SOTICS 2018

— Social media research and suitable methodologies and ethical approaches for analysing social media data are still emerging. This paper presents a methodology for projects using social media data alongside consideration of ethics within the social media analysis context. Earlier stages of the methodology will be expanded to develop a strategy for examining ethics alongside consideration of the relevant analysis techniques that may be employed. This will provide a comprehensive methodology that will provide a springboard for the clear and ethically sound scrutiny of social media data. We aim to present the challenges of using social media data, while the inclusion of ethical and legal aspects in this paper aim to draw researchers' attention to the peculiarity issues involved with dealing with social media data. Abstract — Modern romance and dating are currently experiencing a ‘digital revolution’ that is powered by online dating platforms. Different forms of social media and social networks, such as dating apps, are gradually tapping into the Internet’s acclaimed ability to empower users. Social media has been described a tool which plays a significant role in enabling women to gain control of and improve the quality of their lives. Literature suggests that online dating is of particular importance to women who seek to gain more control of their dating lives. While online dating apps and literature may cite women empowerment as the overall goal of dating apps such as Tinder, there is a need to empirically investigate the extent to which the use of dating apps empower women. The purpose of this study was therefore, to explore how women’s use of mobile dating apps promote or hinder their psychological empowerment. This study applied a qualitative, single case-study strategy of the Tinder dating app. A deductive approach was taken, as the study relied upon a conceptual model to illustrate Tinder’s affordances and features alongside the components of psychological empowerment. The research findings confirm that the use of mobile dating app affordances and features, to some extent, promote as well as hinder particular psychological empowerment components. The identified findings could further contribute to the understanding of how the use of specific online dating app affordances and features influence the psychological empowerment of women. An enhanced understanding of how women use these affordances and features, may encourage mobile dating app developers to rethink the design of their apps, in the context of women and their psychological empowerment. Abstract — The online video sharing website - YouTube, which was launched in February 2005 to help people share videos of well-known events, has rapidly grown to be a cultural phenomenon for its massive user-base. According to Alexa, the web traffic monitoring tool by Amazon, YouTube is the second most popular website globally. Still there is a lack of systematic research - both qualitative as well as quantitative - focusing on the video-based social networking site as compared to other social media sites. Video comments serve as a potentially interesting data source to mine implicit knowledge about users, videos, categories, and community’s interests. In this research, we studied top 200 YouTube videos trending daily for a 40-day period separately in the United States of America (USA) and the Great Britain (GB) regions. We collected data for 7,998 videos trending in the USA throughout the 40-day time period and 7,995 videos trending in the GB regions. We studied content engagement behavior of users in the USA and GB regions by analyzing views, likes, dislikes, and comments on the set of trending videos. The study helped us glean some of the digital ethnographic behaviors of the users in these two regions. This paper presents highlights of the similarities and differences observed in such behaviors between the USA and GB regions.