bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
AN ONLINE WORK IS STILL WORK: VIRTUAL LABORS OF PROFESSIONAL WRESTLERS
Authors: Reinhard CarrieLynn , Fontaine Jessica , King DeWitt
Published: September 2021

The COVID pandemic’s impact on professional wrestling has come in many forms. Like other forms of sports and entertainment, professional wrestling is very dependent on physical interactions to produce content. So, what happens when wrestlers, who work as independent contractors, cannot engage in such physical labor? Fortunately, many had already been utilizing existing social media platforms as additional sources of income to supplement what they receive from their wrestling, trading on their characters and brands under neoliberal approaches to revenue generation. Their online work often aligns with their physical work, as the actual wrestling they perform is only a small fraction of their revenue-generating labor. From selling merchandise to selling themselves, the panel explores how professional wrestling uses these technologies to further their physical businesses and practices. The panel will critically explore these online activities to understand how such technologies mediate the relationship between promotions, wrestlers, and fans while also reflecting late-stage capitalist and neoliberal ideological perspectives on the Internet. This panel considers how these independent contractors have turned to neoliberal platforms and practices, even before the pandemic, to maintain a living, and the extent to which what they have done to survive operates as a template for more people in post-industrial societies operating under similar conditions.
“MISS RONA IS REALLY CLAPPING THE WHITE SUPREMACISTS”: BLACK TWITTER'S POLITICAL HUMOR IN COVID-19 TIMES
Authors: Antoine Anshare Annie , Stanfill Mel
Published: September 2021

As has been widely reported, the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately sickened and killed Black Americans. At the same time, however, there is a significant body of conversation on Black Twitter that jokes about the pandemic. This includes tweets that nickname the pandemic as "Miss Rona,” as in “god i need a drink so bad, miss rona i promise i will be good.” Through an analysis of tweets using the “Miss Rona” nickname, we examine how Black Twitter humor serves as a site of political critique of both public policy failures and the Trump administration more broadly, with users leveraging practices like Signifyin’, African American Vernacular English (AAVE), and wordplay to resist legibility by outsiders as they orient toward their own community. Black humor is political commentary that resonates with the Black community because the tweets address or refer to Black trauma during the pandemic: dealing with continued racial violence, white supremacist ideology, and medical disparities based on race. The tweets are also expressions of Black Twitter catharsis (joy despite pain) through witty one-sided Twitter banters that skillfully and playfully engage with several facets of the social and political climate. We consider how these conversations go beyond laughing to keep from crying to coded political statements and cultural alliance, and argue that Black Twitter’s jokes about the collective trauma of COVID-19 is a resource for online camaraderie, cultural critique, and community affiliation.
TAKING INTERDEPENDENCIES SERIOUSLY: THE CASE OF MOZILLA’S ENTANGLEMENTS WITH JOURNALISM
Authors: Baack Stefan , Conill Raul Ferrer , Cheruiyot David
Published: September 2021

Despite the complex interdependencies in today’s digital news ecology, it is still common to study digital journalism primarily by looking at how ‘non-journalists’ are influencing journalists from ‘outside’ the field of professional journalism. When it comes to how digital journalism is shaping non-journalists, we mostly find audience research or research on the effects of journalistic reporting. We argue that understanding journalism’s role in society today requires us to more broadly ask how imaginaries about journalism influence all kinds of actors that make up our digital public. In this paper, we therefore discuss how imaginaries about journalism shape the practices and identity of Mozilla, an organization best known for the development of the Firefox web browser. Mozilla currently explores collaborations with, or support of journalism, and we argue that this exploration is shaped by imaginaries about journalism. Using a Mozilla project as an example that seeks to support alternatives to advertising as the dominant way to finance journalistic content online, we show how Mozilla is trying to support its own mission by supporting organizations whose practices and values are considered compatible with this mission. We argue that Mozilla is not aiming to support ‘journalism’ as such, but a particular and rather traditional idea of fact-oriented journalism that facilitates political deliberation. Our findings suggest that studying how particular imaginaries about digital journalism influence non-journalists can help illuminate journalism’s role in today's digital news ecology beyond its ‘democratic function’ and contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the digital transformation as a whole.
BETWEEN INCLUSION & EXCLUSION: THE DIGITAL LIVES OF UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS IN THE UNITED STATES
Authors: Bastick Zach , Mallet Marie L.
Published: September 2021

Undocumented immigrants are a highly vulnerable group that can both benefit and suffer from digital technologies. However, little is known about their digital inclusion and the ways in which this amplifies or attenuates the vulnerabilities of their undocumented status. This paper provides rare and novel evidence from 44 in-depth interviews with undocumented Latino immigrants in the United States. It reports on findings regarding the digital employment of undocumented immigrants, the use of the internet in supporting their transnational family practices, and their uses and attitudes towards telehealth services. It highlights the importance of providing insight and analysis on digital life at the margins of society.
GUY NEXT DOOR AND IMPLAUSIBLY ATTRACTIVE YOUNG WOMEN: THE VISUAL FRAMES OF SOCIAL MEDIA PROPAGANDA
Authors: Bastos Marco , Mercea Dan , Goveia Fabio
Published: September 2021

This study introduces a mixed-methods approach to classifying the visual frames of state-sponsored social media propaganda. We relied on Twitter’s Election Integrity data to sample five key propaganda targets of the Internet Research Agency (IRA), including Russian and American partisan groups. We manually coded profile images and subsequently applied qualitative and quantitative processing to the images. The visual motifs identified in IRA Twitter profiles allowed us to explore how their operations deviated from canonical state propaganda marked by symbols of national identify and heroic masculinity. Indeed, the results show that the visual frames employed by the Internet Research Agency are designed to embody the vox populi with relatable, familiar, or attractive faces of ordinary people. The results also show that IRA influence operations displayed cultural acuity and familiarity with the social identity of their targets, and that the visual narrative it crafted trafficked primarily in the tropes of regular guys or implausibly attractive young women. We discuss these findings and argue that state propaganda has effectively attuned to both subcultural and visual affordances of social platforms.
REGULATING EXPRESSION AND EQUALITY IN COLLEGIATE ESPORTS
Authors: Burk Dan , Rosenblatt Betsy
Published: September 2021

Competitive professional computer gaming or “eSports” has grown rapidly over the past decade, and has extended into collegiate play, where educational institutions have begun sponsoring eSports teams, leagues, and events. However, the expansion of eSports has been accompanied by concerns regarding the online gaming culture from which eSports proceeds. Copious research establishes that women are routinely subjected to gender-based harassment in computer games and game-related activity. In the context of American collegiate eSports, this implicates the law of educational equality known as “Title IX.” Institutions subject to Title IX are required to maintain a learning environment in which educational opportunities are not impeded by sexual harassment, which will be required of eSports as it has long been required for physical sports. Yet, unlike sports played in physical space, computer games are necessarily mediated by software, which has consistently been held to constitute protected speech under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. In this paper we examine the First Amendment constraints on the regulation of eSport computer games under Title IX. We argue that to the extent that choices among gaming content may be dictated by the constraints of Title IX, care must be exercised to accommodate both the statutory requirements of educational opportunity and the constitutional requirements for expressive freedom.
‘THE GREAT YOUTUBE PURGE OF WRONGTHINK’: ALTRIGHT ADAPTATIONS IN A CHANGING PLATFORM ECOLOGY
Authors: Burnett Scott , P. Moura Trancoso Fotini
Published: September 2021

Social media platforms are under increasing pressure to counter racist and other extremist discourses online. The perceived "independence" of platforms such as YouTube has attracted AltRight "micro-celebrities" (Lewis, 2020) that build alternative networks of influence. This paper examines how the discourses of one online AltRight "manfluencer" responds to tightening controls over allowable speech. We present analysis of the YouTube channel of the Swedish far right bodybuilder and motivational speaker Marcus Follin, or "The Golden One". His specific approach to politics includes fitspiration, motivational speaking, and other kinds of neoliberal technologies of the self that in his ideology come together as a call to defend white motherlands and join hands between European nations to fight against globalism and multiculturalism. Through conducting post-foundational discourse analysis of a corpus of 40 videos, we identify three prominent strategies that he uses to respond to increased control of online spaces. The first is to increase cultural encryption, constructing social media as territories in a “metapolitical” war will be won culturally. The second is partial articulation, where he stays focused on positive messages, and his ideology is explained as being about love, not hate. The third is migration, diversification, and new platform-specific foci, through which he finds new and ‘independent’ online spaces and builds new audiences. We conclude that we need more nuanced understandings of how far right ideologies might thrive and build resilience in response to pressure on their speech.
A CRITICAL FUTURE OF VIRTUAL REALITY: ALL WORK AND NO PLAY
Authors: Carter Marcus , Egliston Ben
Published: September 2021

Head-Mounted Virtual Reality (VR) is generally discussed as a gaming
technology, but in this paper we argue for the greater need to take VR seriously as a
general computing platform and future site for, and of, work. For Facebook (who hold a
dominant 39% share of the VR market) VR is not simply a gaming device but as a new frontier
for social media, framed by Zuckerberg as a “new kind of social computing platform”. In this
paper we report on our research that is examining the implications of VR as (1) a technology
being introduced into workplaces; as (2) a possible site for existing forms of labour, in
technologies like Infinite Office; and as (3) a platform for transformed and new kinds of
labour, such as remote work via telepresence. We identify concerning issues of algorithmic
discrimination, exascberated by a prevailing 'fantasy of perfect data' with VR, with serious
consequences in the context of productivity tracking and analytics, and the further
expansion of the gig economy into new domains.
CONSTRUCTING THE DIGITAL SKILLS CRISIS: A CRITICAL CONCEPTUAL HISTORY OF “SKILL”
Authors: Cooper Zane , Bridges Lauren E. , Ticona Julia
Published: September 2021

There is a digital skills crisis: the digital skills crisis does not exist. Through a conceptual history of skill––a word, concept, and action––this paper analyzes the historical, cultural, and material constructions of skill and how it has come to influence current discourse around the alleged “digital skills crisis”. Rather than an intrinsic quality to be acquired, we show how skill has been deployed as a political concept to order bodies and processes according to the interests of power and capital. Pushing back against skilled/unskilled dichotomies, we argue skill itself has been used as a technology in the division of labor (Marx, 1990) to maintain patriarchal (Berg, 1994), and colonial hierarchies (Kumar, 2018). This genealogy helps situate how skill is conceptually operationalized alongside technology in contemporary politics. Through a systematic analysis of policy and public speech from four US presidents––from Clinton’s push to bridge the “digital divide” to Trump’s executive order to “combat the skills crisis”––we show how skills discourse is framed as a deficit issue in both democratic and republican administrations. By centering the conceptual roots of skill, this paper attempts to reclaim an understanding of skills as collective social knowledge that are essential to, and not separate from, technology (Veblen, 1914). Through this work, we hope to generate a broader discussion about the normative assumptions which tie the idea of skill to technological progress so we may re-imagine the kinds of collective social knowledge we need to produce a more just and equitable future.
SORRY, BUT...: PLATFORM APOLOGIES, ABUSE, AND CONSTRUCTING THE CULPABLE SUBJECT
Authors: Cross Katherine Alejandra Angel , Hoffmann Anna Lauren
Published: September 2021

Apologies have become a prominent feature of online platforms’ corporate communications. Whether in response to instances of harassment, security lapses, or political manipulation, official expressions of remorse or regret—often coupled with vows to “do better”—work to reconcile or recover a platform’s commitments in the face of public relations, economic, or regulatory pressure. Despite their prominence, however, apologies have received comparably less critical attention in research on harassment and abuse than other corporate responses. In this work, we employ discourse analysis to explore three high-profile apologies: former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao’s July 2015 apology for missteps in addressing the site’s abusive climate; Riot Games’ 2018 apology for hostility and sexual harassment at the company; and Twitch’s June 2020 apology in response to allegations that some streamers had engaged in offline sexual harassment--leading to online harassment of the alleged victims. Throughout our analysis, we pay particular attention to how apologies 1) construct and reproduce particular ideals of platforms and attendant actors and 2) distribute or assign culpability for harassment and abuse. What emerges is an outline of how this genre of corporate apology is emblematic individualist approach to structural problems like online harassment, while offering pseudo-empowerment to end users through new online "tools" that $2 are primarily responsible for using.
SAFE FROM “HARM”: THE GOVERNANCE OF VIOLENCE BY PLATFORMS
Authors: DeCook Julia Rose , Cotter Kelley , Kanthawala Shaheen
Published: September 2021

Platforms have long been under fire for how they create and enforce policies around hate speech, harmful content, and violence. In this study, we examine how three major platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) conceptualize and implement policies around how they moderate “harm,” “violence,” and “danger” on their platforms. Through a feminist discourse analysis of public facing policy documents from official blogs and help pages, we found that platforms are often narrowly defining harm and violence in ways that perpetuate ideological hegemony around what violence is, how it manifests, and who it affects. Through this governance, they continue to control normative notions of harm and violence, denying their culpability, and effectively manage perceptions of their actions and directing users’ understanding of what is “harmful” versus what is not. Rather than changing the mechanisms of their design that enable harm, the platforms reconfigure intentionality and causality to try to stop users from being “harmful,” which, ironically, perpetuates harm.
RIP IT UP AND START AGAIN: REMIX AND CO-OPTION IN THE MEDIA
INDUSTRY
Authors: Delfanti Alessandro , Phan Michelle
Published: September 2021

Media workers use radical remix techniques to produce content for the
mainstream media industries. Rather than thinking of piracy as a form of resistance, we
identify these practices of remix labor as a renewed commodification of media piracy and
remix cultures (Johns 2009; Mueller 2019). Be it wanna-be influencers remaking the latest
viral video on TikTok, videomakers producing dozens of rip-o-matic clips that will
constitute the storyboard for TV ads, or writers churning out pieces in content farms in the
hope they land on a newspaper, the media industry outsources work to and exploits masses of
people who use piracy and remix to produce content based on scissor reels composed from
existing audio, textual and visual materials.
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS ORGANIZED BUILT ON SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS IN BRAZIL: A STUDY OF HOW TRADITIONAL MEDIA EMBRACED THESE NOVEL FORMS OF CONNECTION AND COMMUNITY
Authors: De-Lima-Santos Mathias Felipe , Ceron Wilson
Published: September 2021

The political turmoil unleashed in recent years has influenced how people interact and organize themselves. Social media platforms played an important role in the organization of these movements that spilled across the globe. In a scenario of political turmoil, Brazil is suffering from an economic downturn and a lack of political leadership in recent years that made an unprecedented crisis. Influenced by these social dynamics of the platforms, three social movements emerged in this period, June Journeys, diesel crisis, and panelaço, and have influenced in traditional news media agenda. These movements represent evolving power dynamics in society, attempting to replace a dominant belief system that legitimizes the status quo by supporting collective action for change. This study, under the lens of sociology and social media theory, examines the evolution of these movements using data gathered from Google News API. Preliminary results indicate that there is a strong critique about some of these movements by traditional news media as they are challenging pre-existing power relationships. However, the promises to break from the constraints of traditional media and embrace novel forms of connection and community are yet limited. This study concludes with an agenda for future research.
GEOPOLITICS IN THE INFRASTRUCTURAL IDEOLOGIES OF 5G
Authors: Dunajcsik Peter 'Maxigas' , Ten Oever Niels
Published: September 2021

This paper explores how infrastructural ideologies function as tools
in geopolitical struggles for dependence and independence of world powers. Meese Frith and
Wilken (2020) suggest that controversies around 5G stem from infrastructural anxieties best
examined in the framework of geopolitics. We build on this work by analyzing the emerging
infrastructural imaginary of 5G in light of the changing global division of labor.
Sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim 2015) refer to the vision of technologies
themselves, while ideologies refer to the totality of social relations, translating the
objective reality of material conditions to subjective lived experience (Bory 2020). The
Western imaginaries around 5G infrastructures reflect, deflect, translate and sublimate the
infrastructural anxieties tied to the development and deployment of new network paradigms.
Their controversial nature, contradictory content, and fragmented presentation is a
necessary part of living through the trauma of lost historical agency on the part of Western
superpowers. We engaged in code ethnography (Rosa 2019) of GSM, internet, and 5G
technologies, as well as participant observation in the main standard-development
organizations of the internet and 5G, and semi-structured interviews with equipment vendors
and network operators. Our methodological assumption, taken from World Systems Theory
(Wallerstein and Wallerstein 2004), is that the character and content of imaginaries and
their underpinning ideologies creatively reflect the position of actors in the global
division of labor. This paper contributes to the understanding of the role of
infrastructures in geopolitical power tussles and straddles the fields of science and
technology studies and international relations.
RECASTING COLLEGIATE ESPORTS: INDEPENDENCE AND INTERDEPENDENCE OF UNIVERSITY TWITCH STREAMERS
Authors: Foxman Maxwell , Cote Amanda , Can Onder , Harris Brandon , Rahman Waseq , Hansen Jared , Fickle Tara
Published: September 2021

Few online communities exhibit the tensions between independence and interdependence better than collegiate esports. Twitch, the primary platform for live streaming esports, is central in such strife. The platform is a vital tool for colleges and athletes to forward brand, community, and entrepreneurship, while simultaneously its unbridled use indicates the need for administration and institutional interventions by universities. As such the proposed study aims to illuminate how collegiate esports clubs, including players, administrators, and program directors, use Twitch to promote independence and interdependence with esports publishers, players, fans, and college culture. Preliminary findings from 19 interviews with athletes and directors suggest some commonalities, particularly in optimism about the platform as a tool for entree into the industry. However, beyond this, directors and athletes diverged when it came to how Twitch should be employed, the labor required to successfully navigate the program, and concerns over toxic behavior associated with competitive gaming that manifested during live play. Finally, grey areas colored the interdependency between Twitch and the university. Monetization and use of streams were not clearly articulated, along with undefined policies on how to act professionally and represent universities on the platform. Ultimately, these early findings point to the lack of knowledge and flexibility of institutions like universities as they increasingly rely on platforms to foster online and offline communities.
SUBVERSIVE COMMEMORATION: MAPPING THE ASSEMBLAGE OF COUNTER-MEMORY ON TWITTER
Authors: Gaw Fatima , Bunquin Jon Benedik
Published: September 2021

Beyond enabling participatory forms of memory-making, digital media reconfigure power relations in memory construction. In the Philippines, we witness this through the hashtag network #ArawNgMagnakakaw (‘Day of Thieves’) to counter the heroic commemoration of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos sanctioned by the state and supported by online networks that distort and deny his crimes during his 20-year regime. This case illustrates not only how digital media facilitates the negotiation of memory by non-institutional actors, but also how it sets the conditions to resist elite narratives through non-conventional ways of remembering. This study examines the performance of counter-memory (Foucault, 1977) in the intersection of networked publics, counter-narratives, and technologies of memories. We investigate the hashtag network #ArawNgMagnanakaw by mapping its social network and analyzing its discourses as digital practices (Jones, Chik & Hafner, 2015). We argue that the network derives its power from neither elite nor collective actions, but through connective action of structures, discourses and practices of remembrance. Firstly, the locus of analysis shifts from a single actor (‘who remembers’) to the assemblage (‘what enacts the remembering’) as an agent of counter-memory, with technology shaping its possibilities and boundaries. Secondly, the assemblage’s resistance to elite commemoration surfaces silenced and neglected historical narratives (‘what is remembered’) through affective articulations of protest and subversive commemorative practices (‘how is it remembered’). We theorize the ‘assemblage of counter-memory’ as the connective, discursive, and material assemblage that enact political agency to privilege marginalized narratives and play an active role in the (re)construction of memory.
'IT'S 1776, BABY!': BROADCASTING REVOLUTIONARY PERFORMANCE DURING THE U.S. CAPITOL RIOTS
Authors: Gilmore James N , Hamer Madeline , Erazo Valerie , Hayes Patrick
Published: September 2021

This presentation focuses on the documentation and mediation of the January 6, 2021 breach of the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump in an effort to overturn the certification of Joseph Biden’s electoral victory. We analyzed videos participants recorded and shared through a variety of social networking, live-streaming, and messaging applications. We offer a cross-platform descriptive analysis of footage transmitted from participants during the Capitol Riots from seven different platforms: the social networking sites Facebook, Twitter, and Parler; the live-streaming sites DLive, Twitch, and Periscope; and the messaging application Snapchat. In examining this range of platforms and applications, we argue not just for the importance of attending to the documentation of violent protests, but to also account for the broad spectrum of possibilities at play across the ecology of digital video-sharing platforms in building digitally networked publics. This analysis allows us to provisionally argue that the Capitol Rioters were not only interested in particular political outcomes; they were also interested in mediated outcomes that were consciously drawing from the structured affordances of their smartphones and their online networks to create many different media spectacles that were distributed across an ecology of platforms.
DESIGN CHOICES: MECHANISM DESIGN AND PLATFORM CAPITALISM
Authors: Goldenfein Jake , Viljoen Salomé , McGuigan Lee
Published: September 2021

Mechanism design is a form of optimization developed in economic theory. It casts economists as institutional engineers, choosing a outcome and then arranging a set of market rules and conditions to achieve it. The toolkit from mechanism design is widely used in economics, policymaking, and now in building and managing online environments. Mechanism design has become one of the most pervasive yet inconspicuous influences on the digital mediation of social life. Its optimizing schemes structure online advertising markets and other multi-sided platform businesses. Whatever normative rationales mechanism design might draw on in its economic origins, as its influence has grown and its applications have become more computational, we suggest those justifications for using mechanism design to orchestrate and optimize human interaction are losing traction. In this article, we ask what ideological work mechanism design is doing in economics, computer science, and its applications to the governance of digital platforms. Observing mechanism design in action in algorithmic environments, we argue it has become a tool for producing information domination, distributing social costs in ways that benefit designers, and controlling and coordinating participants in multi-sided platforms.
INDEPENDENCE AND INTERDEPENDENCE: MULTIDIMENSIONALITY OF FINNISH YOUTH’S EXPERIENCES OF TRUST IN NEWS ONLINE AND VIA SOCIAL MEDIA
Authors: Horowitz Minna , Matikainen Janne
Published: September 2021

Young people’s relationship with the news has been a cause of concern, especially due to the role of social media as a central component of their lives, often seen as a prominent cause of declining trust in the news. This proposal features some of the results of a multi-method, interdisciplinary study of the University of Helsinki (2019-2021) that examines how Finnish audiences view the power of traditional news media and social media. The project understands trust as a four-dimensional concept: generalized trust in the media, trust in specific sources, trust in terms of specific issues, and trust determined by one’s individual disposition. Based on the results of two general surveys in Spring 2019 and Spring 2020, a survey focused on young people (18-29-year-olds), three focus group interviews, as well as a three-day online discussion of 30 participants of the same age group in Fall 2020, we analyze how young people and experience the trust in news sources online. We also discuss how the pandemic has shaped their experiences. While the most defining characteristic of Finnish audiences is a combination of both basic trust and critical approaches toward news, this is markedly true for young people. At the same time, our findings do not confirm the worst fears of moral panic about growing distrust and news avoidance by young people. Rather, they suggest a combination of independence and interdependence by young people, of both legacy news media and online and social media sources.
THE SEER AND THE SEEN: A SURVEY OF TOPICS FOUND IN PALANTIR PATENTS
Authors: Iliadis Andrew James , Acker Amelia
Published: September 2021

Palantir is one of the most secretive technology firms in the US. The company supplies information technology (IT) solutions to governments, nonprofits, and corporations, focusing on data integration and surveillance services. To investigate Palantir’s opaque technology practices, this article presents findings from a topic modeling of Palantir patents (n=155) filed from 2006-2019 in the US, Germany, Australia, UK, and EU. This approach follows recent literature that uses patents as data for researching opaque IT firms. We begin by summarizing scholarship on Palantir and IT for policing, intelligence, and security. Our findings show that Palantir’s IT produces infrastructural layers of meaning/context via metadata that are wrapped ‘on top’ of previously held legacy data. We thus use the concept of infrastructuring to understand Palantir’s practices, where information standards like metadata are theorized as phenomena for structuring social worlds. The paper ends by offering action items for future research into opaque IT firms.
HOW A CONNECTIVE ACTION IS DISRUPTED IN RESTRICTIVE CONTEXTS? THE CASE OF DISMANTLING #RAPE ON PERSIAN TWITTER
Authors: Kermani Hossein , Hooman Niloofar
Published: September 2021

Having reduced the cost of political activism, social media has provided room for ordinary citizens to engage in politics, build networks, spread information, and resist oppressive regulation (Howard & Hussain, 2013; Margetts et al., 2016). The ideas of connective action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012) and hashtag activism (Jackson et al., 2020) are recent endeavors to theorize such transitions. However, the existing literature has overemphasized the positive side of social media platforms, in particular Twitter, in challenging inequalities, as well as in giving voice to marginalized groups (Lindgren, 2019; Wonneberger et al., 2020). While scholars, to a lesser extent, investigated how social media are used to suppress online protest from a normative and more general standpoint (Gunitsky, 2015), the ways that a connective action could be disrupted, e.g., by state actors has not received much scholarly attention yet. This has become particularly important in recent years, as several governments across the globe have adopted new tactics to dismantle connective actions, such as the coordinated dissemination of fake news. This study sheds light on such disruptive processes by investigating how a connective action in the Iranian Twittersphere (revolving around #rape , i.e., Iranian #MeToo) was derailed.
MOTIVATIONS AND EXPECTATIONS FOR VIRTUAL GIFT-GIVING IN DOUYIN LIVE STREAMS
Authors: Klug Daniel , Qiu Huilian Sophie
Published: September 2021

Mobile live streaming recently advanced as popular form of content creation for streamers on short-video apps like Douyin and TikTok to make money through virtual gifts from viewers. Virtual gifts are primarily used to reward streamers for their content or performance in a live stream, yet on Douyin social aspects seem to be more crucial for virtual gifting. We are looking at three types of live streams by young male hosts (= streamers) on Douyin to analyze the motivations of female viewers to watch and make virtual gifts to the hosts and to explore resulting power relations between hosts and viewers. We conducted 12 semi-structured interviews with female of all three live streams who sent virtual gifts to hosts. We find female viewers send virtual gifts, for example, because they wanted to make the host happy or to help them achieve an assigned virtual gifts task. We did not find aspects of power imbalances regarding the monetary or social value of virtual gifts. While interviewees do not expect anything from the hosts in return for their virtual gifts, they appreciate online gestures, like a host blowing a kiss. In contrast, we observed viewers send virtual gifts to help a host win a live stream competition which holds implicit expectations. Overall, we find female viewers of male-hosted Douyin live streams mainly use virtual gifts as a social means of appreciation and support for friendship in a parasocial online interaction.
TOWARDS A MULTI-DIMENSIONAL THEORY OF TEMPORAL CONTROL IN THE GIG
ECONOMY
Authors: Kwok Chi , Chan Ngai Keung
Published: September 2021

This paper proposes a multi-dimensional theory of temporal control in
the gig economy. Specifically, we focus on different types of platform-based temporal
control and their respective effects on (a) workers’ autonomy, (b) value of free time, and
(c) their social and political connectedness. Theoretically, we draw on the sociology of
time and normative time literature in political theory. Empirically, the framework is
informed by the synthesis of the literature about algorithms in the gig economy, with
particular attention to the methods of temporal control. Meanwhile, we draw insights from a
larger comparative project that examines algorithmic labor control and resistance across
ride-hailing platforms (Uber and Lyft), TaskRabbit, and delivery platforms (DoorDash, Uber
Eats, and Instacart) in the United States. The project interviewed 50 gig workers between
2017 and 2020. Through a systematic synthesis of primary and secondary materials, this paper
contributes to understanding temporalities and work autonomy in the gig economy, and more
broadly, flexible workplaces where the boundaries between work and non-work time become
blurred.
‘IT’S MY FAULT FOR POSTING IN THE FIRST PLACE’: HOW INDIVIDUAL
RESPONSIBILITY AND SELF-BLAME ARE SUSTAINED AND INTERNALIZED
Authors: Liao Tony , Fite Haley
Published: September 2021

Data breaches and data misuse are frequent occurrences in today’s
digital society and often spark debate over who should hold responsibility. While many hold
the platforms responsible when confronted with violations of data privacy, some users shift
the blame inward for trusting the platforms and posting on them. While a large body of
research has dedicated itself to issues of data privacy, discourses of individual
responsibility and the internalization of user self-blame have received less attention. This
study explores how users respond to unknown use of their personal data through the case of
CrystalKnows, a personality detection algorithm that generated profiles about individuals
using unknown data sources, often without the user’s knowledge. Founded in 2015,
CrystalKnows claims to have the world’s largest personality database, providing and selling
algorithmically generated user profiles, often without the express consent of these
individuals. Interviews were conducted with individuals whose profiles appeared on the
platform (N=37) to reveal users’ reactions and rationalizations of the data collected about
them. Rationales of self-blame vary but commonly center issues of ambiguity concerning
digital consent and the algorithm itself. Ultimately, these contribute to feelings of
resignation often paired with the unrealistic alternative of total platform non-use. We
argue that these complex discourses of self-blame, independence/choice, and
resignation/non-use as the only options are intertwined with data privacy reform efforts.
Understanding the sources of self-blame and how deep it runs is an important step to
interrogating and refuting some of these assumptions, if broader reforms hope to garner
support and implementation.
ALGORITHMIC EMPOWERMENT OR IMPERIALIST WARFARE? DARK SKIN, AI CAMERA,
AND A CHINESE COMPANY’S PATENT STRATEGY
Authors: Lu Miao , Qiu Jack Linchuan
Published: September 2021

Through document analysis and participant observation, this paper
examines the patent strategy of Transsion, a Chinese company that dominates Africa’s
smartphone market and a leading innovator in facial recognition technologies optimised for
darker skins. We identify two major narratives surrounding Transsion’s facial recognition
patent strategy. First is the “empowerment” narrative, in which Transsion argues that there
are “blind spots” in conventional AI camera technologies and interprets its AI camera as not
just a fix to existing blindness but also an empowerment tool for dark-skinned users by
“seeing” and capturing their beauty. While the “empowerment” narrative is more externally
oriented, Transsion uses a “warfare” narrative to interpret its patent strategy internally.
This may have to do with cut-throat market competition, patents race, and the rapid pace of
innovation, which gave Transsion a strong sense of crisis. Other major Chinese brands are
also entering the African market. Transsion thus considers its facial recognition patents as
“competitive weaponry” in preparation for a future clash in Africa’s smartphone market. This
study makes three contributions. Empirically, through document analysis and participant
observation, we examine a relatively less known Chinese smartphone company that has made
huge impact in the Global South. Theoretically, we shed on the possibility of algorithmic
empowerment against racist facial recognition systems, although developing AI as a weaponry,
in the Chinese-African contexts, may also lead to new forms of imperialism. Thematically,
echoing this year’s AoIR conference theme, this study reveals the politics and geopolitics
of independence through patents.
DEEP NEURAL NETWORKS FOR SOCIAL VISUALS: STUDYING CLIMATE COMMUNICATION
ON YOUTUBE
Authors: Magnani Matteo , Segerberg Alexandra
Published: September 2021

Visual politics is becoming increasingly salient online. The
qualitative methods of the research tradition do not expand to complex media ecologies, but
advances in deep neural networks open an unprecedented path to large-scale analysis on the
basis of actual visual content. However, the analysis of social visuals is challenging,
since social and political scenes are semantically rich and convey complex narratives and
ideas. This paper examines validity conditions for integrating deep neural network tools in
the study of digitally augmented social visuals. It argues that the complexity of social
visuals needs to be reflected in the validation process and its communication: It is
necessary to move beyond the conventionally dichotomous approach to neural network
validation which focuses on data and neural network respectively, to instead acknowledge the
interdependency between data and tool. The final definition of good data is not available
until the end of the process, which itself relies on a tool that needs good data to be
trained. Themes change during the process not just because of our interaction with the data,
but also because of our interactions with the tool and the specific way in which it mediates
our analysis. An upshot is that the conventional approach of performance assessment – i.e.,
counting errors – is potentially misleading in this context. We explore our argument
experimentally in the context of a study that addresses climate communication on YouTube.
Climate themes such as polar bear in arctic landscapes and elite people/events present tough
cases of social visuals.
END-USER FLEXIBILITIES IN CONTEMPORARY DIGITAL COPYRIGHT LAW – AN
EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF END-USER LICENSE AGREEMENTS
Authors: Mezei Peter , Harkai Istvan
Published: September 2021

In the platform age, copyright protected contents are primarily
disseminated over the internet. This model poses various challenges to the copyright regime
that was mainly designed in and for the analogue age. One of these challenges is related to
the fair balance between the interests of rightholders and other members of the society.
Copyright norms try to guarantee the high level of protection of rightholders and preserve
some flexibility for the benefit of end-users. These flexibilities range from statutory
limitations and exceptions (e.g., private use); resales (covered by the doctrine of
exhaustion); or complaint-and-redress mechanisms. Platforms, with their private norms,
especially end-user license agreements (EULAs), might effectively enforce that balance in
their role as intermediaries in the chain of (e-)commerce. In our research, conducted within
the frames of the „reCreating Europe” H2020 project, we focused on how these private norms
allow for or diminish the exercise of user flexibilities. We collected, analysed and
compared twenty private ordering practices. The analysed platforms include streaming sites
with or without host function for end-users; online video game stores and other online
marketplaces; and social media. Our empirical examination demonstrates that the
intermediaries, in line with their technical nature and business model, offer substantive
flexibilities for their consumers, on the one hand, and they meaningfully limit the
possibilities and decrease the expectations of end-users by restricting certain uses and
providing limited access to contents, on the other hand. Based on our findings, we measured
the user-friendliness of the selected platforms.
HASHTAG ACTIVISM LOST IN TRANSLATION: THE REFORMULATION OF #METOO IN
JAPAN
Authors: Mizoroki Saki , Shifman Limor , Hayashi Kaori
Published: September 2021

In 2017, the #MeToo movement lit up Twitter. In Japan, however, it
was almost nonexistent and morphed into other forms of hashtag activism: #WeToo, #WithYou,
and #furawademo (“flower demo”). This paper investigates both the absence of #MeToo in Japan
and its reformulations. We hypothesize that these could be explained through the interplay
of three avenues: (1) values—the literature on values in Japan foregrounds harmony,
collectivism, and the avoidance of shame; (2) Topic—gender and sexual harassment—drawing on
literature on the rootedness of sexism in this society; (3) Platform—mounting concerns over
privacy issues on Twitter in Japan. We conducted fifteen interviews with Japanese men and
women from varied backgrounds and assembled 119 newspaper articles that explain why people
are reluctant to speak up. We applied a combination of grounded and thematic analysis to
analyze these samples. Our analysis affirmed that the three avenues are key to understanding
the movement’s absence and reformulation. Perceived Japanese values clash against the values
that respondents and newspapers detected in the movement, and the new formulations are
evaluated as “softening” the protest by blending in acceptable values. However, while most
participants appreciated the movement, they were afraid of retaliation and isolation, given
their perception of Japanese values. We tentatively argue that it’s not values as essential
orientations but the prevalent perceptions of popular values that limit activism. Such
perceptions of national values become self-fulfilling prophecies; people “perform” the
values that they think others will appreciate and, in so doing, reinforce those
values.
TOP 5 TINDER HACKS! BLACKBOXING ALGORITHMS IN THE DATING APP
INDUSTRY
Authors: Myles David , Blais Martin
Published: September 2021

Tinder’s swipe feature operates algorithms that have influenced a new
generation of dating apps. In this paper, we argue that the mystique surrounding Tinder’s
algorithms is as productive for the dating app industry as the actual technical operations
they perform. We seek to understand how actors in the dating industry construct matchmaking
algorithms as strategic unknowns that can be harnessed to reach commercial objectives. To do
so, we mobilize the notion of ‘algorithmic blackboxing’ – how actors strategically construct
algorithms as black boxes to reach certain goals – to analyze a corpus of 48 online dating
guides that offer ‘best advice’ to exploit Tinder’s matchmaking algorithms. Our analysis
shows that dating guides overwhelmingly construct Tinder’s algorithms as black boxes whose
secrets must be unlocked for users to generate matches and, therefore, find love. The
alleged unintelligibility and opacity of Tinder’s algorithms allow self-proclaimed ‘dating
experts’ to sell their advice or services in the context of a speculative dating economy. To
obtain more matches, dating guides promote a common injunction: to hack Tinder. They invite
users to modulate their behaviors and practices to become more algorithmically recognizable.
Dating guides also readily invoke rhetorical arguments that draw on statistical data
produced by Tinder, which highlights the emergence of new ‘regimes of truth’ within the
matchmaking industry that enact a dataist ideology. We conclude by advocating for the
importance of critically examining the increasing algorithmic mediation of dating cultures
at the intersection of Internet, gender, and sexuality studies.
ANALYZING PLATFORM POWER IN THE CULTURAL INDUSTRIES
Authors: Nieborg David B. , Poell Thomas , Duffy Brooke Erin
Published: September 2021

Across cultures and contexts, digital platforms like YouTube,
TikTok/Douyin, WeChat, and Spotify are fundamentally reshaping both the processes and
products of cultural production—from music and news to entertainment and advertising. But,
despite considerable attention to the perverse power of algorithms in various spheres of
social and economic life, we contend that existing political economic frameworks fail to
account for the distinctiveness of the cultural industries. Challenging essentialist
theories of platform dominance, this paper argues that claims of platform power need to be
qualified in the context of industry- and culture-specific inquiries. Building on research
in science and technology studies (STS), software studies, political economy, business
studies, and media industries studies, the paper presents a new analytical framework to
analyse the evolving power relationship between platforms and cultural producers. It is
argued that the decision space of cultural producers in their role as platform complementors
is shaped by three key variables: 1) platform evolution, 2) cultural industry segments, and
3) stages of production. The proposed framework makes clear that, while the relationship
between platforms and cultural producers is staggeringly uneven and, at times, highly
volatile, it should be understood as one of mutual dependence. That is, platforms exert
mechanisms of power over the phases of the creation, distribution, monetization, and
marketing of culture; but they also furnish space for negotiation and contestation.
Acknowledging this requires a framework that is less deterministic and sensitive to the
nuance inherent in cultural production.