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‘Living in a post-truth era’? Online misinformation in everyday life in rural and urban China
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Post-truth politics-the term has achieved buzzword status, arguably with good reason. After all, the Trump presidential campaign was built on a foundation of demonstrably false statements and unproven allegations of conspiracy. However, the concept of post-truth politics currently lacks a firm conceptual foundation. This article, therefore, defines and explicates the concept of post-truth politics, drawing primarily on the work of Jodi Dean, Marc Andrejevic, and Anthony Giddens. With this refined definition, I apply the concept to examine a recent political debate over a proposed streetcar line in Arlington, Virginia. A brief conclusion discusses the political and ethical implications of the Arlington streetcar case and explores prospects for future conceptual development.
Online media platforms are increasingly using algorithms to select and present relevant information to their audiences. This highlights the importance of exploring whether people are aware of algorithmic content recommendations. Although some studies have already investigated algorithmic awareness, no standardized instrument has been developed yet to assess this construct. In this study, we therefore developed and validated the Algorithmic Media Content Awareness Scale (AMCA-scale). This scale contains four underlying dimensions: 1) users’ awareness of content filtering, 2) users’ awareness of automated decision-making, 3) users’ awareness of human-algorithm interplay, and 4) users’ awareness of ethical considerations. In validating the scale, results revealed strong psychometrics properties. The AMCA-scale was also successfully tested for three different online platforms: Facebook, YouTube, and Netflix, showing its robustness over different environments. Based on these findings, we conclude that the AMCA-scale offers scholars a valid, reliable and robust tool to measure algorithmic awareness.
As the coronavirus pandemic continues apace in the United States, the dizzying amount of data being generated, analyzed and consumed about the virus has led to calls to proclaim this the first ‘data-driven pandemic’. But at the same time, it seems that this plethora of data has not meant a better grasp on the reality of the pandemic and its effects. Even as we have the potential to digitally track and trace nearly every single individual who has contracted the virus, we have no idea exactly how many people have had the virus, been hospitalized, or died because of it, largely due to a confluence of factors, particularly active obfuscation and mismanagement by public authorities and misinformation spread through social media and right-wing media channels. But beyond these dynamics, there also lies the less nefarious ways that the everyday, subjective practices of data collection, analysis and visualization have the potential to themselves (re)produce these very same dynamics where data is at once valorized and ignored, preeminent and completely useless. That is, the pandemic has revealed only the general inadequacy of our data infrastructures and assemblages to solving pressing social issues, but also the more general shift towards a ‘post-truth’ disposition in contemporary social life. But, as this paper argues, it would be a mistake to see the centrality of data as being somehow the opposite from the larger post-truth apparatus, as the two are instead fundamentally intertwined and co-produced.
When does repression of online expression lead to public punishment of citizens in China? Chinese social media is heavily censored through a system of intermediary liability in which the government relies on private companies to implement content controls. Outside of this system the Chinese authorities at times utilize public punishment to repress social media users. Under China’s regulatory environment, individuals are subject to punishment such as fines and detention for their expressions online. While censorship has become more implicit, authorities have periodically announced cases of repression to the public. To understand when the state escalates from censoring online content to punishing social media users for their online expressions and publicizes the punishment, we collected 468 cases of state repression announced by the authorities between 1 January 2014 and 1 April 2019. We find that the Chinese authorities most frequently publicize persecutions of citizens who posted online expression deemed critical of the government or those that challenged government credibility. These cases show more evidence of the state pushing the responsibility of ‘self-regulation’ further to average citizens. By making an example of individuals who post prohibited content even in semi-public social media venues, the state signals strength and its determination to maintain authority.
The scale, volume, and distribution speed of disinformation raise concerns in governments, businesses, and citizens. To respond effectively to this problem, we first need to disambiguate, understand, and clearly define the phenomenon. Our online information landscape is characterized by a variety of different types of false information. There is no commonly agreed typology framework, specific categorization criteria, and explicit definitions as a basis to assist the further investigation of the area. Our work is focused on filling this need. Our contribution is twofold. First, we collect the various implicit and explicit disinformation typologies proposed by scholars. We consolidate the findings following certain design principles to articulate an all-inclusive disinformation typology. Second, we propose three independent dimensions with controlled values per dimension as categorization criteria for all types of disinformation. The taxonomy can promote and support further multidisciplinary research to analyze the special characteristics of the identified disinformation types.
Truthfulness is the lifeblood of news. However, fake news, like a wide-spreading virus, is infecting the global journalism. Taking China’s top fake news from 2001 to 2019 as an example, the study endorses a social pathological approach to address the symptoms, etiology, and developing trend of fake news. Through symptoms diagnosis, the study contributes more categories to the previous typology of fake news: “click-bait,” “alarmist talk,” “subjective assumption,” “user-generated content (UGC)-news,” “hearsay,” and “incorrect-data news”. Etiology analysis shows that Chinese fake news is mainly about social life partially because of no previous tradition of verifying daily statements from politicians. Trend predictions reveal that online media, hearsay, and social life-related news of unverified single sources are the main problems which are different from the West and require special attention in the future. The proposed solution for the Chinese press and media outlets is to cooperate with internet platforms and establish a comprehensive fact-checking mechanism, integrating professional journalism, data and visualization technology, specialized knowledge, and communication efficiency.
Marking the 25th anniversary of the “digital divide,” we continue our metaphor of the digital inequality stack by mapping out the rapidly evolving nature of digital inequality using a broad lens. We tackle complex, and often unseen, inequalities spawned by the platform economy, automation, big data, algorithms, cybercrime, cybersafety, gaming, emotional well-being, assistive technologies, civic engagement, and mobility. These inequalities are woven throughout the digital inequality stack in many ways including differentiated access, use, consumption, literacies, skills, and production. While many users are competent prosumers who nimbly work within different layers of the stack, very few individuals are “full stack engineers” able to create or recreate digital devices, networks, and software platforms as pure producers. This new frontier of digital inequalities further differentiates digitally skilled creators from mere users. Therefore, we document emergent forms of inequality that radically diminish individuals’ agency and augment the power of technology creators, big tech, and other already powerful social actors whose dominance is increasing.
For a long time, a common opinion among policy-makers was that the digital divide problem would be solved when a country's Internet connection rate reaches saturation. However, scholars of the second-level digital divide have concluded that the divides in Internet skills and type of use continue to expand even after physical access is universal. This study-based on an online survey among a representative sample of the Dutch population-indicates that the first-level digital divide remains a problem in one of the richest and most technologically advanced countries in the world. By extending basic physical access combined with material access, the study finds that a diversity in access to devices and peripherals, device-related opportunities, and the ongoing expenses required to maintain the hardware, software, and subscriptions affect existing inequalities related to Internet skills, uses, and outcomes.
Political communication is the process of putting information, technology, and media in the service of power. Increasingly, political actors are automating such processes, through algorithms that obscure motives and authors yet reach immense networks of people through personal ties among friends and family. Not all political algorithms are used for manipulation and social control however. So what are the primary ways in which algorithmic political communication—organized by automated scripts on social media—may undermine elections in democracies? In the US context, what specific elements of communication policy or election law might regulate the behavior of such “bots,” or the political actors who employ them? First, we describe computational propaganda and define political bots as automated scripts designed to manipulate public opinion. Second, we illustrate how political bots have been used to manipulate public opinion and explain how algorithms are an important new domain of analysis for scholars of political communication. Finally, we demonstrate how political bots are likely to interfere with political communication in the United States by allowing surreptitious campaign coordination, illegally soliciting either contributions or votes, or violating rules on disclosure.
China's control of information online is often imposed by social media platforms in the name of “rumor management.” This article examines the content moderation strategies of Sina Weibo, China's largest microblogging platform, in regulating discussion of rumors following the 2015 Tianjin blasts. More than 100,000 Weibo posts were collected and categorized into three data sets: rumor discussion posts from the public, rumor‐debunking posts from Weibo's official rumor rebuttal accounts, and posts removed from the system. Two content‐moderation rumor strategies, namely rumor rebuttal and content removal, were identified. Clustering analysis and time series analysis was applied to test how these two strategies were used to filter posts of different topics and how they were associated with public discussion of rumor‐related topics. Our findings suggest that the platform's response to rumor varied depending on the political sensitivity of the topic. Time‐series analysis indicated that the implementation of both strategies was usually associated with a subsequent increase in general discussion about the rumor, suggesting that these strategies do not create a consistent chilling effect on public speech.
Purpose
The aim of the study is to understand how meaning is assigned to online searching by viewing it as a mundane, yet often invisible, activity of everyday life and an integrated part of various social practices.
Design/methodology/approach
Searching is investigated with a sociomaterial approach with a starting point in information searching as entangled across practices and material arrangements and as a mundane part of everyday life. 21 focus groups with 127 participants have been carried out. The study focuses particularly on peoples’ experiences and meaning-making and on how these experiences and the making of meaning could be understood in the light of algorithmic shaping.
Findings
An often-invisible activity such as searching is made visible with the help of focus group discussions. An understanding of the relationship between searching and everyday life through two interrelated narratives is proposed: a search-ification of everyday life and a mundane-ification of search.
Originality/value
The study broadens the often narrow focus on searching in order to open up for a research-based discussion in information science on the role of online searching in society and everyday life.
Thematic analysis (TA) is a method for identifying, analyzing, and interpreting patterns of meaning (‘themes’) within qualitative data. TA is unusual in the canon of qualitative analytic approaches, because it offers a method – a tool or technique, unbounded by theoretical commitments – rather than a methodology (a theoretically informed, and confined, framework for research). This does not mean that TA is atheoretical, or, as is often assumed, realist, or essentialist. Rather, TA can be applied across a range of theoretical frameworks and indeed research paradigms. There are versions of TA developed for use within (post)positivist frameworks that foreground the importance of coding reliability (e.g. Boyatzis, 1998; Guest, MacQueen, & Namey, 2012), and given the emphasis on positivism in positive psychology (Friedman, 2008), it is unsurprising that such approaches are often favored by qualitative researchers in this area (e.g. Selvam & Collicutt, 2013). However, there are also versions of TA – like ours – developed (primarily) for use within a qualitative paradigm (Braun & Clarke, 2006, 2013). These versions emphasize an organic approach to coding and theme development and the active role of the researcher in these processes, and some positive psychologists are embracing the greater flexibility that they offer to the qualitative researcher (e.g. Holmqvist & Frisén, 2012). Since we published our original paper on TA (Braun & Clarke, 2006), our approach has become the most widely cited of the many (many!) different version of TA available to the qualitative researcher, and it is this version that we focus on in the rest of this brief commentary.
Introduction. This paper reports the first stage of an ongoing information behaviour research project undertaken with a rural Indigenous community in South Australia. Method. Twenty-one Ngarrindjeri volunteers participated in the field study. Permission was granted and extensive community consultations were conducted. Analysis. Questionnaires and interview transcriptions were analysed using the open coding method. Results. Ngarrindjeri people’s everyday information needs included the gathering of information on weather, jobs, entertainment, culture, education, and health services. The Internet (37.6%) was the most frequently used source of information where participants obtained information from social media, specialised Websites and search engines. However, non-Internet resources accounted for 62.4% of overall information sources and these included local sources such as families and relatives, Elders, and local TV channels. Ngarrindjeri participants were distressed by a lack of computer literacy, costs of maintaining a network, and inadequate facilities in the rural area. Despite this, their attitudes towards the Internet were still positive: they recognised the value of technologies and would like to distribute their culture online, with caution and in an appropriate manner. Conclusion. The study provides insights into indigenous Australians’ information behaviour and Internet use in their daily lives. Future research directions are also discussed. This research project was funded by the auDA Foundation Pty Ltd and Division of ITEE Research Development Grant at the University of South Australia. We acknowledge the advice and support of the Ngarrindjeri Land and Progress Association, with particular thanks to the Ngarrindjeri participants. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their detailed and constructive comments. Research Assistants Vicky Sun and Dandan Ma helped collect the data and did some preliminary analysis.
The first two years of the Xi Jinping administration saw a thorough reconfiguration of Internet governance. This reconfiguration created a centralized and integrated institutional framework for information technologies, in support of an ambitious agenda to place digital technologies at the heart of propaganda, public opinion and social control work. Conversely, the autonomy and spontaneity of China’s online sphere was vastly reduced, as the leadership closed channels for public deliberation. This article reviews the institutional and regulatory changes that have taken place between 2012 and 2014, and analyses the methods and purposes of control they imply.
Despite growing interest in search engines in China, relatively few empirical studies have examined their sociopolitical implications. This study fills several research gaps by comparing query results (N = 6320) from China's two leading search engines, Baidu and Google, focusing on accessibility, overlap, ranking, and bias patterns. Analysis of query results of 316 popular Chinese Internet events reveals the following: (1) after Google moved its servers from Mainland China to Hong Kong, its results are equally if not more likely to be inaccessible than Baidu's, and Baidu's filtering is much subtler than the Great Firewall's wholesale blocking of Google's results; (2) there is low overlap (6.8%) and little ranking similarity between Baidu's and Google's results, implying different search engines, different results and different social realities; and (3) Baidu rarely links to its competitors Hudong Baike or Chinese Wikipedia, while their presence in Google's results is much more prominent, raising search bias concerns. These results suggest search engines can be architecturally altered to serve political regimes, arbitrary in rendering social realities and biased toward self-interest.
While much has been written about the technological, economic and regulatory aspects
of search engines, their impact on everyday life has been largely overlooked. This
essay argues that this is mainly because the role of information and knowledge has
been poorly theorized in the social sciences in terms of how search engines are actually
used. One way to make a start on this topic is to bring to bear two theoretical frameworks
from the social study of technology – large technological systems and the domestication
of technology. These allow us to see how search engines have become an infrastructure
at a time when, on the one hand, the uses of the Internet as a system have become
pervasive and, on the other, information seeking in the home has become a routine
activity in everyday life. Several studies of search behaviour have identified the
main patterns of search. What emerges is the dominant role played by Google, and that
the vast majority of searches are related to leisure. The paper asks whether Google
plays a gatekeeping function, and how it shapes the information we use in everyday
life.
In a representative survey of the Dutch population we found that people with low levels
of education and disabled people are using the Internet for more hours a day in their
spare time than higher educated and employed populations. To explain this finding, we
investigated what these people are doing online. The first contribution is a theoretically
validated cluster of Internet usage types: information, news, personal development, social
interaction, leisure, commercial transaction and gaming. The second contribution is
that, based on this classification, we were able to identify a number of usage differences,
including those demonstrated by people with different gender, age, education and Internet
experience, that are often observed in digital divide literature. The general conclusion is
that when the Internet matures, it will increasingly reflect known social, economic and
cultural relationships of the offline world, including inequalities.
Mixed methods research involves the combined use of quantitative and qualitative methods in the same research study, and it
is becoming increasingly important in several scientific areas. The aim of this paper is to review and compare through a mixed
methods multiple-case study the application of this methodology in three reputable behavioural science journals: the Journal of Organizational Behavior, Addictive Behaviors and Psicothema. A quantitative analysis was carried out to review all the papers published in these journals during the period 2003–2008
and classify them into two blocks: theoretical and empirical, with the latter being further subdivided into three subtypes
(quantitative, qualitative and mixed). A qualitative analysis determined the main characteristics of the mixed methods studies
identified, in order to describe in more detail the ways in which the two methods are combined based on their purpose, priority,
implementation and research design. From the journals selected, a total of 1,958 articles were analysed, the majority of which
corresponded to empirical studies, with only a small number referring to research that used mixed methods. Nonetheless, mixed
methods research does appear in all the behavioural science journals studied within the period selected, showing a range of
designs, where the sequential equal weight mixed methods research design seems to stand out.
In this chapter, the authors begin by describing the current state of comparative disinformation research in Sub‐Saharan Africa and beyond. They then discuss two of the methodological challenges we have faced: the difficulty to identify the most appropriate unit of comparison, and the importance of taking proactive steps to guarantee research outputs that are inclusive of the diverse range of individual experiences with disinformation. Finally, and building on the idea presented above that the study of falsehoods, rumors, and inaccurate information might be best understood as a field of study of its own, the authors highlight the areas in which methodological innovation from Sub‐Saharan Africa could lead to more equitable and inclusive research elsewhere. There are plenty of lessons to be learned from decades of contextualized research on the roots, effects, and consequences of poor‐quality information outside the Global North.
The internet is becoming a major source of everyday information, yet existing research often focuses on specific information seeking contexts such as health, climate change, news, or hobbies. In this paper, we put forward a more holistic theoretical model of information seeking practices in everyday life that combines the social phenomenological perspective of Savolainen (2008) and the domestication framework proposed by Haddon (2004). We extend the cultural context to the Global South countries, where there is less research on “mobile first” societies centred on emerging mobile platforms. Based on extensive and mixed-methods fieldwork in rural and industrial China about everyday information seeking practices, the paper goes beyond previous research about digital divides in internet access and internet literacy. Instead, it focuses on divides in everyday information seeking practices. We argue that new divides are emerging between those with more restricted everyday internet uses and those with broader and more diverse ones. We compare everyday information practices and divides in China with those in India and show how a theory of digital divides in everyday information seeking practices can be applied beyond both countries to the Global South. Such a theory can also contribute to the design of informatisation policies.
This study examines the “fake news” problem in China where the media environment is tightly controlled. Focusing on online rumors that are not politically sensitive, this article seeks to shed light on a commercialized dimension of China’s online media landscape in addition to a highly politicalized one that previous research has emphasized. Based on an intermedia agenda-setting analysis of the top ten rumors circulated on China’s Internet in 2016, this study demonstrates that although the government-controlled news websites challenged the rumors to a great extent, they also contributed to the perpetration of misinformation. Even the national official media advanced some rumors themselves and induced other media outlets to do so.
China has in recent years seen the rapid adoption of multifunctional social networking applications such as WeChat. This paper aims to explore if China’s social stratification has influenced the adoption and use of mobile social apps and if social apps such as WeChat can help to bridge the digital divide by providing urban and rural users equal access to diverse information and communication resources. The study is based on 4 months of fieldwork in the Henan Province of central China and combines quantitative data from surveys and qualitative data from semistructured interviews and focus groups. We found that there still exists a digital gap in the adoption and use of mobile social apps such as WeChat between rural and urban China, but such differences are also associated with demographic variables such as age, gender, and education level. Meanwhile, we found that WeChat has become more than a communication tool; it has also played an essential role in everyday problem-solving and information seeking for both rural and urban users. Our qualitative interviews and focus group studies reveal how WeChat influences various aspects of daily life in developing areas in China. We argue that although some divides in information seeking are being overcome, other new divides are emerging.
Within the scientific community, much attention has focused on improving communications between scientists, policy makers, and the public. To date, efforts have centered on improving the content, accessibility, and delivery of scientific communications. Here we argue that in the current political and media environment faulty communication is no longer the core of the problem. Distrust in the scientific enterprise and misperceptions of scientific knowledge increasingly stem less from problems of communication and more from the widespread dissemination of misleading and biased information. We describe the profound structural shifts in the media environment that have occurred in recent decades and their connection to public policy decisions and technological changes. We explain how these shifts have enabled unscrupulous actors with ulterior motives increasingly to circulate fake news, misinformation, and disinformation with the help of trolls, bots, and respondent-driven algorithms. We document the high degree of partisan animosity, implicit ideological bias, political polarization, and politically motivated reasoning that now prevail in the public sphere and offer an actual example of how clearly stated scientific conclusions can be systematically perverted in the media through an internet-based campaign of disinformation and misinformation. We suggest that, in addition to attending to the clarity of their communications, scientists must also develop online strategies to counteract campaigns of misinformation and disinformation that will inevitably follow the release of findings threatening to partisans on either end of the political spectrum.
Lies spread faster than the truth
There is worldwide concern over false news and the possibility that it can influence political, economic, and social well-being. To understand how false news spreads, Vosoughi et al. used a data set of rumor cascades on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. About 126,000 rumors were spread by ∼3 million people. False news reached more people than the truth; the top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people. Falsehood also diffused faster than the truth. The degree of novelty and the emotional reactions of recipients may be responsible for the differences observed.
Science , this issue p. 1146
This article puts forward a theory of the role of digital media in social change. It begins by criticizing three theories that currently dominate our understanding of digital media and of media generally: network theory, mediatization theory and actor-network theory. It also identifies a gap in current communication theory, namely, that digital media mostly do not fit the divide into mass and interpersonal communication. A further problem is that insufficient attention is given to the difference between political communication and popular culture or everyday life. The article develops an alternative, focusing on four countries that provide a range of relationships between media and society; the U.S., Sweden, India and China. In all four countries, despite their differences, digital media, in contrast to traditional broadcast and interpersonal media, have led to a more differentiated media landscape. Greater complexity in political communication nevertheless runs up against the continuing dominance of elite agenda-setting. In terms of popular culture, all four countries have experienced a proliferation of media offerings and greater tetheredness between people. Hence, new divides are emerging between more active and variegated as against more passive and restricted media uses. The article concludes with implications of digital media for understanding media generally: with new digital media, there is now a need to rethink media theory in terms of fundamental debates about how media transform or preserve the social order.
If politicians can lie without condemnation, what are scientists to do? Kathleen Higgins offers some explanation.
Described as the biggest migration in human history, an estimated 250 million Chinese people have left their villages in recent decades to live and work in urban areas. Xinyuan Wang spent 15 months living among a community of these migrants in a small factory town in southeast China to track their use of social media. It was here she witnessed a second migration taking place: a movement from offline to online. As Wang argues, this is not simply a convenient analogy but represents the convergence of two phenomena as profound and consequential as each other, where the online world now provides a home for the migrant workers who feel otherwise ‘homeless’. Wang’s fascinating study explores the full range of preconceptions commonly held about Chinese people – their relationship with education, with family, with politics, with ‘home’ – and argues why, for this vast population, it is time to reassess what we think we know about contemporary China and the evolving role of social media.
The task of this work is to conduct a global political-economic analysis of China's major social media platforms in the context of transformations of the Chinese economy. It analyses Chinese social media's commodity and capital form. It compares the political economy of Baidu (search engine), Weibo (microblog) and Renren (social networking site) to the political economy of the US platforms Google (search engine), Twitter (microblog) and Facebook (social networking site) in order to analyse differences and commonalities. The comparative analysis focuses on aspects such as profits, the role of advertising, the boards of directors, shareholders, financial market values, terms of use and usage policies. The analysis is framed by the question to which extent China has a capitalist or socialist economy.
This article is a report on a research project that collected detailed information on articles, book chapters, books, and so on, published by academics on the Chinese Internet between 1990 and early 2013. The findings of the meta-review of 20 years of Chinese Internet research, as gleaned from quantitative and qualitative analysis of the collected body of publications, are presented and discussed in this report. It engages with the conclusions drawn by previous meta-studies, and seeks to shed a critical, self-reflexive light onto the main discursive formations of
their research field. The article concludes that there is still a lot of scope for growth in studies of the Internet in China and lists several of the identified research gaps.
Digital inequality can take many forms. Four forms studied here are access to Internet, use of different devices, extent of usage, and engagement in different Internet activities. However, it is not clear whether sociodemographic factors, or devices, are more influential in usage and activities. Results from an unfamiliar context show that there are significant sociodemographic influences on access, device, usage, and activities, and differences in activities by device type and usage. While sociodemographic differences are more influential, device type can increase likelihood of use for some “capital enhancing” activities, but only for a computer. Thus, although mobile Internet is available for those on the wrong side of the digital divide, these users do not engage in many activities, decreasing potential benefits.
In a world where digital media are everywhere, public attention is spread thin. Attracting an audience is crucial if you want to build social capital, make money, or affect the course of human events. Without an audience, however, media have very little purpose. In The Marketplace of Attention (30 September 2014 / $29.95) James G. Webster explains how audiences take shape and what those patterns of use mean for society.
Webster describes the factors that create audiences, including the preferences and habits of media users, the role of social networks, the resources and strategies of media providers, and the growing impact of media measures—from ratings to user recommendations. He incorporates these factors into one comprehensive framework: the marketplace of attention. In doing so, he shows that the marketplace works in ways that belie our greatest hopes and fears about digital media.
Some observers claim that digital media empower a new participatory culture; others fear that digital media encourage users to retreat to isolated enclaves. Webster shows that public attention is at once diverse and concentrated—that users move across a variety of outlets, producing high levels of audience overlap. So although audiences are fragmented in ways that would astonish midcentury broadcasting executives, Webster argues that this doesn’t signal polarization. He questions whether our preferences are immune from media influence, and he describes how our encounters with media might change our tastes. In the digital era’s marketplace of attention, Webster claims, we typically encounter ideas that cut across our predispositions. In the process, we will remake the marketplace of ideas and reshape the twenty-first century public sphere.
Despite the prevalence of anti-government rumors in authoritarian countries, little is currently known about their effects on citizens’ attitudes toward the government, and whether the authorities can effectively combat rumors. With an experimental procedure embedded in two surveys about Chinese internet users’ information exposure, this study finds that rumors decrease citizens’ trust in the government and support of the regime. Moreover, individuals from diverse socio-economic and political backgrounds are similarly susceptible to thinly evidenced rumors. Rebuttals generally reduce people’s belief in the specific content of rumors, but often do not recover political trust unless the government brings forth solid and vivid evidence to back its refutation or win the endorsement of public figures broadly perceived to be independent. But because such high-quality and strong rebuttals are hard to come by, rumors will erode political support in an authoritarian state. These findings have rich implications for studies of rumors and misinformation in general, and authoritarian information politics in particular.
We offer the first large scale, multiple source analysis of the outcome of what may be the most extensive effort to selectively censor human expression ever implemented. To do this, we have devised a system to locate, download, and analyze the content of millions of social media posts originating from nearly 1,400 different social media services all over China before the Chinese government is able to find, evaluate, and censor (i.e., remove from the Internet) the large subset they deem objectionable. Using modern computer-assisted text analytic methods that we adapt and validate in the Chinese language, we compare the substantive content of posts censored to those not censored over time in each of 95 issue areas. Contrary to previous understandings, posts with negative, even vitriolic, criticism of the state, its leaders, and its policies are not more likely to be censored. Instead, we show that the censorship program is aimed at curtailing collection action by silencing comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization, regardless of content. Censorship is oriented toward attempting to forestall collective activities that are occurring now or may occur in the future --- and, as such, seem to clearly expose government intent, such as examples we offer where sharp increases in censorship presage government action outside the Internet.
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the multifaceted information disadvantages facing the so-called information poor in today's society. It has two specific objectives: to identify, from the empirical evidence of individuals' daily and regular information practices, meaningful constructs for defining information inequality; and to investigate how the “information poor” characterise on these constructs in comparison with others. Design/methodology/approach – The study developed its findings in relation to the above objectives inductively from the interview transcripts of 73 people of different social statuses and occupations regarding their daily and regular information practices. Findings – Three concepts emerged as meaningful constructs to define information inequality, hence to describe the information poor: individuals' information resource bases, information practices, and information assets. The information poor are found to be disadvantaged in all these aspects. They are first disadvantaged by limited freedom and/or opportunities in claiming society's vast and rapidly increasing information resources into their own information resource bases; then by the constraint of their information practices in developing their information resource bases and obtaining information utilities from these resources; and further more by impoverished information assets to empower themselves in normal and problematic situations. Practical implications – Understanding of the information poor as sketched above will likely demand further research into a number of issues/areas hitherto ignored by information inequality studies. Originality/value – This paper is one of the first to address empirically one of the most fundamental questions in information inequality studies; it extends library and information science understanding of the information poor hitherto dominated by the information deficiency thesis.
With the increasing speed and volume of the global circulation of cultural products and events, the rise of transnational public spheres becomes a possibility. This possibility has been explored by scholars interested in diaspora studies and transnational activism. Jackie Smith, for example, writes that the participation of transnational social movement organizations in international politics 'helps enfranchise individuals and groups that are formally excluded from participation in international institutions' and 'strengthens the global public sphere by mobilizing this disenfranchised
Many research-based models of information seeking behaviour are limited in their ability to describe everyday life information seeking. Such models tend to focus on active information seeking, to the neglect of less-directed practices. Models are often based on studies of scholars or professionals, and many have been developed using a cognitive approach to model building. This article reports on the development of a research-based model of everyday life information seeking and proposes that a focus on the social concept of information practices is more appropriate to everyday life information seeking than the psychological concept of information behaviour The model is derived from a constructionist discourse analysis of individuals’ accounts of everyday life information seeking.
This paper looks at the prevalence of creative activity and sharing in an age when the barriers to disseminating material have been considerably lowered compared with earlier times. The authors use unique data to explore the extent to which young adults create video, music, writing and artistic photography, as well as the prevalence of sharing such material online. Findings suggest that despite new opportunities to engage in such distribution of content, relatively few people are taking advantage of these recent developments. Moreover, neither creation nor sharing is randomly distributed among a diverse group of young adults. Consistent with existing literature, creative activity is related to a person's socioeconomic status as measured by parental schooling. The novel act of sharing online, however, is considerably different by gender with men much more likely to engage in it. However, once internet user skill is controlled for, men and women are equally likely to post their materials on the Web.
List of Figures. List of Tables. Foreword: The Virtual Community in the Real World. (Howard Rheingold). Series Editora s Preface: The Internet and the Network Society . (Manuel Castells). Introduction: The Internet in Everyday Life. (Caroline Haythornthwaite and Barry Wellman). Part I: Moving The Internet Out Of Cyberspace. The internet in Everyday Life: An Introduction. (Caroline Haythornthwaite and Barry Wellman). Part II: The Place Of The Internet In Everyday Life. 1. Days and Nights on the Internet. (Philip Howard, Lee Rainie, and Steve Jones). 2 The Global Villagers: Comparing Internet Users and Uses Around the World. (Wenhong Chen, Jeffrey Boase and Barry Wellman). 3 Syntopia: Access, Civic Involvement and Social Interaction on the Net. (James Katz and Ronald Rice). 4 Digital Living: The Impact (or Otherwise) of the Internet in Everyday British Life. (Ben Anderson and Karina Tracey). 5 The Changing Digital Divide in Germany. (Gert Wagner, Rainer Pischner and John Haisken--DeNew). 6 Doing Social Science Research Online . (Alan Neustadtl, John Robinson and Meyer Kestnbaum). Part III: Finding Time For The Internet. 7 Internet Use, Interpersonal Relations and Sociability: A Time Diary Study. (Norman Nie, D. Sunshine Hillygus and Lutz Erbring). 8 The Internet and Other Uses of Time. (John Robinson, Meyer Kestnbaum, Alan Neustadtl and Anthony Alvarez). 9 Everyday Communication Patterns of Heavy and Light Email Users. (Janell Copher, Alaina Kanfer and Mary Bea Walker). Part IV: The Internet In The Community. 10 Capitalizing on the Net: Social Contact, Civic Engagement and Sense of Community. (Anabel Quan--Haase and Barry Wellman). 11 The Impact of Computer Networks on Social Capital and Community Involvement in Blacksburg. (Andrea Kavanaugh and Scott Patterson). 12 The Not So Global Village of Netville. (Keith Hampton and Barry Wellman). 13 Gender and Personal Relationships in HomeNet. (Bonka Boneva and Robert Kraut). 14 Belonging in Geographic, Ethnic and Internet Spaces. (Sorin Matei and Sandra Ball--Rokeach). Part V: The Internet At School, Work And Home. 15 Bringing the Internet Home: Adult distance learners and their Internet, Home and Work worlds. (Caroline Haythornthwaite and Michelle Kazmer). 16 Where Home is the Office: The New Form of Flexible Work. (Janet Salaff). 17 Kerala Connections: Will the Internet Affect Science in Developing Areas?. (Teresa Davidson, R. Sooryamoorthy and Wesley Shrum). 18 Social Support for Japanese Mothers Online and Offline . (Kakuko Miyata). 19 Shopping Behavior Online. (Robert Lunn and Michael Suman). Index
The digital divide – differences in access to and usage of new communication technologies across sociodemographic groups – is a major policy and social issue. While results are fairly consistent on some topics (usage gaps are associated with education, income, and age), there are contradictions in other areas, and differences based on race and gender are largely disappearing. Recent research on the digital divide is almost entirely devoted to the Internet, with little analysis of the mobile phone. The paper summarizes recent research on the extent and distinctions of the Internet (and some mobile phone) digital divide. Analyses of a national representative telephone survey in 2000 considers similarities and differences in three kinds of digital divides for both the Internet and the mobile phone — users and nonusers, users and dropouts, and recent and veteran users. The results show that these three kinds of digital divides are conceptually and empirically different both within and across the Internet and mobile phone media.
The present article selectively reviews the large number of recent studies that have been described as based on mixed methods. I begin by discussing a body of work that has emerged to promote mixed methods research across the social sciences. I then review and critique empirical studies in each of two general approaches to mixed methods: mixed data–collection studies, which combine two or more kinds of data; and mixed data–analysis studies, which combine two or more analytical strategies, examine qualitative data with quantitative methods, or explore quantitative data with qualitative techniques. I argue that, although mixed methods research is by no means new, empirical studies today combine methods in more diverse and, at times, innovative ways. Nevertheless, important methodological tensions will likely surface as the research becomes more self-reflexive.
Scholars have documented the deficiencies in political knowledge among American citizens. Another problem, misinformation, has received less attention. People are misinformed when they confidently hold wrong beliefs. We present evidence of misinformation about welfare and show that this misinformation acts as an obstacle to educating the public with correct facts. Moreover, widespread misinformation can lead to collective preferences that are far different from those that would exist if people were correctly informed. The misinformation phenomenon has implications for two currently influential scholarly literatures: the study of political heuristics and the study of elite persuasion and issue framing.