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Information, identity, and action: The messages of the Dutch anti-vaccination community on Telegram
Abstract
The anti-vaccination movement has successfully spread its views on social media. This study examined how community building emerges in the messages of Dutch anti-vaccination Telegram groups. Particularly, we investigated the extent to which these groups provide a platform for sharing information, perpetuating a shared identity, and promoting action. As negative emotions are considered a prime driver of collective action, we examined to what extent the messages had a negative valence. We used a mixed-method approach through a quantitative content analysis of 4654 text messages from five Telegram groups, while also examining the nature of the content through a qualitative analysis. The results suggest that most messages contained a form of shared identity (ingroup favoritism and outgroup hostility) or (mis)information, and, to a lesser extent, encouragements for (online) action. Moreover, most content had a negative valence. These findings illustrate how online groups might be sources of (mis)information, polarization, and intergroup hostility.
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Communities are one of the most important factors affecting consumer decisions. The final phase of the concept of community with developing technology and globalization is virtual communities. As this book argues, the subject of virtual communities and how they are changing is also now more relevant than ever before for students, as they will be the future managers and business owners who have to grapple with the effects of the changes in behaviour. This text provides detailed information about the definition, features, and types of virtual communities, and will stimulate academics, students and especially business owners to conduct more research in this field.
Thanks a lot and happy reading.
Assistant Professor Kadir Deligöz
During the COVID-19 pandemic sizeable groups of unvaccinated minorities persist even in countries with high vaccine access1. Consequently, vaccination became a controversial subject of debate and even protest2. Here, we assess whether people express discriminatory attitudes in the form of negative affect, stereotypes and exclusionary attitudes in family and political settings across groups defined by COVID-19 vaccination status. We quantify discriminatory attitudes between vaccinated and unvaccinated citizens in 21 countries, covering a diverse set of cultures across the world. Across three conjoint experimental studies (N=15,233), we demonstrate that vaccinated people express discriminatory attitudes towards the unvaccinated, as high as the discriminatory attitudes suffered by common targets like immigrant and minority populations3,4.5. In contrast, there is an absence of evidence that unvaccinated individuals display discriminatory attitudes towards vaccinated people, except for the presence of negative affect in Germany and United States. We find evidence in support of discriminatory attitudes against the unvaccinated in all countries except Hungary and Romania and find that discriminatory attitudes are more strongly expressed in cultures with stronger cooperative norms. Prior research on the psychology of cooperation has shown that individuals react negatively against perceived free-riders6,7 including in the domain of vaccinations8,9. Consistent with this, the present findings suggest that contributors to the public good of epidemic control (i.e., the vaccinated) react with discriminatory attitudes against perceived free-riders (i.e., the unvaccinated). Elites and the vaccinated general public appealed to moral obligations to increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake10,11 but the present findings suggest that discriminatory attitudes including support for the removal of fundamental rights simultaneously emerged.
During the epidemic, social media platforms were frequently used by users to express and spread negative emotions. Under emotional contagion, individual emotions gradually generalized into group emotions. At the same time, the public could not regulate their emotions and lacked access to release them rationally. This study explores the factors influencing the negative emotions' communication among social media users during the COVID-19 epidemic from the perspective of emotion contagion theory to discover the psychological mechanisms among the public. The questionnaire was tested for reliability and validity and then distributed online on Chinese social media platforms, and the data collected were statistically analyzed. The findings show that there are significant differences in negative emotional communication in social media among different age groups; the seven dimensions of deindividuation, risk perception, group identity, group efficacy, event stimulation, event publicness, and emotion contagion all have significant positive effects on users' negative emotional communication. This study aims to raise public awareness of negative emotions and promote the reconstruction and recovery of public mental health in the epidemic era.
Background:
Vaccine hesitancy continues to limit global efforts in combatting the COVID-19 pandemic. Emerging research demonstrates the role of social media in disseminating information and potentially influencing people's attitudes towards public health campaigns. This systematic review sought to synthesize the current evidence regarding the potential role of social media in shaping COVID-19 vaccination attitudes, and to explore its potential for shaping public health interventions to address the issue of vaccine hesitancy.
Methods:
We performed a systematic review of the studies published from inception to 13 of March2022 by searching PubMed, Web of Science, Embase, PsychNET, Scopus, CINAHL, and MEDLINE. Studies that reported outcomes related to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine (attitudes, opinion, etc.) gathered from the social media platforms, and those analyzing the relationship between social media use and COVID-19 hesitancy/acceptance were included. Studies that reported no outcome of interest or analyzed data from sources other than social media (websites, newspapers, etc.) will be excluded. The Newcastle Ottawa Scale (NOS) was used to assess the quality of all cross-sectional studies included in this review. This study is registered with PROSPERO (CRD42021283219).
Findings:
Of the 2539 records identified, a total of 156 articles fully met the inclusion criteria. Overall, the quality of the cross-sectional studies was moderate - 2 studies received 10 stars, 5 studies received 9 stars, 9 studies were evaluated with 8, 12 studies with 7,16 studies with 6, 11 studies with 5, and 6 studies with 4 stars. The included studies were categorized into four categories. Cross-sectional studies reporting the association between reliance on social media and vaccine intentions mainly observed a negative relationship. Studies that performed thematic analyses of extracted social media data, mainly observed a domination of vaccine hesitant topics. Studies that explored the degree of polarization of specific social media contents related to COVID-19 vaccines observed a similar degree of content for both positive and negative tone posted on different social media platforms. Finally, studies that explored the fluctuations of vaccination attitudes/opinions gathered from social media identified specific events as significant cofactors that affect and shape vaccination intentions of individuals.
Interpretation:
This thorough examination of the various roles social media can play in disseminating information to the public, as well as how individuals behave on social media in the context of public health events, articulates the potential of social media as a platform of public health intervention to address vaccine hesitancy.
Funding:
None.
Background
Vaccine hesitancy threatens public health. Some evidence suggests that vaccine hesitancy in Europe may be linked with the success of populist parties, but more systematic analysis is needed.
Methods
We examine the prevalence of individual-level vaccine hesitancy across the European Union (EU) and its association with political orientations. We also analyze whether success of populist parties is linked with vaccine hesitancy and uptake. We draw on individual-level Eurobarometer data from 2019, with a total of 27 524 respondents across the EU. We also rely on national and regional-level populist party vote shares. Finally, for a time-series analysis, we rely on aggregated populist party support as measured in the European Social Survey waves 1–9 (2002–18), and national immunization coverage rates from the WHO from 2002 to 2018.
Results
While vaccine hesitancy is confined to a minority of the population, this group is large enough to risk herd immunity. Political orientations on a left-right dimension are not strongly linked to vaccine hesitancy. Instead, vaccine hesitancy is associated with anti-elite world views and culturally closed rather than cosmopolitan positions.
Conclusions
Vaccine hesitancy is not only present in all EU member states but also maps on broader dimensions of cultural conflict. Hesitancy is rooted in a broader worldview, rather than misperceptions about health risks. Pro-vaccine interventions need to consider the underlying worldview, rather than simply targeting misperceptions.
In this study, the constructive communication process of anti-vaccination advocates is explored to provide insight into the challenges of communicating with an engaged, educated public that is distrustful of mainstream medical and governmental organizations. Using the circuit of culture as a theoretical and methodological model, this article examines how anti-vaccination advocates use social media to construct and reinforce a belief system that counters dominate understandings of health. Findings show that, through online communication, anti-vaccination advocates create shared cultural constructs embracing the identity of health information crusader, critic, and expert. This community consumes, produces, and distributes information that reframes mainstream health information and reinforces shared values. The purposes of this study are to better understand the culture of anti-vaccination advocates, identify communication barriers, and offer practical implications for health care professionals.
Online messaging app Telegram has increased in popularity in recent years surpassing Twitter and Snapchat by the number of active monthly users in late 2020. The messenger has also been crucial to protest movements in several countries in 2019-2020, including Belarus, Russia and Hong Kong. Yet, to date only few studies examined online activities on Telegram and none have analyzed the platform with regard to the protest mobilization. In the present study, we address the existing gap by examining Telegram-based activities related to the 2019 protests in Hong Kong. With this paper we aim to provide an example of methodological tools that can be used to study protest mobilization and coordination on Telegram. We also contribute to the research on computational text analysis in Cantonese—one of the low-resource Asian languages,—as well as to the scholarship on Hong Kong protests and research on social media-based protest mobilization in general. For that, we rely on the data collected through Telegram’s API and a combination of network analysis and computational text analysis. We find that the Telegram-based network was cohesive ensuring efficient spread of protest-related information. Content spread through Telegram predominantly concerned discussions of future actions and protest-related on-site information (i.e., police presence in certain areas). We find that the Telegram network was dominated by different actors each month of the observation suggesting the absence of one single leader. Further, traditional protest leaders—those prominent during the 2014 Umbrella Movement,—such as media and civic organisations were less prominent in the network than local communities. Finally, we observe a cooldown in the level of Telegram activity after the enactment of the harsh National Security Law in July 2020. Further investigation is necessary to assess the persistence of this effect in a long-term perspective.
We review 100 articles published from 2000 to early 2020 that research aspects of vaccine hesitancy in online communication spaces and identify several gaps in the literature prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. These gaps relate to five areas: disciplinary focus; specific vaccine, condition, or disease focus; stakeholders and implications; research methodology; and geographical coverage. Our findings show that we entered the global pandemic vaccination effort without a thorough understanding of how levels of confidence and hesitancy might differ across conditions and vaccines, geographical areas, and platforms, or how they might change over time. In addition, little was known about the role of platforms, platforms' politics, and specific sociotechnical affordances in the spread of vaccine hesitancy and the associated issue of misinformation online.
Vaccine hesitancy (delay in obtaining a vaccine, despite availability) represents a significant hurdle to managing the COVID-19 pandemic. Vaccine hesitancy is in part related to the prevalence of anti-vaccine misinformation and disinformation, which are spread through social media and user-generated content platforms. This study uses qualitative coding methodology to identify salient narratives and rhetorical styles common to anti-vaccine and COVID-denialist media. It organizes these narratives and rhetorics according to theme, imagined antagonist, and frequency. Most frequent were narratives centered on “corrupt elites” and rhetorics appealing to the vulnerability of children. The identification of these narratives and rhetorics may assist in developing effective public health messaging campaigns, since narrative and emotion have demonstrated persuasive effectiveness in other public health communication settings.
We synthesize a burgeoning literature investigating why people believe and share false or highly misleading news online. Contrary to a common narrative whereby politics drives susceptibility to fake news, people are ‘better’ at discerning truth from falsehood (despite greater overall belief) when evaluating politically concordant news. Instead, poor truth discernment is associated with lack of careful reasoning and relevant knowledge, and the use of heuristics such as familiarity. Furthermore, there is a substantial disconnect between what people believe and what they share on social media. This dissociation is largely driven by inattention, more so than by purposeful sharing of misinformation. Thus, interventions can successfully nudge social media users to focus more on accuracy. Crowdsourced veracity ratings can also be leveraged to improve social media ranking algorithms.
Social media (SM) are often regarded drivers of personalized echo chambers in which only ideas resonante that individuals already hold, leading to more extreme opinions and intensified opinion expression. However, recent theorizing and evidence has cast doubts on the universal applicability of the echo chamber metaphor, pointing out that communication effects on opinion expression are much more complex than the metaphor suggests. Using the refugee crisis in Germany as a background, the current study challenges four implicit premises of the echo chamber metaphor empirically. The findings show a more complex picture than the metaphor implies: (1) Ignoring other information sources beyond SM may lead to severe misinterpretations; seeming evidence for echo chambers disappears after controlling for news media use. (2) SM reliance does not generally stimulate opinion expression. (3) Attitude extremity moderates the effect of SM reliance, suggesting that people with more extreme views are susceptible to echo chamber effects. (4) Attitude position on the issue-at-hand moderates the effect of SM reliance, which suggests that echo chambers do not completely shield their users from the public discourse. We propose the Echo Chamber Continuum (ECCo) Model to stimulate developing the echo chamber metaphor into a theory suitable for studying opinion formation.
Extreme, anti-establishment actors are being characterized increasingly as ‘dangerous individuals’ by the social media platforms that once aided in making them into ‘Internet celebrities’. These individuals (and sometimes groups) are being ‘deplatformed’ by the leading social media companies such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube for such offences as ‘organised hate’. Deplatforming has prompted debate about ‘liberal big tech’ silencing free speech and taking on the role of editors, but also about the questions of whether it is effective and for whom. The research reported here follows certain of these Internet celebrities to Telegram as well as to a larger alternative social media ecology. It enquires empirically into some of the arguments made concerning whether deplatforming ‘works’ and how the deplatformed use Telegram. It discusses the effects of deplatforming for extreme Internet celebrities, alternative and mainstream social media platforms and the Internet at large. It also touches upon how social media companies’ deplatforming is affecting critical social media research, both into the substance of extreme speech as well as its audiences on mainstream as well as alternative platforms.
Leisure-based communities often provide spaces to develop sense of community among members. With the rapid advances in technology virtual communities are on the rise, yet research on virtual communities from a leisure perspective is limited. This study utilized Netnography to explore the meanings participants in a leisure-based virtual community attribute to their experiences of community. The Hogwarts Running Club, a Facebook-based virtual community, served as the study setting. Member posts were collected on pre-selected days over the course of six months. The dataset was open coded and then the coding framework was compared to the four core factors of Sense of Community Theory. The findings fit well within the four-factor model. Participants described a sense of belonging and connection to the community through social support, shared experiences (both positive and negative), discussing the Harry Potter books and films which provided shared symbols and terminology, and being “part of something bigger.”
We review online activism and its relations with offline collective action. Social media facilitate online activism, particularly by documenting and collating individual experiences, community building, norm formation, and development of shared realities. In theory, online activism could hinder offline protests, but empirical evidence for slacktivism is mixed. In some contexts, online and offline action could be unrelated because people act differently online versus offline, or because people restrict their actions to one domain. However, most empirical evidence suggests that online and offline activism are positively related and intertwined (no digital dualism), because social media posts can mobilise others for offline protest. Notwithstanding this positive relationship, the internet also enhances the visibility of activism and therefore facilitates repression in repressive contexts.
This article scrutinizes the method of automated content analysis to measure the tone of news coverage. We compare a range of off-the-shelf sentiment analysis tools to manually coded economic news as well as examine the agreement between these dictionary approaches themselves. We assess the performance of five off-the-shelf sentiment analysis tools and two tailor-made dictionary-based approaches. The analyses result in five conclusions. First, there is little overlap between the off-the-shelf tools; causing wide divergence in terms of tone measurement. Second, there is no stronger overlap with manual coding for short texts (i.e., headlines) than for long texts (i.e., full articles). Third, an approach that combines individual dictionaries achieves a comparably good performance. Fourth, precision may increase to acceptable levels at higher levels of granularity. Fifth, performance of dictionary approaches depends more on the number of relevant keywords in the dictionary than on the number of valenced words as such; a small tailor-made lexicon was not inferior to large established dictionaries. Altogether, we conclude that off-the-shelf sentiment analysis tools are mostly unreliable and unsuitable for research purposes – at least in the context of Dutch economic news – and manual validation for the specific language, domain, and genre of the research project at hand is always warranted.
Emotional valence is predominately conveyed in social interactions by words and facial expressions. The existence of broad biases which favor more efficient processing of positive or negative emotions is still a controversial matter. While so far this question has been investigated separately for each modality, in this narrative review of the literature we focus on valence effects in processing both words and facial expressions. In order to identify the factors underlying positivity and negativity effects, and to uncover whether these effects depend on modality and age, we present and analyze three representative overviews of the literature concerning valence effects in word processing, face processing, and combinations of word and face processing. Our analysis of word processing studies points to a positivity bias or a balanced processing of positive and negative words, whereas the analysis of face processing studies showed the existence of separate positivity and negativity biases depending on the experimental paradigm. The mixed results seem to be a product of the different methods and types of stimuli being used. Interestingly, we found that children exhibit a clear positivity advantage for both word and face processing, indicating similar processing biases in both modalities. Over the course of development, the initial positivity advantage gradually disappears, and in some face processing studies even reverses into a negativity bias. We therefore conclude that there is a need for future research that systematically analyses the impact of age and modality on the emergence of these valence effects. Finally, we discuss possible explanations for the presence of the early positivity advantage and its subsequent decrease.
This article proposes a definition of alternative news media and suggests routes for further research. It complements and extends previous conceptualizations in research on alternative media and outlines an umbrella definition of this phenomenon aimed to inspire contemporary research and scholarly debate. Previous research has been guided by a ‘progressive’ perspective as a form of resistance against ‘bourgeois’ hegemonic discourse. Such normative evaluations have in turn limited how the phenomenon has been studied empirically, by limiting the scope of research so that important contemporary phenomena fall outside the theoretical map. Conceptualizing alternative news media in the present hybrid and polarized media environment, we first propose a non-normative, multilevel relational definition: Alternative news media position themselves as correctives of the mainstream news media, as expressed in editorial agendas or statements and/or are perceived as such by their audiences or third-parties. This counter-hegemonic alternativeness can emerge on the macro level of societal function, the meso-level of organizations and/or the micro level of news content and producers. Second, demonstrating why this umbrella definition is fruitful in the changing media environment characterized by boundary struggles, crisis in legacy news media and mushrooming of alternative news outlets, we highlight research gaps and propose future research.
Addressing fake news requires a multidisciplinary effort
Objective:
Strengthening of antivaccination movements in recent decades has coincided with unprecedented increases in the incidence of some communicable diseases. Many intervention programs work from a deficit model of science communication, presuming that vaccination skeptics lack the ability to access or understand evidence. However, interventions focusing on evidence and the debunking of vaccine-related myths have proven to be either nonproductive or counterproductive. Working from a motivated reasoning perspective, we examine the psychological factors that might motivate people to reject scientific consensus around vaccination. To assist with international generalizability, we examine this question in 24 countries.
Methods:
We sampled 5,323 participants in 24 countries, and measured their antivaccination attitudes. We also measured their belief in conspiracy theories, reactance (the tendency for people to have a low tolerance for impingements on their freedoms), disgust sensitivity toward blood and needles, and individualistic/hierarchical worldviews (i.e., people's beliefs about how much control society should have over individuals, and whether hierarchies are desirable).
Results:
In order of magnitude, antivaccination attitudes were highest among those who (a) were high in conspiratorial thinking, (b) were high in reactance, (c) reported high levels of disgust toward blood and needles, and (d) had strong individualistic/hierarchical worldviews. In contrast, demographic variables (including education) accounted for nonsignificant or trivial levels of variance.
Conclusions:
These data help identify the "attitude roots" that may motivate and sustain vaccine skepticism. In so doing, they help shed light on why repetition of evidence can be nonproductive, and suggest communication solutions to that problem. (PsycINFO Database Record
In a high-choice media environment, there are fears that individuals will select media and content that reinforce their existing beliefs and lead to segregation based on interest and/or partisanship. This could lead to partisan echo chambers among those who are politically interested and could contribute to a growing gap in knowledge between those who are politically interested and those who are not. However, the high-choice environment also allows individuals, including those who are politically interested, to consume a wide variety of media, which could lead them to more diverse content and perspectives. This study examines the relationship between political interest as well as media diversity and being caught in an echo chamber (measured by five different variables). Using a nationally representative survey of adult internet users in the United Kingdom (N = 2000), we find that those who are interested in politics and those with diverse media diets tend to avoid echo chambers. This work challenges the impact of echo chambers and tempers fears of partisan segregation since only a small segment of the population are likely to find themselves in an echo chamber. We argue that single media studies and studies which use narrow definitions and measurements of being in an echo chamber are flawed because they do not test the theory in the realistic context of a multiple media environment.
Over the past decade, anti-vaccination rhetoric has become part of the mainstream discourse regarding the public health practice of childhood vaccination. These utilise social media to foster online spaces that strengthen and popularise anti-vaccination discourses. In this paper, we examine the characteristics of and the discourses present within six popular anti-vaccination Facebook pages. We examine these large-scale datasets using a range of methods, including social network analysis, gender prediction using historical census data, and generative statistical models for topic analysis (Latent Dirichlet allocation). We find that present-day discourses centre around moral outrage and structural oppression by institutional government and the media, suggesting a strong logic of ‘conspiracy-style’ beliefs and thinking. Furthermore, anti-vaccination pages on Facebook reflect a highly ‘feminised’ movement ‒ the vast majority of participants are women. Although anti-vaccination networks on Facebook are large and global in scope, the comment activity sub-networks appear to be ‘small world’. This suggests that social media may have a role in spreading anti-vaccination ideas and making the movement durable on a global scale.
Using large Twitter datasets collected during the 2012 U.S. presidential election, we examined how partisanship shapes patterns of sharing and commenting on candidate fact-check rulings. Our results indicate that partisans selectively share fact-checking messages that cheerlead their own candidate and denigrate the opposing party's candidate, resulting in an ideologically narrow flow of fact checks to their followers. We also find evidence of hostile media perception in users' public accusations of bias on the part of fact-checking organizations. Additionally, Republicans showed stronger outgroup negativity and hostility toward fact checkers than Democrats. These findings help us understand “selective sharing” as a complementary process to selective exposure, as well as identifying asymmetries between partisans in their sharing practices.
Objectives
: The Internet and social media are revolutionizing how social support is exchanged and perceived, making online health communities (OHCs) one of the most exciting research areas in health informatics. This paper aims to provide a framework for organizing research of OHCs and help identify questions to explore for future informatics research. Based on the framework, we conceptualize OHCs from a social support standpoint and identify variables of interest in characterizing community members. For the sake of this tutorial, we focus our review on online cancer communities.
Target audience
: The primary target audience is informaticists interested in understanding ways to characterize OHCs, their members, and the impact of participation, and in creating tools to facilitate outcome research of OHCs. OHC designers and moderators are also among the target audience for this tutorial.
Scope
: The tutorial provides an informatics point of view of online cancer communities, with social support as their leading element. We conceptualize OHCs according to 3 major variables: type of support, source of support, and setting in which the support is exchanged. We summarize current research and synthesize the findings for 2 primary research questions on online cancer communities: (1) the impact of using online social support on an individual's health, and (2) the characteristics of the community, its members, and their interactions. We discuss ways in which future research in informatics in social support and OHCs can ultimately benefit patients.
This review addresses three recent developments in the collective action literature. First, we demonstrate that normative and non-normative collective action participation can be predicted by different psychological variables. Second, we show that collective action participation has emotional and identity-related consequences for activists that shape their motivation to engage in future action. Third, we illustrate that members of disadvantaged groups are faced with two dilemmas—the dilemma of alternative ways of identity management and the dilemma of affective loyalties towards the outgroup—both of which present barriers to social change by undermining protest intentions. In the final part of the review, we outline an integrative framework that maps out the dynamic processes between antecedents of, barriers to and outcomes of collective action participation and highlight a number of directions for future research.
Exposure to news, opinion and civic information increasingly occurs through social media. How do these online networks influence exposure to perspectives that cut across ideological lines? Using de-identified data, we examined how 10.1 million U.S. Facebook users interact with socially shared news. We directly measured ideological homophily in friend networks, and examine the extent to which heterogeneous friends could potentially expose individuals to cross-cutting content. We then quantified the extent to which individuals encounter comparatively more or less diverse content while interacting via Facebook's algorithmically ranked News Feed, and further studied users' choices to click through to ideologically discordant content. Compared to algorithmic ranking, individuals' choices about what to consume had a stronger effect limiting exposure to cross-cutting content.
Copyright © 2015, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Action to tackle the complex and divisive issue of climate change will be strongly influenced by public perception. Online social media and associated social networks are an increasingly important forum for public debate and are known to influence individual attitudes and behaviours – yet online discussions and social networks related to climate change are not well understood. Here we construct several forms of social network for users communicating about climate change on the popular microblogging platform Twitter. We classify user attitudes to climate change based on message content and find that social networks are characterised by strong attitude-based homophily and segregation into polarised “sceptic” and “activist” groups. Most users interact only with like-minded others, in communities dominated by a single view. However, we also find mixed-attitude communities in which sceptics and activists frequently interact. Messages between like-minded users typically carry positive sentiment, while messages between sceptics and activists carry negative sentiment. We identify a number of general patterns in user behaviours relating to engagement with alternative views. Users who express negative sentiment are themselves the target of negativity. Users in mixed-attitude communities are less likely to hold a strongly polarised view, but more likely to express negative sentiment towards other users with differing views. Overall, social media discussions of climate change often occur within polarising “echo chambers”, but also within “open forums”, mixed-attitude communities that reduce polarisation and stimulate debate. Our results have implications for public engagement with this important global challenge.
Historical records suggest that the political extremes—at both the “left” and the “right”—substantially endorsed conspiracy beliefs about other-minded groups. The present contribution empirically tests whether extreme political ideologies, at either side of the political spectrum, are positively associated with an increased tendency to believe in conspiracy theories. Four studies conducted in the United States and the Netherlands revealed a quadratic relationship between strength of political ideology and conspiracy beliefs about various political issues. Moreover, participants’ belief in simple political solutions to societal problems mediated conspiracy beliefs among both left- and right-wing extremists. Finally, the effects described here were not attributable to general attitude extremity. Our conclusion is that political extremism and conspiracy beliefs are strongly associated due to a highly structured thinking style that is aimed at making sense of societal events.
Happiness and other emotions spread between people in direct contact, but it is unclear whether massive online social networks also contribute to this spread. Here, we elaborate a novel method for measuring the contagion of emotional expression. With data from millions of Facebook users, we show that rainfall directly influences the emotional content of their status messages, and it also affects the status messages of friends in other cities who are not experiencing rainfall. For every one person affected directly, rainfall alters the emotional expression of about one to two other people, suggesting that online social networks may magnify the intensity of global emotional synchrony.
This chapter provides an overview of the SIDE model, its theoretical roots and how it developed, and its utility in explaining a range of social influence and other group phenomena as instantiated within the new communications technologies. As a model grounded in the social identity approach the SIDE model provides broad scope for analyzing how specific features associated with these technologies (visual anonymity, the means to connect, coordinate and coopt) interact with the levels of self and contents of identities, to predict key processes and outcomes. As a model (albeit grounded in theory) it remains provisional, a work in progress, open to being updated as new and relevant technological features, and their possible effects become apparent. However, rather than accounting for effects post hoc or ad hoc, the SIDE framework has been able to anticipate and explain some of the more counterintuitive social effects of CMC and cyberspace. The idea that social influence could be strengthened by anonymity and isolation went against the prevailing models as well as common sense, but has remained a robust and consistent finding replicated in much subsequent research (albeit circumscribed by identities in situ). Similarly the idea that these same features (anonymity and isolation) could actually strengthen power relations and the dominance of powerful groups, as predicted by the cognitive SIDE, went against much of the theorizing and writing on the effect and potential of these new media (Spears & Lea, 1994; Postmes, Spears, & Lea, 1998). So far the SIDE model has been able to account for a wide range of influence phenomena and many related aspects of group processes (influence, stereotyping, group cohesion, power relations), as well as providing a framework to inform and guide applications in diverse domains (group decision making, cooperative learning and working, collective action, to name but a few).
The aim of the studies was to assess the effefcs of social categorization on intergroup behaviour when, in the intergroup situation, neither calculations of individual interest nor previously existing attitudes of hostility could have been said to have determined discriminative behaviour against an outgroup. These conditions were satisfied in the experimental design. In the first series of experiments, it was found that the subjects favoured their own group in the distribution of real rewards and penalities in a situation in which nothing but the variable of fairly irrelevant classification distinguished between the ingroup and the outgroup. In the second series of experiments it was found that: 1) maximum joint profit independent of group membership did not affect significantly the manner in which the subjects divided real pecuniary rewards; 2) maximum profit for own group did affect the distribution of rewards; 3) the clearest effect on the distribution of rewards was due to the subjects' attempt to achieve a maximum difference between the ingroup and the outgroup even at the price of sacrificing other ‘objective’ advantages.
The design and the results of the study are theoretically discussed within the framework of social norms and expectations and particularly in relation to a ‘generic’ norm of outgroup behaviour prevalent in some societies.
This article explores how and why some online protests manage to gain digital resource abundance, that is, mobilising large numbers of people and attracting wide interest and support in a short space of time. The study focuses on the case of the Swedish Petrol Uprising 2.0 which after a few months managed to mobilise 630,000 members on Facebook. The article expands established theories on online mobilisation by stressing the structural elements of social media platforms and the shaping of online mobilisations through three types of factors: resources, discourses and social positions. By combining contemporary social media research with classic stage theory, we discern the significance of each factor in the three-stage mobilisation process, leading towards digital resource abundance. The article shows that digital resource abundance serves both as a blessing and a burden for online organisers. Paradoxically, social media platforms serve as a fertile ground for bringing ‘the many’ together yet also force successful groups to stay in a stage of constant mobilising.
Online communities play an important role in spreading public discontent and could contribute to polarization. This study focuses on anti-vaccination views in the Netherlands, which have intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic. We examined the structure and development of five Dutch anti-vaccination Telegram groups and studied their interactivity and posting behaviour. Using group-based trajectory modelling, we examined the development of users’ posting behaviour in these groups. We find four posting trajectories across all five groups. A small group of users contributes the majority of posts. Overall, posting frequency declines over time and our results do not show evidence for a group of users whose posting frequency increases. This is taken to indicate that only a small group of users spread their anti-vaccination views through Telegram groups. While social media can reach a broad audience, most users are not necessarily engaged to also actively contribute to the online anti-vaccination community.
The pandemic has affected social relations in many ways, and even created new social groups through vaccination. The goal of this study was to explore whether intergroup discrimination regarding vaccination status can be observed in a resource allocation task. Participants (N = 818; Mage = 46.0 years) completed a resource allocation task. Results showed that the better-than-average effect was widespread among the participants as most of them perceived themselves more informed about the pandemic than others. The resource allocation task showed participants preferred to create maximum difference in favor of their group in intergroup situations, but decisions were fairer when targets’ group membership was identical. Moreover, vaccinated people were more likely to use maximum difference strategies than non-vaccinated people. The results revealed that vaccination status changes the perception of intergroup situations, which may be important in planning future strategies to handle mass emergencies similar to the current pandemic.
Scholarly and journalistic profiles of anti-vaxxers – i.e., individuals who are active in efforts to oppose widespread vaccination – suggest that some Americans may identify with the “anti-vaccine” label in order to fulfill social goals (e.g., a sense of belonging in a broader community). This is potentially problematic, as anti-vaxx social identification (AVSID) could imply increased receptivity to vaccine misinformation, and resistance to evidence-based medicine. In a large and demographically representative survey (N = 1001), we propose a novel measure of AVSID, and take stock of its prevalence and correlates. We find that about 22% of Americans always (8%) or sometimes (14%) self-identify as “anti-vaxxers” (activists who support vaccine refusal), and that those who do tend to embrace the label as a form of social identity. We also find that people who score highly on our AVSID measure tend to be less trusting of scientific experts and more individualistic. Finally, predictive validation analyses suggest that – among self-identified anti-vaxxers – AVSID is associated with increased opposition to childhood vaccine requirements. We conclude by outlining how our AVSID measure can be implemented to inform future research on opposition to evidence-based medicine and related public policies.
Prior research has indicated that both attitudinal homogeneity of communication networks (“echo chambers”) and attitudinal heterogeneity of communication networks (“adversarial debates”) can lead to attitude polarization. The present paper argues that communication in both echo chambers and adversarial debates is dominated by network negativity, a negative valence in the tone of discussions which might be associated with attitude polarization. Combining methods from sentiment analysis and social network analysis, more than 4 million tweets on two controversial topics (Brexit, Trump) were analyzed to investigate the occurrence of network negativity and its association with two proxies of attitude polarization (extremity and ambivalence). Results indicate that negativity in users' own tweets was most strongly related to polarization, whereas negativity among users’ friends, or consonance of sentiments between users and friends had less impact on polarization. The findings are related to literatures on negativity bias, optimal distinctiveness theory, and intergroup contact theory.
This article draws on a broadcast popular among the anti-vaccine community to map out six themes used by the broadcast to mislead viewers about COVID-19. The themes are the claim that “they” – government and pharma – are lying to you, claims that COVID-19 is an excuse to remove civil liberties, viewing everyone as an expert, claiming that science cannot save us, skewing the science, and a claim that “they” are out to harm the viewers. The article points out that similar themes are used to mislead followers with anti-vaccine information. It highlights the concern that these themes will not only mislead people who are already anti-vaccine about the pandemic, but may draw in people who are not anti-vaccine but are seeking information about COVID-19, and suggests some options for dealing with the misinformation. Scientists benefit from understanding these claims, as we are often tasked with providing rebuttals to this misinformation.
Self-disclosure is pervasive on social media and has significant implications for psychological well-being. In this review we synthesize recent research on the motivations, mechanisms and effects of self-disclosure on well-being and then propose a framework that highlights the bidirectional relationship between self-disclosure and well-being. The framework details the mechanisms by which self-disclosure on social media can influence well-being and how self-disclosure fulfills particular needs of individuals with different well-being characteristics. We call for future research to examine the proposed bi-directional relationship, especially studies designed to tease out causal effects.
Research and practice have mostly focused on the "bright side" of social media, aiming to understand and help in leveraging the manifold opportunities afforded by this technology. However, it is increasingly observable that social media present enormous risks for individuals, communities, firms, and even for society as a whole. Examples for this "dark side" of social media include cyberbullying, addictive use, trolling, online witch hunts, fake news, and privacy abuse. In this article, we aim to illustrate the multidimensionality of the dark side of social media and describe the related various undesirable outcomes. To do this, we adapt the established social media honeycomb framework to explain the dark side implications of each of the seven functional building blocks: conversations, sharing, presence, relationships, reputation, groups, and identity. On the basis of these reflections, we present a number of avenues for future research, so as to facilitate a better understanding and use of social media.
Although social media offer adolescents new possibilities for emotion regulation, little is known about how adolescents use different platforms to this end. This study adds to the emotion regulation literature and affordances-of-technologies perspective by describing whether and how adolescents use different social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, 9Gag, and blogs) for emotion sharing and how technical, social, and contextual factors influence these practices. In-depth interviews with 22 adolescents aged 14 to 18 show that adolescents share emotions on multiple of these platforms. Although the different platforms have similar affordances, their social norms clearly differ and influence adolescents’ online behavior. Facebook statuses, Instagram, and Snapchat are mostly used for sharing positive emotions, if emotions are shared at all. Twitter and Messenger, on the other hand, are also used for sharing negative emotions, albeit for different reasons.
This paper explores the concept of online community. It is divided into three main sections. The first examines the challenge of defining the concepts of community and being online. The second looks at definitions of online community as well as the ways in which the term has been used across a wide range of contexts, covering issues of attachment, emotion, community strength, motivation for participation, and relationship to technology. The third provides a general definition of online community around six key elements: commitment; connection to others; reciprocity; interaction; agency and consequences. The paper sensitises practitioners and researchers to the contested nature of community and provides a definition that is both broad and complex.
This paper explores the concept of online community. It is divided into three main sections. The first examines the challenge of defining the concepts of community and being online. The second looks at definitions of online community as well as the ways in which the term has been used across a wide range of contexts, covering issues of
attachment, emotion, community strength, motivation for participation, and relationship to technology. The third provides a general definition of online community around six key elements: commitment; connection to others; reciprocity; interaction; agency and consequences. The paper sensitises practitioners and researchers to the contested nature of community and provides a definition that is both broad and complex.
The political psychology of political action provides the potential for building bridges between scholars from different fields. The main aim of this article is to set some baby steps toward building two conceptual bridges by bringing together a core motivation approach to political action with core features of the social structure that embeds those core motivations. The first conceptual bridge relies on considering a broader motivational model than provided by rational actor or social identity approaches, whereas the second bridge relies on considering core features of the social structure as potentiating these core motivations for political action. More specifically, I first discuss definitions of political action. Second, I identify four converging themes across different literatures on collective action, social movement participation, and voting turnout, resulting in a taxonomy of core motivations for political action (i.e., personal or group-based identity, efficacy, emotion, and moral motivations). Third, in a more explorative fashion I identify four core features of the social structure (ingroup, outgroup, interpersonal network, and institutional features), which I tentatively connect with the taxonomy of core motivations. Finally, I discuss the theoretical, empirical, and practical implications of this generalist, generative, and integrative perspective on political action.
Organizational Identity presents the classic works on organizational identity alongside more current thinking on the issues. Ranging from theoretical contributions to empirical studies, the readings in this volume address the key issues of organizational identity, and show how these issues have developed through contributions from such diverse fields of study as sociology, psychology, management studies and cultural studies. The readings examine questions such as how organizations understand who they are, why organizations develop a sense of identity and belonging where the boundaries of identity lie and the implications of postmodern and critical theories' challenges to the concept of identity as deeply-rooted and authentic. Includes work by: Stuart Albert, Mats Alvesson, Blake E. Ashforth, Marilynn B. Brewer, George Cheney, Lars Thoger Christensen, C.H. Cooley, Kevin G. Corley, Barbara Czarniawska, Janet M. Dukerich, Jane E. Dutton, Kimberly D. Elsbach, Wendi Gardner, Linda E. Ginzela, Dennis A. Gioia, E. Goffman, Karen Golden-Biddle, Mary Jo Hatch, Roderick M. Kramer, Fred Rael, G.H. Mead, Michael G. Pratt, Anat Rafaeli, Hayagreeva Rao, Majken Schultz, Howard S. Schwartz, Robert I. Sutton, Henri Taijfel, John Turner, David A. Wherren, and Hugh Willmott. Intended to provide easy access to this material for students of organizational identity, it will also be of interest more broadly to students of business, sociology and psychology.
Identity status theory and Lofland and Starks' (1965, Becoming a world-saver: A theory of conversion to a deviant perspective, American Sociological Review, 30, 862-875) model of religious conversion were used to explain why young people become jihad fighters. Both theories maintain that young people with unclear commitments are vulnerable for radical identity change. A religious problem-solving perspective, along with a self-definition as religious seeker, steers this potential identity change into the direction of religious conversion. This may lead young Muslims or young people with an uncertain identity and a religious orientation to move closer to radical Islam and jihad. Also, research from both traditions found that absence of positive affective bonds with relevant others go together with unstable identity. A new group with a clear defined mission may therefore be able to solve their problems in two ways: it offers warm interpersonal bonds, as well as potential new personal goals and commitments. Groups of jihadists are perfectly fit to serve this twofold purpose.
The growing use of social media like Facebook and Twitter is in the process of changing how news is produced, disseminated, and discussed. But so far, we have only a preliminary understanding of (1) how important social media are as sources of news relative to other media, (2) the extent to which people use them to find news, (3) how many use them to engage in more participatory forms of news use, and (4) whether these developments are similar within countries with otherwise comparable levels of technological development. Based on data from a cross-country online survey of news media use, we present a comparative analysis of the relative importance of social media for news in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, covering eight developed democracies with different media systems. We show that television remains both the most widely used and most important source of news in all these countries, and that even print newspapers are still more widely used and seen as more important sources of news than social media. We identify a set of similarities in terms of the growing importance of social media as part of people’s cross-media news habits, but also important country-to-country differences, in particular in terms of how widespread the more active and participatory forms of media use are. Surprisingly, these differences do not correspond to differences in levels of internet use, suggesting that more than mere availability shapes the role of social media as parts of people’s news habits.
Abstract Conversations among online community members as a form of everyday, unconstrained, flexible, and spontaneous communication are important for developing a sense of community, sustainability of online communities, construction of identity, public sphere, and for creating and maintaining offline taken-for-granted basic structures of everyday life. While the lack of qualities of online conversations in online communities is often discussed and researched, we argue that its positive sides should also be conceptualized and become the subject of quantitative empirical research. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept and scale of perceived quality of online conversations and inspect the psychometric properties of the proposed scale in terms of content and convergent, discriminant, and criterion validity and reliability. The paper presents a five-factor structure of the quality of conversation scale, which is tested for its quality on a sample of 1,276 online community participants. Confirmatory factor analysis supports the proposed multidimensional structure, while correlational and regression analyses demonstrate good levels of convergent, discriminant and criterion validity. The paper suggests several refinements of the measurement instrument, and concludes with the usefulness of the introduced scale for the research and understanding of the online community phenomenon.