bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
PANDEMIC POLITICS: THE 2021 AND 2022 GERMAN AND AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL ELECTION CAMPAIGNS ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Authors: Bruns Axel , Schumacher Nina Fabiola , Mathieu Moritz , Nuernbergk Christian , Righetti Nicola , Giglietto Fabio , Kavakand Azade , Kulichkina Aytalina , Marino Giada , Terenzi Massimo , Angus Daniel , Graham Timothy , Dehghan Ehsan , Jude Nadia , Matich Phoebe , Andrejevic Mark , Carlson Bronwyn , Obeid Abdul , Mai Philip , Gruzd Anatoliy
Published: April 2023

One of the effects of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic has been to further accelerate the incorporation of social media activities into political and electoral campaigning. Especially as a result of lockdowns and other restrictions to offline public life, overall social media use has increased in many countries; health concerns have severely curtailed conventional in-person political campaigning activities, from doorknocking to mass rallies (even if some candidates are openly flouting health measures in order to appeal to fringe, COVID-denialist voters); and concerns about the safety of in-person voting processes have also led to a growth in postal voting well ahead of election day, potentially increasing the importance of political messaging early on in election campaigns. In addition, of course, the pandemic itself, and the health, economic, and social measures taken by different governments to address and manage its implications, have also become a dominant theme in most political contests.

Political parties around the world have scrambled to keep up with and engage with these changing circumstances, voter behaviours, and political debates, and it is therefore time to re-examine the current state of affairs. This panel does so by focussing on social media campaigning in two of the most recent major national elections: the German federal election campaign in August and September 2021, and the Australian federal election campaign in March to May 2022. The four papers included in this panel examine political campaigning, public engagement, and journalistic coverage on Facebook and Twitter, as well as political advertising practices on Facebook, and in combination offer a very timely new perspective on electioneering in the final stages of a multi-year global pandemic.
POLICING PLATFORMS: ADDRESSING POWER AND INEQUALITIES IN PLATFORM POLICIES
Authors: Katzenbach Christian , Redeker Dennis , Magalhães João Carlos , Kopps Adrian , Sühr Tom , Caplan Robyn , Viejo Otero Paloma , Celeste Edoardo , Palladino Nicola , Yilma Kinfe
Published: April 2023

Social media platforms had for a long time successfully positioned themselves in the “sweet spot” between beneficial legislative protections and a remarkable absence of obligations (Gillespie 2010: 348), yielding little need to take direct responsibility for the content of users. Increasingly, and specifically since 2016, public and policy pressure has pushed platforms to become something different: not the allegedly neutral tech companies, but powerful intermediaries responsible for the functioning of public discourse and democracy. Platforms have struggled to develop their positions and processes for handling contested and delicate issues such as hate speech and misinformation, and the (at times unwritten) policies are still changing regularly. The panel examines four interrelated aspects of platform policies, including (1) the complexification and commodification of copyright content moderation, (2) platform verification processes and policies to classify some users, things, and places as ‘official,’ or ‘authentic’, (3) the relationship between human reviewers and AI in the enforcement of content moderation policies, and (4) the dilemma platforms face when turning to human rights as a standard for their platform policies. Taken together, the papers of this panel analyze crucial power dynamics and inequalities embedded within and extending beyond platform policies. For this, the panel convenes a productive multidisciplinary conversation and methodological exchange. This examination of the social, political, legal and economic underpinnings of recent changes in platform policies from a global perspective will allow us to better understand the ability of platforms to “re-fashion the world in their image” and to foster change.
COST OF REMEMBERING: GENDERED EXPERIENCES OF ENGAGING WITH ‘MEMORIES’ ON SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS
Authors: Annabell Taylor
Published: April 2023

The use of the term ‘memories’ by social media platforms is not neutral but puts forward a particular understanding of what memories are. I situate the algorithmic resurfacing of the past as ‘memories’ within the dynamic of data colonialism. Memory becomes another layer of human experience that is subjected to datafication and is part of the economic strategy of Facebook to foster increased feelings of intimacy and interdependence. In this paper, I focus on the overlap between the conceptualisations of memory and mnemonic processes by people and commercially driven social media platforms. Drawing on interviews, focus groups and digital traces shared by participants, I examine how gendered subjectivities are being reproduced and intensified by young women as they engage with memories on platforms. First, I address how participants describe their interactions with memory products, focusing on their expectations of typical encounters and entanglements between remembering and feeling. I argue their interpellation into happy remembering by the platform is consequential due to their positionality. Second, I focus on how participants positioned platforms as spaces for preserving and keeping memories beyond the ‘memories’ feature. Third, I look at the role of likes and the quantification of the past within understandings of memories for young women. By exploring intersections of memory, gender and data colonialism, I grapple with how specific groups experience and navigate social media platforms. Navigating gendered pressures and performing normative femininity is part of the cost of engaging with memories for young women.
CONDUCTING CROSS-CULTURAL ONLINE AUDIENCE RESEARCH WITH TWO GENERATIONS: METHODOLOGICAL EXPERIENCES AND REFLECTIONS FROM THE PANDEMIC CONTEXT
Authors: Bolin Göran , Figueiras Rita , Kalmus Veronika
Published: April 2023

This paper discusses methodological, ethical, and empirical problematics related to forced changes in the research design of a comparative project during the Covid-19 pandemic, and its wider implications for future online audience research.

The larger project aims to understand media users’ attitudes towards corporate and state surveillance in countries with different historical surveillance regimes: Estonia, Portugal, and Sweden. In a mixed-methods design, comprising an online survey and focus groups (FGs), we sampled participants from two generational cohorts: born in 1946-1953 and in 1988-1995. In each country, we planned six face-to-face FGs with people from these generational cohorts, divided into three gender-balanced groups with different profiles: higher education; mixed education, living in small cities/countryside; secondary education.

The paper discusses the challenges of conducing FGs online, namely the effects of the technological interface on the group size and interaction, the importance of digital skills, and ethics-related considerations.

Although we encountered cultural differences between the three countries, our main methodological lessons and suggestions for further audience studies center on the need to consider the subtle facets of inter-generational differences when planning online research. As we witnessed, not all barriers were rooted in access to technology and connectivity. The level of digital skills and self-confidence in use also played a role in participants' possibilities and willingness for taking part in online research. Further research is needed to explore how age and online methods intersect, and the role online settings play, in the experience of focus group and interview participants with various social backgrounds.
TOWARD INTIMATE DATA: RE-THINKING DIGITAL, SOCIAL, POLITICAL RELATIONS
Authors: Burns Ryan , Hoffmann Anna Lauren , Welker Preston
Published: April 2023

Digital technologies enable the mass datafication of human activity in new and intimate ways, allowing for both active and passive tracking bodily functions, physical movements, consumption habits, social encounters, and even moods and feelings. Despite the seeming newness of these developments, however, Internet scholars recognize that data production and use has always been bound up with broader relations between individuals, communities, and claims to the privateness or publicness of certain bodies, spaces, and behaviors. Most recently, critical data scholars have illuminated the complex, often surreptitious contexts in which datafication occurs, offering a range of conceptual frameworks to contend with the meanings and implications of these deeply personal digital-human entanglements.

In this paper we take up and recast the notion of “intimate data.” Elsewhere denoting a particular category of tracked activities deemed private or sensitive, we instead consider intimacy as marking a set of (often unequal) socio-political relationships. That is, we mobilize “intimate data” to attend to the processes by which individuals and collectives are datafied in ways that have repercussions for knowledges about oneself and others. In so doing, we sidestep hermetic liberal conceptions of data that center ideals like consent and exchange to think about data collection as eliciting confessions , vulnerabilities, monetizable practices, and new possibilities for governing (inter)personal and other relations. We advance different, alternative political responses, focusing specifically on (1) the (racialized, gendered, classed, sexualized) normativity of intimate data, (2) (re)considerations of privacy and surveillance, (3) tensions around visibility, and (4) responsibilization of individuals to police spaces.
'GASLIGHT, GATEKEEP, GIRLBOSS': MEMEFIED FEMININITIES AND DISIDENTIFICATION IN TIKTOK YOUTH CULTURES
Authors: Chen Shirley Xue , Zeng Natasha
Published: April 2023

Catchcries of empowerment and enterprise have been documented and critiqued by a range of scholars, and continue to be invoked within the postfeminist mainstream (Negra 2014, Winch 2013, Adkins and Dever 2016, Banet-Weiser 2015, Dobson 2014). Yet, on the social media platform TikTok, a number of alternative feminist trends have emerged. Young users are increasingly disidentifying with, or even zealously rejecting, postfeminist ideals. This emerging form of online feminist consciousness, however, intertwines with existing regimes of femininity and girlhood, producing a fraught environment within which establishing a young, feminine identity is particularly precarious. Expanding on scholarship examining teenage girlhood on TikTok (Kennedy 2020) and the ‘memeified’ politics of Gen Z (Zeng and Abidin 2021), we consider how young girls on TikTok have developed ‘remixed’ feminine identities by positioning figures such as the ‘girlboss’, the ‘pick me girl’ and ‘that girl’ as imagined others.

Throughout our analysis, we highlight a range of tensions and contradictions that are evoked within normative frames of youthful femininity. These include performing ‘wokeness’ (Sobande 2019); compulsory irony (Chateau 2020); navigating digital literacies (Nissenbaum and Shifman 2017); manufacturing relatability (Kanai 2019) and compliance with hegemonic feminine norms. Ultimately, we argue that through practices of humour, irony and disidentification, the ‘girlboss’, the ‘pick me girl’ and 'that girl' are evoked as feminine Others, producing a collective feminist politics that lacks positive identity markers, where the feminine self must precariously navigate practices of identification, disidentification, opposition and rejection.
LOST IN THE ETHER: THE IMPACT OF PLATFORM HEGEMONY ON SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Authors: Cooper Tony
Published: April 2023

In post-modern society, the pervasion of social media by business interests is immutable. From benign beginnings as peer-to-peer networking sites, social media has attracted the attention of commercial actors intent on exploiting the media’s propensity to reach large audiences quickly and cheaply. Organically based campaigns saw small firms gain access to large audiences on a previously unthinkable scale. However, the business model monetisation strategies of legacy platforms such as Facebook and Instagram have redefined the intrinsic role of these platforms beyond simple network carriage providers. Together with algorithmic changes designed to filter out unpaid content, a profound effect on equity of access to audiences has been felt by companies marketing via these channels. In particular, the communications efforts of small organisations with limited resources, have been substantially diminished, together with their visibility, under the user-pays regime.

This paper examines the distribution of power in commercialised social media ecosystems. The research maps significant shifts in relational dynamics to reveal an increasingly dichotomous system of haves and have nots among companies operating in this environment. Using a resource and stakeholder theory lens, in-depth interviews were conducted with 17 social media marketing practitioners in the UK and Australia and analysed using a grounded theory approach. The findings reveal a form of neo-colonial gatekeeping based on increased platform hegemony. The new social media hierarchy was found to diminish diversity and perpetuate an increasingly unbalanced economic system. The research implications are discussed in the context of disenfranchised small enterprises.
INEQUALITY AND DISCRIMINATION IN THE ONLINE LABOR MARKET: A SCOPING REVIEW
Authors: Fiers Floor
Published: April 2023

Online labor markets present opportunities to exchange work for money that require different resources and skills than the traditional labor market. Unlike other forms of participation in the realm of society that happens on and via the Internet, participating as an independent contractor in an online labor market does not only depend on individual access to technology, knowledge, motivation, and skills, but also on the preferences and biases of both the hiring party and the mediating platform. We conduct a scoping review to examine how the existing body of literature has approached inequality, discrimination, and bias with regards to paid online labor. Conceptualizing online participation as a multistage process, we build a model of participation and success in the online labor market as a pipeline. Based on a comprehensive set of studies collected via five academic databases, we map prior literature across the pipeline’s stages of becoming an independent contractor and find that most of the prior literature focuses on later stages, such as having been hired. Ultimately, we identify remaining puzzles and advocate for the importance of studying the precursors of online labor outcomes.
PRECARITY, DISCRIMINATION AND (IN)VISIBILITY: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF “THE ALGORITHM” IN THE INFLUENCER INDUSTRY
Authors: Glatt Zoë
Published: April 2023

YouTube’s algorithmic recommendation system – known colloquially as “The Algorithm” – is a powerful character in the lives of professional and aspiring social media content creators, exerting various pressures on them in their struggles for visibility and income. This paper brings an anthropological approach to the study of algorithms in the context of platformised creative work, seeking to understand YouTube’s algorithmic recommendation system as situated in content creators’ everyday lives through a triangulated examination of their discourses, practices and experiences. “The Algorithm” is variously understood as an omnipotent God, a black box to be opened, a mystery to be solved, a voracious machine, and an oppressor of marginalised groups. Above all, it is viewed as unknowable, impenetrable, mysterious, and inscrutable. Though creators’ experiences vary significantly based on a myriad of factors, amongst my participants “The Algorithm” was universally understood as an antagonistic force, one which heightened conditions of precarity and made their working lives more unpredictable and stressful. With an ever-increasing number of people seeking careers as content creators, it is vital to interrogate the emerging and problematic sociotechnological formations that are core to this new form of labour.
INSTAGRAM’S SHIFT TOWARDS LIVE: HOW STORIES AND LIVE VIDEOS SHAPE HOW WE EXPERIENCE BEING AT EVENTS
Authors: Hammelburg Esther
Published: April 2023

Instagram has long been about sharing perfect pictures. For their Instagram posts many users beautify scenes from everyday life, elevate photogenic aspects, and articulate special moments in a style that fits the standards of Instagram culture (Leaver et al., 2020; Manovich, 2017). The term “instagrammable” found its way into many dictionaries and is widely used as a promotional label, for instance in tourism, food, and the museum sector. However, since the introduction of Instagram Stories and Instagram Live – in 2016 – an increasingly large part of the content shared on Instagram is no longer instagrammable in the same sense. These features afford instantaneous sharing of images and videos that are not necessarily displayed permanently, introducing a very different visual language and new visual practices.

At festivals, Instagram is a ubiquitous platform. Many event-goers share their live experiences through posts and stories, often using event-specific hashtags, locations, and stickers. Based on an elaborate empirical examination of event-goers’ Instagram practices, this paper argues that Instagram’s shift towards live shapes their live experiences in distinct ways.
CREATIVE DESIGN METHODS FOR IOT DATA ETHICS IN HYBRID SPACES
Authors: Jacobs Naomi Jane , Kwon Nuri , Mullagh Louise
Published: April 2023

This paper presents the use of creative methods including walking workshops, design fiction and policy prototyping to investigate questions of trust, security and ethics in public space Internet of Things (IoT) deployments.

We describe how the walking workshops, or 'walkshops', were developed to incorporate both real IoT deployments, and design fictions representing mundane speculations, in the context of a city in the North-West of England. The first event was held in the physical city, highlighting its hybrid nature as ubiquitous data collection becomes common. The event was also repeated in a digital hybrid space created for this purpose which replicated the features of the city walk virtually. These activities were used to engage with local council officers and cybersecurity experts, and supported the development of new local government policies for secure and ethical IoT deployment.

The outcomes of this work include reflections on the use of these methods, the delivery of policy recommendations, and the development of an online tool to support organizations in consideration of IoT deployments. Potential users of this tool include public bodies evaluating whether or not deployments conform to policy, those undertaking the design or procurement process for a deployment, and any other organizations assessing ethical and security aspects of IoT.

We reflect on how combining such creative methods with others such as speculative design allows us a deeper insight into questions of data ownership, ethical data practice and data governance.
IMAGINARY PARLIAMENTS: EXCAVATING THE METAPHOR OF CONSENSUS WITHIN BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGIES
Authors: Jankowski Steve J.
Published: April 2023

Blockchain technologies function partly according to consensus algorithms and protocols. Beyond a practical means of allowing these technologies to function, they can also be considered to have imagined affordances that “emerge between users’ perceptions, attitudes, and expectations; between the materiality and functionality of technologies; and between the intentions and perceptions of designers” (Nagy and Neff, 2015, p. 5). In the case of blockchains, these affordances are attached to representing social trust and decentralizing electoral processes. As such, blockchain technologies have been intimately woven into discourses that imagine the future of governance, transparency, and democratic decision-making.

But how has this happened? In this paper I identify that at the root of these discourses is the ambiguous concept of "consensus" and that socio-political meanings of consensus have be re-written as a set of technical operations. Through a combination of metaphor analysis and content analysis of canonical computer science papers and news articles, I demonstrate how the oscillation between technical and political meanings became the basis of the celebratory discourses around blockchain technologies. Through this analysis I demonstrate how computer scientists used a metaphor to guide technical development, and then this metaphor took on a foundational aspect of the socio-political value of the technology in the form of visions for decentralization, autonomy, and democracy.
A MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN: QUEER CHRISTIANS & DATING APPS
Authors: King W.E.
Published: April 2023

Dating apps pose particular challenges for queer Christians, reproducing oppressions and experiences of dispossession in the context of seeking intimate relationships. Queer Christians using dating apps complicates an already sensitive combination of social and cultural commitments, values, and beliefs. Dating apps position themselves in the dating market in a variety of ways, however all function to help people meet other people for dates. Some apps are known for facilitating hookups or catering to queer populations, others are used more broadly and aim to facilitate long-term relationships. Dating apps, along with other social media sites, independently create and control the categories users interact with. On dating apps, users expect the app interface to enable them to represent their unique identities. However, dating apps are often designed with dominant populations in mind and end up excluding those who do not fit the model of their ideal user. Ultimately, my analysis reveals how queer Christians know and express gender and religious identities on dating apps but dating apps do not allow for this complexity to be easily visible or searchable. Queer Christians wrestle with dominant narratives, deviate from social scripts, and resist condemnation to a life without hope for loving partnerships. Dating apps offer fine-grained means of seeking and finding a match made in heaven while simultaneously constructing a hellhole of exclusionary, discriminatory, and oppressive binary categories. Still, queer Christians depend on dating apps, both to do queer identity work and to help them seek and find their match made in heaven.
A GIRL DEFINED BY GOD: BIBLICAL WOMANHOOD, ANTI-FEMINISM, AND WHITE EVANGELICAL MICROCELEBRITIES
Authors: Lawson Caitlin
Published: April 2023

Girl Defined is a cross-platform fundamentalist Evangelical Christian ministry started by two sisters, Kristen Clark and Bethany Beal. The goal of their ministry is to encourage women to reject feminism, deny their personal desires, and live out God’s design for their lives: Biblical womanhood, which centers on traditional feminine gender performance, subordinance to one’s husband, and motherhood. This project seeks to understand the ways that white fundamentalist Christian women make sense of and mobilize against the feminist movement in order to augment our understanding of anti-feminist backlash and white Evangelical women’s place in the culture wars. Informed by research on white Evangelical women in the US and microcelebrity practices, I conducted a critical discourse analysis of 67 blog posts (2012-2021) and 14 YouTube videos (2016-2021) tagged “feminism” on the Girl Defined blog. This analysis demonstrates that Girl Defined portrays feminism as fundamentally self-interested and synonymous with mainstream secular culture. Clark and Beal appeal to their audiences by incorporating neoliberal logics of self-improvement while appropriating the language of progressive movements to modernize their presentation of traditional gender norms. Through their expansive construction of feminism as ideologically dominant, Girl Defined simplifies and individualizes women’s experiences to frame Biblical womanhood as a “radical” alternative to feminism. Overall, these findings provide insight into the paradoxical flexibility of hyper-conservative ideologies that center on a rigidly defined “us” vs. an ever-flexible “them” while expanding our understanding of the ways conservative thought leaders modernize old ideas and use digital networks and influencer logics to spread them.
COLONIZERS IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD: A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF NEXTDOOR USERS’ “POSTRACIAL” SURVEILLANCE
Authors: Lee Jenny , Ahn Chloe
Published: April 2023

Today, colonizing the neighborhood is more accessible to the everyday individual than ever before with the widespread accessibility and popularity of hyper-local digital platforms like Nextdoor. Our project investigates how individuals use these platforms to better understand how their colonial practices are reshaped and perpetuated in the era of the networked smart home. Through a content analysis of user-generated posts in West Philadelphia, we find that users rarely engage with explicitly racist language or topics. Rather than interpret this finding as an indication that Nextdoor users are not racist, or that the platform’s content moderation strategies prevent racism, we argue that users, instead, rely on postracial practices to simultaneously normalize and obscure anti-Blackness. Drawing from Mukherjee et al.’s (2019) concept of “postrace,” we find that users commonly engage in three practices. First, users increasingly shifted away from explicit racial identifiers to more general "race-neutral" goals of safety and community. Second, users shied away from using problematic but non-explicit racialized language (e.g., "thugs"), opting to embed their racializing opinions in broader “policy” discussions. Third, even with increased attention on the harms of surveillance technologies on people of color, discussions around monitoring remained relatively consistent. These themes reflect postracial racism as yet another iteration of colonization in the neighborhood, entrenching essentializing tactics, perpetuating carceral logics, and developing and perfecting surveillance through the site of Blackness.
VOICES FROM THE MARGINS: PRIVACY DISCOURSE IN GITHUB README FILES
Authors: Levy-Eshkol Keren , Ribak Rivka
Published: April 2023

Most digital products use technologies that enable the collection, analysis and transfer of a considerable amount of personal information to the cloud, where it is stored and processed. Thus much of the responsibility for the users’ personal information is in the hands of the developers and the code that they author. This research adopts a materialist perspective to study developers’ discourse around the privacy solutions they embed in the code. Defining GitHub as a discursive platform, we draw on a sample of almost 60,000 README files to analyze the ways in which developers present code to other developers. We find that the files promote two approaches, privacy-by-policy and privacy-by-design. We suggest that the distinction between the two is in fact a distinction between developers who uphold privacy as a value and developers who regard it as an imposition to comply with.
PLATFORMIZATION OF CONSPIRACISM: INTRODUCING A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK FOR INVESTIGATING CONSPIRACY THEORIES ON "ALTERNATIVE" PLATFORMS USING A CASE STUDY OF BITCHUTE AND GAB
Authors: Mahl Daniela , Zeng Jing , Schäfer Mike S.
Published: April 2023

Digital platforms have modified conspiracy theory communication as they enable users to publicly share their support, to circumvent traditional gatekeepers, and to form like-minded communities. However, the impacts of conspiracy discourses differ greatly between platforms. By drawing on critical platform studies, this article introduces a theoretical and analytical framework to investigate the interplay and mutual shaping between “alternative” platforms and conspiracy theory communication, which we describe as the _platformization of conspiracism_. Along the four interconnected dimensions of our framework – _infrastructure_, _economic model_, _governance_, and _user culture_ of platforms – we examine _BitChute_ and _Gab_ in the context of conspiracy theory communication. To investigate the platforms' technological features, business model, and governance practices, we conduct a documentation analysis of media reports and the platforms own news updates alongside an in-depth examination of each platform's functionality and interface. To gain insights into the user culture, i.e., the key characteristics and monetizing strategies of conspiracy theory propagators, we analyze 20 prominent conspiracy theory channels and profiles from BitChute and Gab, respectively. Findings from our study shed light on how both platforms have positioned themselves as technological equivalents to their “mainstream” counterparts by offering similar features and how they differ from their counterparts by presenting themselves as defenders of free speech. At the user level, our findings suggest that both platforms provide conspiracy propagators a fertile refuge through which they can maintain their presence and connection with their followers – which also allows them to profit from their visibility by receiving monetary rewards.
AUDITING FACEBOOK ALGORITHMS: THE ELAPSED EFFECTS OF FACEBOOK NEWS FEED TO ENGAGEMENT WITH GUARDIAN ARTICLES
Authors: McNally Naoise , Bastos Marco
Published: April 2023

In this paper, a proof-of-concept study is performed to validate the algorithmic auditing of Facebook News Feed. We tracked and documented public or otherwise known changes to the algorithms through Facebook public announcements, industry research, and information leaked to the press to parametrize a model that accounts for the variation in user engagement with Guardian news articles. To this end, we queried the Guardian API to collate a database of all Guardian articles published between 2010 and 2020 and subsequently queried the CrowdTangle API to retrieve Facebook engagement metrics for Guardian articles. We modeled this time series using time series analysis, including cross-correlation, anomaly detection, and granger causality tests to examine the relationship between changes to Facebook News Feed and engagement with Guardian articles over the past decade. Our results show that hard news items, particularly those classified in the section ‘News’ by the Guardian API, are significantly more likely to have been impacted by changes made to the News Feed Algorithm in the period. We conclude with a discussion on the asymmetric power exerted by social platforms on news organizations and the elapsed effects of algorithmic changes to website traffic, business models, and editorial decision-making in the news industry.
SHAPING APP DATA PUBLICS AS A NATIONAL SECURITY ISSUE: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE CFIUS-GRINDR AND CFIUS-TIKTOK RULINGS
Authors: Myles David
Published: April 2023

In March 2019, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) labelled Grindr as a risk for national security and forced the Chinese conglomerate Kunlun Tech to divest from the queer dating app by June 2020. Later that year, the Committee launched an investigation into the Chinese company ByteDance, owner of the popular app TikTok, after it acquired the app Musical.ly in 2017. The objective of this paper is to compare how the CFIUS-TikTok and CFIUS-Grindr rulings were shaped as national security controversies, as well as to highlight how app data publics are increasingly the subject of discursive struggles to determine whether or how they constitute risk, especially amid the ongoing US-China trade conflict. Drawing from a political economy approach to communication, we collected and analyzed newspaper articles pertaining to the CFIUS-TikTok (n=294) and the CFIUS-Grindr (n=107) rulings. Our analysis highlights how both rulings were framed by construing the Chinese ownership of popular social media apps as a potential threat to US national security by conjuring anti-Chinese sentiment. However, a closer examination revealed that TikTok’s and Grindr’s data publics were made to matter differently. If the CFIUS-TikTok ruling was predominantly framed as a human rights issue, the CFIUS-Grindr investigation was made to matter by depicting LGBTQ+ citizens as higher security risks for the US because of their sexual and gender identities. This paper concludes by raising the implications that datafication poses for the LGBTQ+ communities who have little control over the regulatory frames that oversee their activities online.
THE COMPLEX SIMPLICITY OF CONTEXT. AFFORDANCES AS FLOWS OF SOCIAL INFORMATION
Authors: Rama Ilir
Published: April 2023

Affordances are central to consider how sociality and technology intertwine. However, while this entanglement propelled the popularity of the term, it also persistently connected the social and the technical. It is argued how considering affordances as eminently social opens up analytical possibilities to consider cultural, individual, and social contexts, and how these in turn can affect social action in digital environments. This means considering affordances as intersubjective and co-constructed, and posing them in relation to sociological tenets such as that of the social situation.

Through 26 interviews with a variety of Reddit users, results suggest how affordances are understood and employed relationally to navigate complex social contexts, to infer dominant social norms and cultural codes and, once internalized, are deployed to sanction deviations or promote compliance to them. It is shown how the concepts of affordances and social situations can be fruitfully employed as an entry point into the cultural and social dynamics of groups and digital environments. Contextually, it challenges the idea of the social situation as a sociological concept rooted in physical interaction.
MENTAL HEALTH AND THE LIBERTARIAN STRUCTURES OF SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS: EXPERIENCES OF PEOPLE WITH EATING DISORDERS
Authors: Saukko Paula
Published: April 2023

Most research on social media and mental health takes a social psychological focus on associations between types of use (social comparisons) or content (idealised images of thinness) and negative effects. Drawing on critical media studies research on platforms, this presentation shifts the conversation towards exploring how social media platforms or mechanisms shape vulnerable users’ experiences of use and content. Interviews with people with eating disorders (EDs) (n=31) highlighted three key experiences: (i) messaging apps that afforded interpersonal communication with chosen trusted audiences and modes of interaction enhanced wellness, whereas platforms and features pushing interaction and extensive, competitive connections were distressing and shunned, (ii) diet influencers, reeled by algorithms, were especially harmful for people with EDs who sought to steer their feeds towards recovery influencers, which however could rehash triggering aesthetic codes informed by the attention economy; (iii) social media support groups, coaches and mental health advice were deemed useful, however the sheer plenitude of offer and business models also created a minefield. The findings map onto historical intertwining of the countercultural quest to open a space for user-generated content and interaction and commercial entrepreneurialism, both characterised by libertarianism. The participants sought to carve out spaces in social media with trusted friends and alternative vernacular content. Yet, the platforms catapulted them out of their comfort zones into harmful interactions and content streams. The problem here is not specific use or content, but libertarian and commercial social media infrastructures that do not afford safe spaces for vulnerable people with eating disorders or others.
DIGITAL KINK OPACITY: SEXUAL SOCIAL MEDIA BEYOND VISIBILITY AND COMPREHENSION
Authors: Sundén Jenny
Published: April 2023

Building on and expanding discussions of the value of anonymity and pseudonymity in digital cultures in general, and in queer digital cultures in particular, this paper explores notions of opacity as modes of resistance to dominating regimes of visibility on and beyond social media platforms. Across queer, postcolonial and digital media theorizing, opacity provides a way of thinking through the tension between the visible and the invisible, challenging the idea of public visibility and identification as that which drives data cultures and legitimizes deviant sexual practices and expressions. Suggestive of discussions on tactical, queer uses of social media in terms of disconnection and reluctance, opacity affords yet another way of thinking resistance to platform power and user control. Based on an ethnographic study of the Swedish digital BDSM, fetish and kink platform Darkside, this paper theorizes opacity in two ways: first, as a way of discussing tactical uses of Darkside between modes of revealing and concealing, and second, as a way of conceptualizing the platform as a borderland between intelligibility and unintelligibility. Opacity implies a lack of clarity; something opaque may be both difficult to see clearly as well as to understand. Drawing on Édouard Glissant (1997) and his idea of “the right to opacity” as a form of resistance to surveillance and imperial domination, a digital sexual politics of opacity could help provide recognition without a demand to fully understand sexual otherness, opening up for new modes of obscure and pleasurable sexual expressions and transgressions on social media platforms.
WIKIPEDIA'S ENLIGHTENMENT PROBLEM: DECOLONIZING WESTERN EPISTEMOLOGIES THROUGH CRITICAL OPEN EDUCATION PRACTICES
Authors: Vetter Matthew A. , McDowell Zachary J.
Published: April 2023

Although Wikipedia uniquely challenges the boundaries of the encyclopedic genre in terms of collaboration, technology, authority, and knowledge production, it remains an encyclopedia, an epistemological method and forum that carries with it the ideological traces and functions of Enlightenment print culture. Such print culture manifests itself most visibly in the policy of verifiability. Although verifiability ensures that editors support their claims with a reliable, published source, a concern emerges when we recognize that verifiability and reliability are typically only granted to written, published sources. Consequently, Wikipedia omits a tremendous amount of human knowledge, especially from cultures without a (privileged) history of print culture. Cultures and regions representing the global south, indigenous cultures and peoples, and other types of knowledge where an oral culture plays a large part in the transmission and curation of knowledge are simply not accounted for. Wikipedia’s vision (somewhat paradoxically) remains hindered by its adherence to colonialist epistemologies that continue to define the genre. This paper articulates Wikipedia’s colonialist epistemology problem by 1) reviewing the core content policies that prohibit alternative and indigenous sources of knowledge, especially verifiability and notability policies and 2) focusing on direct examples of the encyclopedia’s inability to represent indigenous knowledge. In linking contemporary Wikipedia policies to colonialist ideologies, we also trace the encyclopedia genre from its western predecessor, showcasing how Wikipedia continues this tradition via its own techno-optimistic rhetoric. Finally, we discuss failed attempts to address the issue of indigenous knowledge within Wikipedia, and make recommendations for its future.
"YOU CAN'T SEE IT BUT IT'S A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH". OF PLATFORMS, POWER, AND THE INVISIBLE
Authors: Vicari Stefania
Published: April 2023

We investigate the interplay of platform mechanisms and user tinkering in relation to invisible health conditions and ultimately challenge approaches that picture platforms as either hegemonic or liberating. We draw on initial findings from a project focused on social media uses relevant to hereditary cancer syndromes. These conditions are invisible in at least three ways. Cancer genetic risk is evidence-based and embodied, but not bodily visible. General health practitioners rarely know about hereditary cancer syndromes. Overall, hereditary cancer syndromes have not yet entered the wider collective imagination.

Existing research provides evidence that individuals with these conditions turn to social media to seek, learn, produce and share information. However, little do we know about how these practices form at the intersection of embodied experiences, everyday social media uses, and platform mechanisms. In this paper we explore these dynamics drawing on a social media analysis that incorporates data from Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram and combines computational and ethnographic techniques.

When it comes to invisible health conditions, the voice of ordinary social media users easily overcomes that of traditional elites. Local platform mechanisms differently shape how information is shared and who and what become more visible and credentialed in these sharing practices. They also influence how and which personal experiences are more curated and shared. These initial findings suggest that social media platforms are essential in making the invisible visible but raise questions on how participating in one or more platforms’ “local worlds” might affect the lived experience of those who embody this invisible.
“MELON-EATING MASSES”: CONSUMER-CITIZENS AND PUBLIC INTERNET DISCOURSE IN CHINA
Authors: Wong Jamie , Long Vesper , Qu Yilia , Jones Graham
Published: April 2023

This paper examines how the state, neoliberal capitalism, and digital mass media converge to shape particular kind of Chinese “consumer-citizen” (Mazzarella 2013) public: the “melon-eating masses.” By examining how Chinese internet users participate in a genre of public gossip vernacularly known as “melon eating” when the state looms as the final arbiter of judgement, this study illuminates how the politics of “knowing what not to know” (Hillenbrand 2020) unfold in day-to-day (digital) lives in China. Through attending to the “social poetics” (Herzfeld 1988) of netizens’ performance of “rationality” and their understanding and stereotyping of each other, we show how domestic social imaginaries of the Chinese nation and the “rational” Chinese consumer-citizen are co-produced (Jasanoff 2004; Erickson et al 2013), and how they serve to deflect criticism from the Chinese state. Building on anthropological scholarship on gossip as a form of social control (Merry 1984), we explore how public gossiping becomes incorporated into the state’s panoptic apparatus. As Chinese internet users form “partial theories” about “relationships and events” (Van Vleet 2003) through public gossip, “melon-eating” can paradoxically normalize the unknowability of truth under an already-opaque governmental regime.
USERS’ SENSE OF EMPOWERMENT, COMMUNICATIVE BEHAVIOR, AND PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT ON INSTAGRAM: AN EXAMINATION OF THE #BLACKOUTTUESDAY CONVERSATIONS
Authors: Zaher Zulfia , Dejmanee Tisha , Weber Kirsten
Published: April 2023

#BlackoutTuesday was a digital action devised as part of the unprecedentedly large Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. This study builds on Black Lives Matter research through its three main objectives: To test three new independent variables —

race, gender, and source — in determining the demonstration of users’ empowerment; to test race, gender, and source to determine users’ communicative behavior on Instagram; and, to investigate the connection between source types and user engagement on Instagram. We conducted quantitative content analysis to address the research questions. Using CrowdTangle we collected ten thousand Instagram posts containing #BlackOutTuesday published on June 2, 2020. This study is based on 1250 posts randomly selected from the original sample. This study tested eight hypotheses. Using a series of Chi-Square tests, the results revealed that the users’ gender, race, and source types were significantly associated with their sense of empowerment and communicative behavior regarding #BlackOutTuesday conversation on Instagram. This study also investigated the factors that influenced higher engagement. Employing a One-Way ANOVA, the results showed that source types, particularly celebrities and for-profit and media organizations, generated more Likes. We also found that negative emotions created more Likes and Comments. However, the results did not support the association of post structure with higher engagement .
Flood insurance redesigned: Regulatory considerations for a viable and sustainable private market
Authors: Williams Rebecca , Medders Lorilee , Marlett David , Lattimore Catherine , Evans David
Published: April 2023

Several factors have converged in recent years, bringing the need for admitted-market, private flood insurance options in the U.S. to the fore. Meanwhile, other factors have coincided that make modeling and pricing large segments of the U.S. flood risk exposures more accessible and more accurate than was historically possible. The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), despite recent rating reforms, faces daunting financial and market challenges. The U.S. flood risk has increased: The risk of severe flooding and the cost of such events continues to grow. Flood loss models that can support granular pricing are now commercially available, outperforming the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA’s) flood maps historically used for rating and loss mitigation purposes. Several states have begun encouraging admitted insurance markets to provide flood insurance in addition to the NFIP and the excess and surplus lines coverages already available. This paper examines the private market opportunity and challenges, highlights state-level strategies, and demonstrates the importance of flexibility in program legislation and regulation—with respect to both program design and implementation. Our work contributes to the literature by: 1)exploring the market challenges in the development of private flood insurance; 2)demonstrating the importance of local risk considerations and flexible program features for state-level, private strategies that provide a sustainable framework for insurers to consider; and 3) highlighting the alignment of recent model laws and several state programs with the recommended features.
Early Indicators of Good Reading Skill: Grade 3 Learners in Focus, Ethiopia
Authors: Dendena Berhanu , Tabane Ramodungoane
Published: April 2023

The article presents early indicators of good reading skills for Grade 3 learners. It employed an explanatory sequential mixed methods design by which quantitative data collection and analysis occurred first, followed by qualitative data collection and analysis. The intention of using this design was that qualitative data would explain and contextualize the quantitative findings. The quantitative part constitutes a non-equivalent control group design in a quasi-experimental approach. It used naturally occurring intact groups that already existed before and after a quasi-experimental treatment occurred to make comparisons between groups. It involved 1,325 Grade 3 learners selected by convenient sampling technique from 10 primary schools. It used a reading achievement test for quantitative data collection in both groups after and before the intervention. It analyzed quantitative data with the help of a t-test and ANCOVA. Under the qualitative part, a multiple case study design was employed via interviews and observation of learners, teachers, and parents. Qualitative data were analyzed thematically. The findings indicated that there was an association between reading achievement and learners’ linguistics skills, schema, motivation, and reading self-efficacy. Therefore, teachers are advised to emphasize early indicators of reading skills in order to make Grade 3 learners more beneficiaries.