How social media impacts the autonomy of its users is a topic of increasing focus. However, much of the literature that explores these impacts fails to engage in depth with the philosophical literature on autonomy. This has resulted in a failure to consider the full range of impacts that social media might have on autonomy. A deeper consideration of these impacts is thus needed, given the importance of both autonomy as a moral concept and social (...) media as a feature of contemporary life. By drawing on this philosophical literature, we argue that autonomy is broadly a matter of developing autonomy competencies, having authentic ends and control over key aspects of your own life, and not being manipulated, coerced, and controlled by others. We show how the autonomy of users of social media can be disrespected and harmed through the control that social media can have over its users’ data, attention, and behaviour. We conclude by discussing various recommendations to better regulate social media. (shrink)

Background:Data representing people’s behaviour, attitudes, feelings and relationships are increasingly being harvested from social media platforms and re-used for research purposes. This can be ethically problematic, even where such data exist in the public domain. We set out to explore how the academic community is addressing these challenges by analysing a national corpus of research ethics guidelines and published studies in one interdisciplinary research area.Methods:Ethics guidelines published by Research Councils UK, its seven-member councils and guidelines cited within these (...) were reviewed. Guidelines referring to social media were classified according to published typologies of social media research uses and ethical considerations for social media mining. Using health research as an exemplar, PubMed was searched to identify studies using social media data, which were assessed according to their coverage of ethical considerations and guidelines.Results:Of the 13 guidelines published or recom... (shrink)

This paper reviews the actual and potential use of social media in emergency, disaster and crisis situations. This is a field that has generated intense interest. It is characterised by a burgeoning but small and very recent literature. In the emergencies field, social media (blogs, messaging, sites such as Facebook, wikis and so on) are used in seven different ways: listening to public debate, monitoring situations, extending emergency response and management, crowd-sourcing and collaborative development, creating (...) class='Hi'>social cohesion, furthering causes (including charitable donation) and enhancing research. Appreciation of the positive side of social media is balanced by their potential for negative developments, such as disseminating rumours, undermining authority and promoting terrorist acts. This leads to an examination of the ethics of social media usage in crisis situations. Despite some clearly identifiable risks, for example regarding the violation of privacy, it appears that public consensus on ethics will tend to override unscrupulous attempts to subvert the media. Moreover, social media are a robust means of exposing corruption and malpractice. In synthesis, the widespread adoption and use of social media by members of the public throughout the world heralds a new age in which it is imperative that emergency managers adapt their working practices to the challenge and potential of this development. At the same time, they must heed the ethical warnings and ensure that social media are not abused or misused when crises and emergencies occur. (shrink)

The instrumental benefits of firm’s CSR activities are contingent upon the stakeholders’ awareness and favorable attribution. While social media creates an important momentum for firms to cultivate favorable awareness by establishing a powerful framework of stakeholder relationships, the opportunities are not distributed evenly for all firms. In this paper, we investigate the impact of CSR credentials on the effectiveness of social media as a stakeholder-relationship management platform. The analysis of Fortune 500 companies in the Twitter sphere (...) reveals that a higher CSR rating is a strong indicator of an earlier adoption, a faster establishment of online presence, a higher responsiveness to the firm’s identity, and a stronger virality of the messages. Incidentally, the higher CSIR rating is also found to be associated with the stronger virality. Our findings also suggest that socially responsible firms can harvest proactive stakeholders’ participation without investing more resources. As the first study that conceptualizes the social media as a proponent of CSR, this paper contends that “being socially responsible” makes more practical sense for firms with the rise of social media. (shrink)

Introduction: Social media has become an integrated part of daily life, with an estimated 3 billion social media users worldwide. Adolescents and young adults are the most active users of social media. Research on social media has grown rapidly, with the potential association of social media use and mental health and well-being becoming a polarized and much-studied subject. The current body of knowledge on this theme is complex and difficult-to-follow. The (...) current paper presents a scoping review of the published literature in the research field of social media use and its association with mental health and well-being among adolescents. Methods and analysis: First, relevant databases were searched for eligible studies with a vast range of relevant search terms for social media use and mental health and well-being over the past five years. Identified studies were screened thoroughly and included or excluded based on prior established criteria. Data from the included studies were extracted and summarized according to the previously published study protocol. Results: Among the 79 studies that met our inclusion criteria, the vast majority (94%) were quantitative, with a cross-sectional design (57%) being the most common study design. Several studies focused on different aspects of mental health, with depression (29%) being the most studied aspect. Almost half of the included studies focused on use of non-specified social network sites (43%). Of specified social media, Facebook (39%) was the most studied social network site. The most used approach to measuring social media use was frequency and duration (56%). Participants of both genders were included in most studies (92%) but seldom examined as an explanatory variable. 77% of the included studies had social media use as the independent variable. Conclusion: The findings from the current scoping review revealed that about ¾ of the included studies focused on social media and some aspect of pathology. Focus on the potential association between social media use and positive outcomes seems to be rarer in the current literature. Amongst the included studies, few separated between different forms of (inter)actions on social media, which are likely to be differentially associated with mental health and well-being outcomes. (shrink)

The concept of apublic energy fieldis central to public administration discourse theory. Its main idea is the facilitation of dialog between government and the public, on the basis of equality, to construct a public policy consensus. In contemporary society, social media provides new and distinctive channels for such interactions. Social media can, therefore, be conceived as a novel type ofpublic energy field. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, interactions between the Chinese government and the Chinese (...) public (whether located in China or abroad) have been acutely reflected through WeChat official accounts. This article focuses on the COVID-19 pandemic and, through social media text mining and processing, analyzes the text topics and emotions covered. Basic principles of discourse validity, regarding this public energy field and two guarantee conditions, are applied to analyze the information exchange and dialog between the government and the public on COVID-19 through WeChat official accounts. It was found that the government’s WeChat official accounts have not yet formed a harmonious dialog space to balance the public energy field, and that the interaction between the government and the public has to be improved. The government’s social discourse had a significant influence on the public’s social discourse. Using text analysis, the study found that the government has published information on 11 topics related to the prevention and control of the pandemic. It can be argued that the public energyfieldpresented by both the government and the public effectively portrayed and reflected the actual situation of the pandemic in China. (shrink)

In this article we explore some of the ethical dimensions of using social media to increase the number of living kidney donors. Social media provides a platform for changing non-identifiable ‘statistical victims’ into ‘real people’ with whom we can identify and feel empathy: the so-called ‘identifiable victim effect’, which prompts charitable action. We examine three approaches to promoting kidney donation using social media which could take advantages of the identifiable victim effect: institutionally organized campaigns (...) based on historical cases aimed at promoting non-directed altruistic donation; personal case-based campaigns organized by individuals aimed at promoting themselves/or someone with whom they are in a relationship as a recipient of directed donation; institutionally organized personal case-based campaigns aimed at promoting specific recipients for directed donation. We will highlight the key ethical issues raised by these approaches, and will argue that the third option, despite raising ethical concerns, is preferable to the other two. (shrink)

Purpose The study explores how social media impacts institutional trust through the lens of Kohlberg’s stages of moral development. Specifically, this study aims to understand how moral relativism and moral intuitionism can moderate the relationship between social media use and perception of social authorities. Design/methodology/approach The study analyzes a large data set from the World Values Survey, covering responses from approximately 52,000 individuals across 45 countries between 2017 and 2022. Multiple regression analyses were conducted to (...) test for interactions between social media use and stages of moral development on trust in social institutions. Findings The study finds that different stages of moral development significantly moderate the relationship between social media use and institutional trust. Specifically, higher moral development buffers the negative effect of social media use on trust in three main social institutions: law enforcement, parliament and the legal system. In contrast, individuals with higher levels of moral relativism and moral intuitionism are more susceptible to the negative influence of social media on institutional trust. Research limitations/implications The study relies on self-reported data from the World Values Survey, which may introduce response biases. In addition, while the large-scale data set offers insights into correlations, it does not allow for conclusive causal inferences. Originality/value This research contributes to understanding technology’s impact on modern societies by highlighting the role of individual moral development in shaping perceptions of key social institutions. The study uniquely integrates Kohlberg’s moral development theory with the influence of social media, offering a novel perspective on how personal moral systems can moderate the effect of digital media use. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to understand the current state of learners' use of social media in entrepreneurship courses and explore uses and gratifications on social media in entrepreneurship courses from the learners' perspective. The respondents must have participated in government or private entrepreneurship courses and joined the online group of those courses. Respondents are not college students, but more entrepreneurs, and their multi-attribute makes the research results and explanatory more abundant. The methods used are (...) in-depth interviews and questionnaires, a total of 458 valid data was collected. The results of the survey revealed four gratification factors namely trust, profit, learning, and social in online entrepreneurial groups. It is also found that the structures of the four gratification factors vary in three social media (Line, Facebook, and WeChat). In terms of the trust factor, there are significant differences among the three social media. and the score of ''trust'' outranks other factors. Most of the entrepreneurs' business is "networking business", and the business unit is mostly "micro". In short, the two gratification factors of trust and profit can be seen as specific gratifications for online entrepreneurial groups, especially the trust factor, which deserves more attention in the further research of online entrepreneurial courses on social media. (shrink)

This paper proposes the concept of digital mirroring to explore and contextualise post-Arab Spring digital feminism in the Levant within a critical discourse framework. Digital mirroring illustrates the way in which contemporary Arab feminist groups articulate their digital presence orienting toward the vertical dimension of their sociopolitical contexts and toward the horizontal dimension characterised by the digital practices of other feminist movements in the region. We observed this phenomenon through the analysis of a multimodal corpus of Facebook and Instagram posts (...) published by thirty-two institutionalised and non-institutionalised feminist groups in Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria between 2011 and 2019. The analysis of the linguistic and the visual strategies of MENA feminist groups is grounded in contemporary sociolinguistic studies on Arabic diglossia and multimodality. Findings reveal the complex interplay of digital self-representation, local resistance, and transregional networking of Levantine women. We argue that a simultaneous analysis of the vertical and the horizontal contextual dimensions of digital mirroring is necessary to comprehend social media discursive strategies and their transregional breadth as a central component of contemporary Arab feminism and emancipatory discourses at large. (shrink)

The topic of lifestyle has always been present in one way or another in social philosophy and economics. Max Weber and Thorstein Veblen were among the first to introduce the concept of "lifestyle" into the field of science. Weber used lifestyle in the context of social stratification to describe status groups. Veblen introduced the concept in his concept of the "leisure class", showing that consumer lifestyle / conspicuous consumption is an assertion of one's power, symbolic power. That is, (...) goods are purchased not out of need, but as a demonstration of one's class and money. Thus, Weben and Veblen set the tone for subsequent studies of lifestyle. Pierre Bourdieu also believes that different lifestyles show belonging to a particular class. He incorporates the concept into his concept of habitus and shows how a person's lifestyle is manifested in his everyday life. Anthony Giddens transfers the conversation about lifestyle from the class structure of society to the world of modernity, where a person is faced with the task of constructing his own identity, and lifestyle is revealed in existential discourse. In search of his “I” and trying to answer the question “how should I live?”, a modern person turns to all sorts of sources of expert opinion, one of which is social media. But instead of looking for answers to his questions, a person immerses himself in a world of beautiful images, which is filled with “avatars” demonstrating an ideal life. Thus, a person falls into a pseudo-reality created by social media, from which he cannot escape or, perhaps, no longer wants to. After all, this new reality is better, brighter and more beautiful, and most importantly, in it a person can create an ideal self and display it through his pseudo-lifestyle. Half a century ago, Baudrillard already described a person immersed in this “aesthetic” hallucination of reality. And now a modern person faces a new task - to escape from the destructive pseudo-reality and return to the search for his “I”. (shrink)

The outbreak of COVID-19 has greatly affected university students’ studies and life. This study aimed to examine the possible mediating role of psychological capital and the moderating role of academic burnout in the relationship between problematic social media usage and anxiety among university students during COVID-19. A total of 3,123 undergraduates from universities in Shanghai participated in an online survey from March to April 2020. The results showed that problematic social media usage among university students predicted (...) their levels of anxiety. Mediation analysis indicated that psychological capital mediated the relationship between problematic social media usage and anxiety. Furthermore, for university students whose academic performance had been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, the effects of both problematic social media usage and the psychological capital on anxiety were moderated by academic burnout. For university students whose academic performance was not affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, academic burnout moderated the effects of psychological capital but not the effects of problematic social media usage on anxiety. The results highlighted the underlying mechanisms in the relationship between problematic social media usage and anxiety. These findings provide practical insights into the development and implementation of psychological interventions when facing a pandemic. (shrink)

Corpus-based word frequencies are one of the most important predictors in language processing tasks. Frequencies based on conversational corpora are shown to better capture the variance in lexical decision tasks compared to traditional corpora. In this study, we show that frequencies computed from social media are currently the best frequency-based estimators of lexical decision reaction times. The results are robust and are still substantial when we control for corpus size.

Concerning the ubiquity of social media, this research tried to examine the impacts of using Telegram on Iranian EFL learners’ foreign language motivation, foreign language anxiety, and attitude toward learning. To achieve these purposes, 60 Iranian EFL learners at the intermediate level were selected and randomly divided into two groups: experimental and control. After that, both groups were pretested on motivation and anxiety variables. After pretesting, the participants in the experimental class received treatmentviausing the Telegram application, and the (...) control students were trained traditionally without using any social media. After an 18-session instruction, a post-test of motivation and a post-test of anxiety were given to both groups, and also an attitude questionnaire was distributed among the experimental group to inspect their attitudes toward the Telegram application in language learning. The results of using two one-way ANCOVA tests showed significant differences between the post-tests of the control and experimental groups in favor of the experimental group. The findings demonstrated that using the Telegram application increased the motivation of the experimental group and decreased their level of foreign language anxiety. Also, the results of one sample t-test showed that the participants of the experimental group held positive attitudes toward using the Telegram application in English language learning. The implications of this research can encourage both teachers and learners to use social media-based instruments in English teaching and learning. (shrink)

In the few years since the advent of ‘Big Data’ research, social media analytics has begun to accumulate studies drawing on social media as a resource and tool for research work. Yet, there has been relatively little attention paid to the development of methodologies for handling this kind of data. The few works that exist in this area often reflect upon the implications of ‘grand’ social science methodological concepts for new social media research. (...) By contrast, we advance an abductively oriented methodological suite designed to explore the construction of phenomena played out through social media. To do this, we use a software tool – Chorus – to illustrate a visual analytic approach to data. Informed by visual analytic principles, we posit a two-by-two methodological model of social media analytics, combining two data collection strategies with two analytic modes. We go on to demonstrate each of these four approaches ‘in action’, to help clarify how and why they might be used to address various research questions. (shrink)

This paper takes a unique approach to framing the political obligation social media companies like Twitter and Facebook have in a democratic society by casting the public sphere as a common-pool resource. Over the last decade or so much of our civic discourse has moved to social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. This paper argues that just as citizens have an obligation to one another, social media companies have an obligation to promote (...) agonistic forms of civic, political discourse through their algorithms. This algorithmic obligation that social media companies have must be reconciled with social media companies’ formulation of their fiduciary shareholder obligations. We posit that a commons based view of social media discourse allows these companies to make both a democratic health and fiduciary interest argument. (shrink)

Though the rise of social media has provided countless advantages and possibilities, both within and without the domain of sports, recent years have also seen some more detrimental aspects of these technologies come to light. In particular, the widespread social media culture surrounding fitness – ‘fitspiration’ – warrants attention for the way it encourages self-sexualization and -objectification, thereby epitomizing a wider issue with photo-based social media in general. Though the negative impact of fitspiration has (...) been well documented, what is less understood are the ways it potentially impacts and molds moral psychology, and how these same aspects may come to influence digital sports subcultures more broadly. In this theoretical paper, I rely on the insights of Friedrich Nietzsche to analyze the moral significance of a culture like fitspiration becoming normalized and influential in structuring and informing self-understanding, notions of value, and how to flourish in life. Using two doctrines central to Nietzsche’s philosophy—The Last Man and his conception of the ’higher self’ – I argue that fitspiration involves a form of hedonism that is potentially harmful to the pursuit and achievement of human flourishing. Through fitspiration, desire is elevated to a central moral principle, underlying the way users both consume and produce its content, catering simultaneously to their desires for external validation and instant gratification. It thereby creates conditions which foster a culture in adherence to the ethos of The Last Man. In doing so, I argue it impedes the cultivation of the virtues and higher values which define the higher individual, regarded by Nietzsche as essential for human flourishing. However, drawing on the ethical framework of the higher individual provides the philosophical and psychological resources with which resisting and overcoming the more harmful temptations of these trends may be possible. (shrink)

In this brief review I discuss various social media used by philosophers, such as Academia.edu, PhilPapers, blogs and email-lists. Strenghts and weaknesses of different medias are evaluated.

To explore social media use in New Zealand, a sample of 1001 adults aged 18 and over were surveyed in November 2021. Participants were asked about the frequency of their use of different social media platforms (text message included). This report describes how often each of the nine social media sites and apps covered in the survey are used individually on a daily basis. Differences based on key demographics, i.e., age and gender, are tested (...) for statistical significance, and findings summarised. (shrink)

Psychometrics firms such as Cambridge Analytica (CA) and troll factories such as the Internet Research Agency (IRA) have had a significant effect on democratic politics, through narrow targeting of political advertising (CA) and concerted disinformation campaigns on social media (IRA) (U.S. Department of Justice 2019; Select Committee on Intelligence, United States Senate 2019; DiResta et al. 2019). It is natural to think that such activities manipulate individuals and, hence, are wrong. Yet, as some recent cases illustrate, the moral (...) concerns with these activities cannot be reduced simply to the effects they have on individuals. Rather, we will argue, the wrongness of these activities relates to the threats they present to the legitimacy of political orders. This occurs primarily through a mechanism we call “emergent manipulation,” rather than through the sort of manipulation that involves specific individuals. (shrink)

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the extent of personal privacy concerns expressed by university students in Vietnam while using TikTok, the influence of peer interactions and social norms on privacy attitudes and behaviors and the strategies used by university students in Vietnam to mitigate privacy risks on TikTok. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative approach using semi-structured interviews was used to gather data on the following: the degree to which Vietnamese university students express concerns about their personal privacy while using TikTok; (...) how peer interactions and social norms influence privacy attitudes and behaviors; and the strategies these students use to mitigate privacy risks on the platform. Findings Findings indicate that although university students exhibit a relatively low level of concern regarding their personal privacy on TikTok, peer influences and societal norms significantly shape their attitudes and behaviors on the platform. Moreover, students use several strategies to mitigate privacy risks, such as selective content sharing and refraining from engaging with unknown links. Practical implications These insights provide valuable implications for the development of targeted interventions and educational initiatives aimed at fostering a more privacy-conscious TikTok user community among university students in Vietnam. Originality/value This research fills a critical gap in the existing literature by focusing on the influence of social norms and peer influences on privacy attitudes and behaviors on social media platforms. While prior studies have explored various factors impacting privacy concerns on social media, the role of social dynamics has been understudied. Moreover, the research specifically addresses the lack of investigation into privacy concerns on TikTok, a platform rapidly gaining popularity among younger demographics. (shrink)

Social media is a mess. Philosophers have recently helped catalogue some of the various ills. In this chapter, I relay some of this conceptual work on virtue signalling, piling on, ramping up, echo-chambers, epistemic bubbles, polarization, moral outrage porn, and the gamification of communication. In drawing attention to these things, philosophers hope to steer us towards being better online. One form that this takes is a call for more civility (both online and off). There is a good case (...) to be made for this; social media is a mess, and we should be kinder and look to communicate better with each other. But there is also a good objection: Civility, and calls for civility and politeness, can placate serious resistance to power and wrongdoing. What we ought to be doing is resisting power, looking to protect democracy and mitigate the climate crisis. And given that, so the objection goes, focussing on civility is at best wrong-headed, and at worse counterproductive to real needed change. How then are we to negotiate the call for civility with the need for real change? The hope is that we can be better online and work towards serious change together. (shrink)

During the COVID-19 outbreak, educational institutions were closed, and students worldwide were confined to their homes. In an educational environment, students depend on collaborative learning to improve their learning performance. This study aimed to increase the understanding of social media adoption among students during the COVID-19 pandemic for the purpose of CL. Social media provides a learning platform that enables students to easily communicate with their peers and subject specialists, and is conducive to students' CL. This (...) study addresses the key concept of CL during the COVID-19 pandemic by assessing social media use among students in higher education. The relationship between social media use and students' performance is crucial to understanding the role of social media during a pandemic. This study is based on constructivism theory and the technology acceptance model. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the conceptual model using SmartPLS. The research findings indicate that social media plays an important role during the pandemic because it provides opportunities for students to enhance CL under the aforementioned situations. This study makes noteworthy theoretical and practical contributions. (shrink)

Social media have become a standard in contemporary communication. That is especially true for business which jumped at the opportunity to con­nect with current and prospective customers allowing them to integrate with their favourite brands and products even further. This trend, however, seems to be absent in the public domain. Local authorities notice social media but attempt to use it in a one-to-many format, which is incompatible with the interactive nature of the new medium. Cities can (...) strongly benefit from an active presence in the social sphere as it opens new paths to co-governance and better communication. (shrink)

This essay offers a Kierkegaardian analysis of and response to the harmful effects of destabilization that can be caused by engaging with certain technological media. It argues that the intellectual technological ethic that is at work in social media platforms reflects two types of despair discussed in Søren Kierkegaard's Sickness Unto Death. It advises using a Kierkegaard-inspired Socratic rhetorical strategy of communication that ironically employs technology for depicting this despair and awakening individuals to its presence in their (...) lives. Moreover, this essay suggests that the edifying themes of “misery” and “guilt” can be communicated indirectly and thereby offer one intervention that could possibly help the current technological age move from the immediate aesthetic sphere of existence to the religious sphere. Considering the important role of upbuilding in Kierkegaard's oeuvre, the final portion explores how even someone who does not identify with a religious tradition or community may encounter what Kierkegaard terms the paradox of the eternal in time in ways that foster the development of authentic selfhood. (shrink)

Democratic conceptions of politics are tacitly or explicitly predicated upon a functioning arena for the formation of public opinion in an associated media-space. Policy-making thus requires a reliable connection to processes of ‘public’ will formation. These processes formed the focus for Habermas’s influential study on the public sphere. This contribution presents a look at more recent ‘structural transformation’, the causes of which are by no means limited to social media communication, and examines its consequences. It proceeds in (...) three steps: 1) in some proximity to Habermas, but also by means of the theory of resonance, it seeks to determine the kind of public sphere that a democratic polity requires; 2) an analysis of problems within the contemporary public sphere will feed into 3) a discussion of the conditions for the restoration of a ‘functioning political public sphere’. These include changes in the realms of participation, representation and spaces of encounter. (shrink)

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine the respondents’ evaluation of the pervasiveness of fake news through various SM platforms in Kuwait. The authors also examined the respondents’ attitudes toward most fake news on SM. A total of 1,539 Kuwaitis were selected. Design/methodology/approach The questionnaire was the major tool for this study. The respondents, from whom demographic information was obtained, were asked about which SM platforms most frequently spread fake news, their attitudes toward the subjects most frequently involved (...) in spreading fake news, their degree of use of the six SM platforms and interest in various subjects, and the attitudes toward the negative nature of SM news. SPSS was used for the data analysis. Findings The results showed that WhatsApp was the most likely to be used to disseminate fake news; Twitter and Instagram ranked second. The younger subjects were affected more by text and voice clips than the older ones. Originality/value The study, hopefully, produces new knowledge on the subject of fake news in social media, especially in the Arab world, since there are few studies conducted in the region. The study showed that WhatsApp was the SM tool most likely to be responsible for disseminating fake news in Kuwait, which may shed light on the usage of this application to be a news tool, rather than merely an interpersonal communication medium. (shrink)

This article explores the question of how to understand social media following the Habermasian theory of the structural transformation of the public sphere. We argue for a return to political-economic fundamentals as the basis for analysing the public sphere and seek to establish a characteristic connection between digital-behavioural control and singularised audiences in the context of proprietary markets. In the digital constellation, it is less a matter of immobilising the citizen as a consumer but rather of their political (...) activation – albeit in conditions under which commercial interests have primacy: privatisation without privatism. (shrink)

Social media posts are full of potential for data mining and analysis. Recognizing this potential, platform providers increasingly restrict free access to such data. This shift provides new challenges for social scientists and other non-profit researchers who seek to analyze public posts with a purpose of better understanding human interaction and improving the human condition. This paper seeks to outline some of the recent changes in social media data analysis, with a focus on Twitter, specifically. (...) Using Twitter data from a 24-hour period following The Sisters in Spirit Candlelight Vigil, sponsored by the Native Women’s Association of Canada, this article compares three free-use Twitter application programming interfaces for capturing tweets and enabling analysis. Although recent Twitter data restrictions limit free access to tweets, there are many dynamic options for social scientists to choose from in the capture and analysis of Twitter and other social media platform data. This paper calls for critical social media data analytics combined with traditional, qualitative methods to address the developing ‘data gold rush.’. (shrink)

Previous research has established that the success of strikes, and social movements more broadly, depends on their ability to garner support from the public. However, there is scant published research investigating the response of the public to strike action by healthcare workers. In this study, we address this gap through a study of public responses to UK nursing strikes in 2022–2023, using a data set drawn from Twitter of more than 2300 publicly available tweets. We focus on negative tweets, (...) investigating which societal discourses social media users draw on to oppose strike action by nurses. Using a combination of corpus‐based approaches and discourse analysis, we identified five categories of opposition: (i) discourse discrediting nurses; (ii) discourse discrediting strikes by nurses; (iii) discourse on the National Health System; (iv) discourse about the fairness of strikers' demands and (v) discourse about potential harmful impact. Our findings show how social media users operationalise wider societal discourses about the nursing profession (e.g., associations with care, gender, vocation and sacrifice) as well as recent crises such as the Covid‐19 pandemic to justify their opposition. The results also provide valuable insights into misconceptions about nursing, strike action and patient harm, which can inform strategies for public communication. (shrink)

PurposeThis study aims to determine the impact of social media usage on university student’s academic performance in Ghana.Design/methodology/approachA quantitative research method was used for the study. With the aid of a simple random sampling technique, quantitative data were obtained from 373 out of 400 respondents representing 93 per cent of volunteered participants. Data collected was analysed using structural equation modelling to establish the relationship among social media information, social media entertainment, social media (...) innovation, social media knowledge generation and student performance.FindingsThe findings of this study indicate that social media information, social media innovation and social media entertainment all had a significant positive influence on social media knowledge generation, which has wide learning and knowledge management implications. Also, the study indicated that information computer technology knowledge moderates the relationship between social media and student performance.Research limitations/implicationsThe sample taken was mainly cross-sectional in nature rendering the inference of causal relationships between the variables impossible. Future researchers should adopt a longitudinal research design to examine causality. Finally, the study was limited to only university students in Accra, Ghana. Future research can extend to a bigger student population and to other West African and African countries.Practical implicationsThis paper will serve as a profitable source of information for managers and researchers who may embark on future research on social media and academic performance. The findings that social media information, innovation and entertainment can likewise enhance social media knowledge generation can help managers and university teachers to use the vehicle of innovation and entertainment to communicate knowledge.Social implicationsThe findings of this study will help policymakers in education and other industries that engage the youth to realise the important factors that can make them get the best in the social media space.Originality/valueSocial media usage in academic performance is increasingly prevalent. However, little is known about how social media knowledge generation mediates between social media usage and academic performance and, furthermore, whether the information computer technology knowledge level of students moderates the relationship between social media knowledge generation and academic performance of university students in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly Ghana. Theoretically, the findings of this study provide clear research evidence to guide various investigations that can be done on the relationships of the variables under social media usage, knowledge generation and university student performance, which advances the diffusion of new knowledge. (shrink)

1. IntroductionFirst and foremost, the public sphere is the sphere of our social life. Social media’s naturally low barrier to entry and strong participatory attributes have made it more deeply rooted in human social life than any other media before it. Consequently, many scholars have put forward views and theories arguing that the web is essentially a public sphere.

ABSTRACT The rise of social media has correlated with an increase in political polarization, which many perceive as a threat to public discourse and democratic governance. This paper presents a framework, drawing on social epistemology and the economic theory of public goods, to explain how social media can contribute to polarization, making us collectively poorer, even while it provides a preferable media experience for individual consumers. Collective knowledge and consensus is best served by having (...) richly connected networks that are epistemically integrated: individuals with diverse levels of expertise should be relatively well connected to each other. In epistemically segregated networks, by contrast, we have reason to predict collective epistemic failures. Expert knowledge will be isolated from the majority, leading average opinion to be less informed than is socially optimal, and entrenching disagreements. Because social media enables users to very easily adopt homophilous network connections – connections to those with similar opinions, education levels, and social backgrounds – it is likely to have increased epistemic segregation compared to older media platforms. The paper explains the theoretical foundations of these predictions, and sketches regulatory measures – such as taxes – that might be employed to preserve the public good of a well integrated social media network. (shrink)

In the classic study Little science, big science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), Derek Price traces the historical shift from what he calls little science?exemplified by early?modern ?invisible colleges? of scientific amateurs and enthusiasts engaged in small?scale, informal interactions and personal correspondence?to 20th?century big science, dominated by professional scientists and wealthy institutions, where scientific information (primarily in print form and its analogues) was mass?produced, marketed and circulated on a global scale. This article considers whether the growing use of more (...) participatory, interactive ?Web 2.0? technologies and social media in science today (e.g. wikis, blogs, tagging and bookmarking, conferencing, etc.) may signal a revival of little science modes of communication that contrast with big science conventions that continue to dominate research policy, scientific institutions, and the publishing industry. A brief historical review of responses to the scientific ?information explosion? since the early 1900s is presented, with a particular focus on the idealization of large?scale, automated information systems and the privileging of formal (document?producing) over informal (interpersonal) modes of scientific communication. Alternative frameworks for scientific communication that incorporate both documents and interaction are used to examine contemporary examples of so?called Science 2.0 and citizen science projects to determine whether such projects indicate the emergence of new modes of communication in science that bridge the immediacy and involvement of invisible colleges and the rigor of peer?reviewed publishing. The implications for traditional documentary forms such as the journal article are also discussed. (shrink)

This paper explores how the social and affective lives of people with marginalized social identities are particularly affected by digital influences. Specifically, the paper examines whether and how social media enables LGBTQ+ people to experience feelings of belonging. It does so by drawing on literature from digital epistemology and phenomenology of the digital, and by presenting and analyzing the results of a qualitative study consisting of 25 interviews with LGBTQ+ people. The interviews were conducted to explore (...) the social media experiences of LGBTQ+ people through an empirical framework informed by both phenomenology and social epistemology, particularly feminist standpoint theory. The paper emphasizes the importance of positionality and the epistemic value of research that centers marginalized perspectives and employs an anti-oppressive research approach, and focuses on understanding the digital experiences of LGBTQ+ people from within their marginalized perspective. (shrink)

This article originally advances the field of organizational whistleblowing by empirically investigating the suitability of the four elements of the fraud diamond as a means to understand the intention to disclose wrongdoing through virtual channels. This article also makes a contribution on the theme of whistleblowing as it relates to customers, an under-studied, however, relevant stakeholder in this field. The main findings of the article are as follows: the four elements of the fraud diamond as they relate to whistleblowing—a combination (...) of pressure, financial incentive, opportunity and rationalization, and capability—can explain the intentions behind customer reports of wrongdoing; online social media channels are customers’ preferred means of whistleblowing; the elements of opportunity and capability are strongly correlated with the use of social media as a method of disclosing wrongdoing; and virtual channels can be useful for whistleblowers in order to avoid potential retaliation. Unique managerial and academic implications of these research findings are also discussed, extending the layers of knowledge on whistleblowing in organizations. (shrink)

To contribute to the debate on the role of social media in responsible business, this article explores blogger buzz in reaction to food companies’ press releases on health and obesity issues, considering the content and the level of fit between the CSR initiatives and the company. Findings show that companies issued more product-related initiatives than promotion-related ones. Among these, less than half generated a substantial number of responses from bloggers, which could not be identified as a specific group. (...) While new product introductions led to positive buzz, modifications of current products resulted in more negative responses, even if there was a high fit with core business. While promotion-related press releases were received negatively in general, particularly periphery promotion generated most reactions. Our exploratory study suggests that companies can increase the likelihood of a positive reaction if they carefully consider the fit between initiatives and their core business, while taking the notion of ‘controversial fit’, relating to the unhealthy nature of original products, into account. Further research avenues and implications, as well as limitations, are discussed. (shrink)

International observers and critics often attack China's Internet policy on the basis of liberal values. If China's Internet is designed and built on Confucian values that are distinct from, and sometimes incompatible to, liberal values, then the liberalist critique ought to be reconsidered. In this respect, Mary Bockover's “Confucian Values and the Internet: A Potential Conflict” appears to be the most direct attempt to address this issue. Yet, in light of developments since its publication in 2003, it is time to (...) re-examine this issue. In this paper, I revisit Bockover’s argument and show why it fails. Using social media as an example, I offer an alternative argument to show why the Internet remains largely incompatible with Confucian values. I end this paper by suggesting how to recontextualise the Confucian way of life and to redesign social media in accordance to Confucian values in the information society. (shrink)

The current pandemic and the measures taken to address it, on a global scale, are unprecedented. Times of crisis call for creative solutions, and these are not reduced to the work of scientists or politicians. In everyday life, both in online and offline spaces, people use their creativity to make sense of the current situation, to cope with it, and to learn its lessons. Social media is a privileged space for mundane and participative creativity through the production and (...) sharing of coronavirus Internet memes. In this article, we examine the creativity of such memes from a dedicated Reddit community. We ask, in particular, what makes a coronavirus meme creative and what this creativity tells us about the pandemic and popular understandings of it. To answer these questions, we use a triangulation of quantitative and qualitative methods by having 480 memes coded by three social media users for surprise, meaningfulness, elaboration, humor, and creativity and qualitatively analyzing those memes that score highly on each dimension. An interesting finding concerns the importance of elaboration and humor for the evaluation of creativity in the case of memes, above the more traditional criteria of surprise (proxy for novelty) and meaningfulness (proxy for appropriateness), perhaps a feature unique for Internet spaces. The article ends with reflections on what these findings tell us about creativity on social media more generally and the creative processes involved in the generation and reception of coronavirus memes in particular. (shrink)

This article offers an analysis of marketing as an ideological set of practices that makes cultural interventions designed to infuse social relations with biopolitical injunctions. We examine a contemporary site of heightened attention within marketing: the rise of online communities and the attendant profession of social media marketing managers. We argue that social media marketers disavow a core problem; namely, that the object at stake, the customer community, barely exists. The community therefore functions ideologically. We (...) describe the ideological gymnastics necessary for maintaining momentum behind a practice that barely exists and we ponder why such ideologies are necessary, and what they allow the marketer to do. Working with such concepts as ‘the wild’, ‘communicative capitalism’, and ‘biopolitical marketing’, we explore a genre of popular business literature that proselytizes for online customer communities and we reflect on the broader implications. (shrink)

This article develops a framework to analyze how political actors adopt social media in systems characterized by clientelism and populism, tracing the consequences and disruptive capabilities of the forms of social media adoption. The framework proceeds in two analytical stages. The first locates actors’ structural positions in the political system (internal/external) and their relationship with the mainstream media (allied/antagonistic). The second builds on pragmatism focusing on iterative problem situations actors face that explain forms of (...) class='Hi'>social media adoption. In examining the structural positions and problem-solving stages of Colombian political actors, this article articulates three paths of adoption: habit preservation, internal innovation, and external innovation. Preservationists understand the new technology in old terms, projecting their understandings of old media onto the new one. Internal innovators combine clientelist practices and communication ones, upholding core routines while integrating new ones; they show a potential to reshape the system internally, making viable part of it, but changing the balance of power between existing elites. External innovators develop practices that integrate physical spaces and online communication, displaying a disruptive potential for existing core practices and the political system. In this way, the framework and empirical case link and develop the literatures on clientelism and political communication. (shrink)

At a time when firms signal their commitment to CSR through online communication, news sources may convey conflicting information, causing stakeholders to perceive firm hypocrisy. Here, we test the effects of conflicting CSR information that conveys inconsistent outcomes (results-based hypocrisy) and ulterior motives (motive-based hypocrisy) on hypocrisy perceptions expressed in social media posts, which we conceptualize as countersignals that reach a broad audience of stakeholders. Across six studies, we find that (1) conflicting CSR information from internal (firm) and (...) external (news) sources elicits hypocrisy perceptions regardless of whether the CSR information reflects inconsistencies in results or motives, (2) individuals respond to conflicting CSR information with countersignals accusing firms of hypocrisy expressed in social media posts, (3) hypocrisy perceptions are linked to other damaging stakeholder consequences, including behavior (divestment, boycotting, lower employment interest), affect (moral outrage), and cognition (moral condemnation), and (4) firms with higher credibility are more likely to experience adverse effects of conflicting CSR information. These findings advance theory regarding the effects of conflicting CSR information as it relates to the role of credibility and different forms of hypocrisy. Importantly, damaging social media posts and stakeholder backlash can arise from hypocrisy perceptions associated with inconsistent CSR results as well as inconsistent motives, and strong firm credibility only makes a firm more vulnerable to this backlash. (shrink)

Academics across the sciences and humanities are increasingly being encouraged to use social media as a post-publication strategy to enhance and extend the impact of their articles and books. As well as various measures of social media impact, the turn towards publication outlets which are open access and free to use is contributing to anxieties over where, what and how to publish. This is all the more pernicious given the increasing measures of academic value that govern (...) the academy, and the stresses, strains and hidden injuries that structure academic life. This article will debate these issues and their consequences for the humanities and social sciences by analysing the contours of a recent controversy in academic science publishing, which follows the after-lives of a highly cited journal article. This includes a discussion of the value and status of post-publication peer review, and the politics of open access publishing, of citation and the public communication of science within digital environments and archives. (shrink)

We theorize that social media will reduce the incidence of corporate greenwash. Drawing on the management literature on decoupling and the economic literature on information disclosure, we characterize specifically where this effect is likely to be most pronounced. We identify important differences between social media and traditional media, and present a theoretical framework for understanding greenwash in which corporate environmental communications may backfire if citizens and activists feel a company is engaging in excessive self-promotion. The (...) framework allows us to draw out a series of propositions regarding the impact of social media on corporate decisions whether to greenwash, and what channels to use for environmental communication. We conclude with a number of suggestions for future research. (shrink)

Johnson conceptualizes the social responsibilities of digital media platforms by describing two ethical approaches: one emphasizing the discursive freedom of platform-users, the other emphasizing protecting users from harmful posts. These competing concerns are on full display in the current debate over platforms’ obligations during the COVID-19 pandemic. While Johnson argues both approaches are grounded in democracy, we argue that democratic commitments transcend the freedom/harm dichotomy. Instead, a commitment to democracy points toward social media companies’ responsibilities to (...) structure their platforms in ways that facilitate perspectival diversity and collective deliberation. (shrink)

Social media challenge--or have already redefined--conventional boundaries of public and private, personal and professional, friendship, and social relations generally. Here, I consider how these developments may affect professionalism, the physician-patient relationship, and our cultural experiences in a wholly different and unexpected way.

New methods to analyse social media data provide a powerful way to know publics and capture what they say and do. At the same time, access to these methods is uneven, with corporations and governments tending to have best access to relevant data and analytics tools. Critics raise a number of concerns about the implications dominant uses of data mining and analytics may have for the public: they result in less privacy, more surveillance and social discrimination, and (...) they provide new ways of controlling how publics come to be represented and so understood. In this paper, we consider if a different relationship between the public and data mining might be established, one in which publics might be said to have greater agency and reflexivity vis-à-vis data power. Drawing on growing calls for alternative data regimes and practices, we argue that to enable this different relationship, data mining and analytics need to be democratised in three ways: they should be subject to greater public supervision and regulation, available and accessible to all, and used to create not simply known but reflexive, active and knowing publics. We therefore imagine conditions in which data mining is not just used as a way to know publics, but can become a means for publics to know themselves. (shrink)

With an increasing number of international schools, traditional EFL teaching methods may not satisfy students’ needs. This study aims to investigate perceptions of social media technologies and willingness to adopt such technologies to collaborate and communicate in multicultural classrooms among novice EFL schoolteachers in the Czech Republic. The participants were 100 novice EFL schoolteachers in Prague and the South Moravian regions of the Czech Republic. The study used a mixed research method consisting of a survey and a semi-structured (...) interview. The survey examined the participants’ appraisal and concerns of using social media technologies to collaborate and to communicate as well as the level of willingness to use social media technologies. A hierarchical cluster analysis using participants’ responses regarding their attitudes and behavioural tendency towards using Web 2.0 social media technologies in language classrooms identified three clusters of teachers. The teachers who were most likely to adopt social Web 2.0 technologies were those who had the highest ratings on both appraisals and concerns regarding the use of social media in language classrooms. The results from the semi-structured interviews were consistent with those from the survey. Together, the results from the two stages demonstrated that most pre-service teachers favoured using Web 2.0 technology for collaboration and communication among colleagues and stakeholders in a broader community, but they displayed contrasting levels of appraisal of and concerns towards using social media technologies. Participants believed that this might be due to their different levels of ICT proficiency, workload, and working environment. The political and practical implications in K-12 education in the Czech context are also discussed. (shrink)

Social media sites offer a huge data about our everyday life, thoughts, feelings and reflecting what the users want and like. Since user behavior on OSNS is a mirror image of actions in the real world, scholars have to investigate the use SM to prediction, making forecasts about our daily life. This paper provide an overview of different commonly used social media and application of their data analysis.