, or increase in youth turnout (YouGov). Some journalists claimed it was the ‘. . . memes wot won it’. This article seeks to understand the role of memes during political campaigns. Combining meta-data and content analysis, this article aims to answer three questions. First, who creates political memes? Second, what is the level of engagement with political memes and who engages with them? Finally, can any meaningful political information be derived from memes? The findings here suggest that by far the most common producers of memes were citizens suggesting that memes may be a form of citizen-initiated political participation. There was a high level of engagement with memes with almost half a million shares in our sample. However, the level of policy information in memes was low suggesting they are unlikely to increase political knowledge.
With the rise in popularity of social media platforms like Twitter, having higher influence on these platforms has a greater value attached to it, since it has the power to influence many decisions in the form of brand promotions and shaping opinions. However, blackmarket services that allow users to inorganically gain influence are a threat to the credibility of these social networking platforms. Twitter users can gain inorganic appraisals in the form of likes, retweets, and follows through these blackmarket services either by paying for them or by joining syndicates wherein they gain such appraisals by providing similar appraisals to other users. These customers tend to exhibit a mix of organic and inorganic retweeting behavior, making it tougher to detect them.
In this article, we investigate these blackmarket customers engaged in collusive retweeting activities. We collect and annotate a novel dataset containing various types of information about blackmarket customers and use these sources of information to construct multiple user representations. We adopt Weighted Generalized Canonical Correlation Analysis (WGCCA) to combine these individual representations to derive user embeddings that allow us to effectively classify users as: genuine users, bots, promotional customers, and normal customers. Our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches (32.95% better macro F1-score than the best baseline).
This article explores the divisive nature of social media public culture in which impromptu communities of strangers affirm or antagonize one another in non-face-to-face interactions through memes, hashtags, and other posts. Drawing upon the work of Michael Herzfeld, specifically his notion of cultural intimacy and social poetics, this article analyzes contemporary politicized social media to demonstrate what I call social media poetics, briefly, public online shaming through which antagonists criticize one another and, in so doing, create their own identities; this process relies upon essentializing communities of posters that quickly become polarized. During social media acts of “creative shame,” people “become” their posts, making social media a vehicle for perpetuating both community and disunity based on social identities affirmed or antagonized when somehow “embodied” in the posts.
In this article, a diverse group of early, mid, and advanced career scholars call for counseling psychology to continue to evolve in our integration of social justice action in our field. In doing so, we first consider our history as proponents and enactors of social justice, highlighting the ways in which counseling psychologists have served as social justice leaders in psychology. We then discuss our field’s contemporary challenges to, and opportunities for, social justice progress as we work toward equity and justice. Finally, we offer recommendations for counseling psychologists individually and as a field to move forward in our social justice action. Given our longstanding social justice values and our unique training as counseling psychologists, if we aim with intentionality to use our skills toward systems change, counseling psychologists are poised to have a strong and proactive role as social change agents within psychology and society at large.
As digital interactions become more global, individuals who bring divergent practices ‘to the keyboard’ must interact with other participants who come to the digital space with different cultural norms and expectations. This study explores the interface between local expectations and global practice through emoji use in online gaming – a venue which brings people from around the globe together on a common ‘playing field’. Since emojis were originally designed to tap into universals in human experience and expression, they are a ready-made resource through which individuals can integrate their culture-based expectations with communicative norms that are rooted in the common denominators of the (global) digital environment. Using live chat data from the game streaming platform Twitch, this study examines emojis posted to the open chat room during game streams of one female and one male gamer. The analysis examines the ways that participants use these semiotic images to orient toward gaming communities of practice and claim identities within gaming groups. It also explores whether emoji use is affected by the gender of the streamer. Analysis indicates that participants in the man’s stream differ from participants woman’s stream in the ways they use emojis to claim community membership and employ emojis as phatic devices.
This article develops an analytical framework to understand the modes of address of native-to-online content types (gameplay, do-it-yourself (DIY) beauty, personality vlogging). These types of content differ sharply from established screen entertainment and are constituted from intrinsically interactive audience-centricity and appeal to authenticity and community in a commercialising space which we call ‘social media entertainment’. The article offers a revisionist analysis of the shaping and disciplining of brand culture through the twinned discourses of authenticity and community. The significance of social media entertainment lies in that, for a great many especially young viewers, this is what television is, now.
Social media activism provides an important space for dialogue and consciousness-raising. Racism, privilege, and inequalities have received considerable attention in social media discussions. #WhiteProverbs was one attempt to confront this issue, focusing particularly on White privilege. The tweets show how social media is a site where “serious games” are played, as agents are constrained by the “rules” but still able to make choices and push boundaries. This article explores the #WhiteProverbs tweets that came from Australian users to better understand how Australian social media users understand and confront whiteness. Through the use of humor, specifically irony and sarcasm, Twitter users identify a number of key ways that White privilege is reproduced, including justifications for racial inequality, questioning claims to racial differences, and constructing an exclusively White national identity.
As mentioned in the outline, this chapter critically reflects the scientific conceptions in the meta expert discourse from an educational perspective and as a continuation of the investigative tasks identified in step II of educational reconstruction (section 1.4). Drawing on the postcolonial debate which is discussed in chapter II, this chapter continues to clarify the expert perspective. It identifies major conceptual issues that relate to the North-South epistemological relations and re-discusses them in a gender perspective.