bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Challenges in predicting Greenland supraglacial lake drainages at
the regional scale
Authors: Poinar Kristin , Andrews Lauren C.
Published: October 2020

Abstract. A leading hypothesis for the mechanism of fast supraglacial lake drainages is that transient extensional stresses briefly allow crevassing in otherwise-compressive ice flow regimes. Lake water can then hydrofracture the crevasse to the base of the ice sheet, and river inputs can maintain this connection as a moulin. If future ice-sheet models are to accurately represent moulins, we must understand their formation processes, timescales, and locations. Here, we use remote-sensing velocity products to constrain the relationship between strain rates and lake drainages across ~ 1600 km2 in Pâkitsoq, western Greenland, between 2002–2019. We find significantly more-extensional background strain rates at moulins associated with fast-draining lakes than at slow-draining or non-draining lake moulins. We test whether moulins in more-extensional background settings drain their lakes earlier, but find insignificant correlation. To investigate the frequency that strain-rate transients are associated with fast lake drainage, we examined Landsat-derived strain rates over 16- and 32-day periods at moulins associated with 240 fast lake drainage events over 18 years. A low signal-to-noise ratio, the presence of water, and the multi-week repeat cycle obscured any resolution of the hypothesized transient strain rates. Our results support the hypothesis that transient strain rates drive fast lake drainages. However, the current generation of ice-sheet velocity products, even when stacked across hundreds of fast lake drainages, cannot resolve these transients. Thus, observational progress in understanding lake drainage initiation will rely on field-based tools such as GPS networks and photogrammetry.
RE-VALUING PLATFORMS, RECLAIMING THE LOCAL
Authors: Gekker Alex , Hind Sam
Published: October 2020

This panel brings together emerging scholarship that challenges the contemporary hold of major platforms over public and private life. It critically questions the scope, valence, and embeddedness of platforms in the everyday, challenging (commercial) platformization as the new normal. We attempt to offer new ways of managing, changing and co-opting platforms for the benefit of end-users rather than proprietors only. To this end, the panel discusses and debates 'non-market' approaches to tackling social and environmental effects of platforms. It is designed to build on recent work within infrastructure, platform and critical data studies to suggest alternative approaches to the neoliberal ordering of economic life. A central question is whether the data streams monetized by “big tech” can be harnessed for public, democratic, or socialist ends; in doing so, bringing them 'in house' and into competition with big tech itself. In other words, the panel takes a “protocological” (Galloway 2004) resistance approach, in appropriating the methods of algorithmic- and data-governance occurring under platformization, and utilising them at the regional (state) or (hyper-)local (city, city block) level. Moreover, it seeks to highlight examples of successful community-based and cooperative instances of platformization. Looking at the seemingly ruthless efficiency of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (GAFAM) in the extraction of value through digital means, the panellists ask: what would resistance look like if we use the economic and infrastructural strategies levied against us? $2 Galloway, A. R. (2004). Protocol: How control exists after decentralization. MIT press.
TABOO OR NOT TABOO: (IN)VISIBILITIES OF DEATH, DYING AND BEREAVEMENT
Authors: Hård af Segerstad Ylva , Bell Jo , Giaxoglou Korina , Pitsillides Stacey , Yeshua-Katz Daphna , Cumiskey Kathleen , Hjorth Larissa
Published: October 2020

The notion that ‘death is a taboo’ pervades private, public and academic discourses around death, dying and bereavement in contemporary Western societies. The rise of digital media within the last decades further complicates the appreciation of the stance that death is a taboo, given the increased opportunities afforded in social media environments for embracing death, fostering new intimacies with strangers and semi-strangers but also for turning death into a spectacle (Jakobsen, 2016). The study of death-related practices online and the tensions they raise has rapidly been growing in the interdisciplinary field of Death online studies. However, in this field there is a need for developing shared conceptual and analytical frameworks and ensure methodological and theoretical robustness in line with developments in the study of social media communication. There is a need to synthesize insights from death sociology and interdisciplinary death online studies in order to shape an agenda for an integrated study of the offline and the online that can capture continuities and shifts in death-related practices (see also Borgstrom and Ellis, 2017). This panel collects four papers presented by six interdisciplinary scholars from Denmark, Sweden, Israel and the UK. Focusing on the (in)visibilities of death, dying and bereavement across contexts - online and offline - the papers critically revisit the ‘death is taboo’ thesis by investigating the particular conditions under which death, dying and bereavement are talked about, storied, and made socially visible and the ways in which technology plays a vital part in coping with mortality.
MEDIATING MENTAL ILLNESS: DIGITAL LIFEWORLDS, PLATFORMS AND ALGORITHMS
Authors: Hendry Natalie Ann , Wan Evelyn , Flore Jacinthe , McCosker Anthony , Kamstra Peter , Farmer Jane
Published: October 2020

How is mental illness conceptualised, designed, experienced or produced by digital life? This panel explores how digital technologies and media are transforming the performance, recognition, and experience of mental illness. We bring together different methodological and theoretical contributions towards an interdisciplinary study of mental illness and digital life. Our first two papers analyse specifically chatbots and ingestible sensors that are used for diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment of mental illness in their entanglements with private companies, state policy, and university lab experimentations. Our first paper frames the emerging field of computational psychiatry as a biopolitical form of governance of mental illness through algorithmic and digital means, and analyses the logic of control through the example of a cognitive-behavioural therapy chatbot for depression and anxiety. The second paper turns to the body as a site of intervention for the treatment of psychiatric diagnoses and explores how we can think through the assemblages of digital technology, embodiment and moods associated with mental illness. Understanding online forums as potentially “enabling places,” the third paper discusses the relationships between space and location, and social experiences of mental ill-health on online forums posted by forum users living in remote areas in Australia. Our final paper considers the absence of these “enabling places” as digital platforms disafford familial or relational experiences of mental illness, and design out families where a parent or adult carer lives with mental illness.
DISCONNECTION: DESIGNS AND DESIRES
Authors: Karppi Tero , Chia Aleena , Lampinen Airi , Feldman Zeena , Dieter Michael , Ferreira Pedro , Beattie Alex
Published: October 2020

One of the paradoxes of disconnection is that social platforms like Facebook frame it as a threat to our prosperity while critics associated with “the techlash” maintain that quite on the contrary it is the only thing that brings back the possibility for good life. Disconnection means different things for different actors and these differences manifest in varying desires and designs. The five papers in this panel draw on empirical research and media and cultural theory to find answers to questions such as what process have led to the desires to disconnect; how does something disconnect; when does it disconnect; what does it disconnect; and whose disconnection it is? Two of the papers map the choice to disconnect in situations where on one hand digital participation has become structurally necessary by the demands of the society and on the other where users are doing outdoor activities and it is connection that requires activity. Three of the papers focus on particular designs of disconnection from Facebook’s off-Facebook Activity Tool to UX Design Decks and the Light Phone. As a whole, the panel describes the different ways disconnection is becoming central to our online existence.
GAMES OF EMPIRE TEN YEARS ON
Authors: Pelletier Caroline , Ruffino Paolo , Woodcock Jamie , Bulut Ergin , Nieborg David , Fordyce Robbie
Published: October 2020

The panel will retrospectively evaluate the significance of the seminal text Games of Empire (2009) for new media and game studies, reflecting on the contribution of autonomous Marxism to the study of digital culture today, as well as the methodological move it performed in tracing continuities and discontinuities between sites of production and play. Each paper will take one or two key concepts from the original book, including Empire, multitude, ideology, and cognitive capitalism, and apply them to the contemporary moment in the games sector. Our aim is to explore the strengths and limitations of these concepts, as well as identify the salient ways in which the sector has evolved over the last ten years. For example, we will examine efforts at unionisation in the sector; how gender and race have emerged as key concerns in the last few years in sites of game work; how apps are affecting the representation of capitalist and military systems; and how ‘multitude’ in the sector has assumed new forms in the wake of new distribution platforms. The panel will make a case for integrating social theory with the analysis of production cultures and textual practices, as well as situating the analysis of games within the field of new media and internet studies more broadly.
DATAFICATION IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR: EXPLORING THE BORDERS BETWEEN PUBLIC SERVICES AND CITIZENS
Authors: Spilker Hendrik Storstein , Reuter Lisa , Broomfield Heather , Aasback Anne , Dahl-Jørgensen Tangni Cinningham
Published: October 2020

This panel presents on-going research from a large research project on digital infrastructures and citizen participation in the Nordic countries, with a focus on the datafication of the public sector and the construction of new borders between public services and citizens. In recent years, governments have faced increasing pressures to become datafied or “data-driven”. A more data-driven public is said to be able to develop a whole new range of services that are envisaged to result in better services, more effective government, more transparency in the public sector, more just service delivery, and the empowerment of citizens. The panel critically examines the challenges that arise when the precepts are to be converted into working services – such as: What kinds of foreseen and unforeseen transformations does the development of new services give rise to? • What kinds of resistance are the new services facing? • What new forms of expertise, enrollment of new actors, organizational restructuring and redelegation of roles and relations are needed? • How are citizens/clients envisioned and inscribed into the scenarios for future public administration? • How are citizens/clients consulted in the design and development of the services? • How are the new services experienced by citizens/clients? In sum, the presentations in this panel span a range of urgent themes related to the construction of borders (and alleys) between public sector services and citizens – from anticipations to effects and efforts.
SOCIAL MEDIA AND RELIGIOUS IDENTITY CHANGE AMONG MUSLIM ARAB WOMEN IN	ISRAEL
Authors: Agbarya Aysha , John Nicholas
Published: October 2020

This study investigates the interface between increased religiousity among Muslim Arab women in Israel, and their social media use. To understand their use of social media as part of a profound change in social identity, fifteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with Muslim women aged 19-26 who are, or have been, social media users, who live in Israel, and who have become significantly more religious than they had previously been. The findings show two different logics of social media use in times of religious identity change. The first includes reconstructing social media ties to be an alternative, supportive environment, while the second relates to decision making based on the religious rules newly adopted by respondents. Two main social practices were related to the second kind of social media use: managing (and often removing) ties with male users, which raised profound personal dilemmas, and removing digital traces by deleting past posts and photos. Such decisions were made to obey religious rules rather than to gratify personal needs. Social media accompany and assist in the identity change, starting from its very beginnings, and throughout the process. While previous research shows that SNS tie management is an essential part of our identity, our findings show the religious identity of women to be a distinct case where religious rules guide behaviour and decision making. The very fact that these acts and dilemmas are visible to us is a result of paying special attention to identities in flux.
COMBINING MULTIPLE DISINFORMATION COUNTERMEASURES TO REGULATE ELECTION	DISRUPTIONS: THE SOUTH KOREAN CASE
Authors: Ahn Soyun
Published: October 2020

Disinformation spread through social media has been widely detected around the world in recent years. Researchers, the press, and the public alike have expressed strong concerns about disinformation influencing public discourse and elections, perceiving it as a direct threat to democracy. Democratic countries once reluctant to restrict freedom of speech are now actively examining countermeasures to disinformation. Such measures could be divided into four categories: Regulating platforms, criminalization of offenders, governmental monitoring, and relying on civil society. The existing literature so far has focused more on examining the pros and cons of individual policy directions rather than providing an overview of the entire dynamics when multiples measures are combined in practice. It is due to most countries still being at their infancy discussing and inventing a disinformation regulation suitable for their legal freedom of speech protection structure. South Korea is unique in that it has operated a system dealing with disinformation for over a decade now, and in that it has a system specifically dedicated to election protection combining three of the four measures introduced above. Through scrutinizing both the legal framework and execution practices of the multiple disinformation countermeasures in South Korea, this research expands the existing literature by offering insights on how combining measures could result in unforeseen discounts of freedom of speech.
CURATING MEMORIES: THE ROLE OF EMOTION IN THE DIGITAL MEMORY WORK OF	YOUNG WOMEN ON INSTAGRAM & FACEBOOK
Authors: Annabell Taylor
Published: October 2020

A core understanding in memory studies is that memory is not formed by an individual in insolation. Instead, it is guided by social frameworks and enacted within a particular social context. This is articulated by van Dijck (2007) as an inseparability of mediated memories from culture. Accordingly, the active, purposeful creation of and re-engagement with digital traces of the past in the present on Instagram and Facebook by young women can be situated in the postfeminist, neoliberal environment. Significantly, the particular expectations and pressures on how young women should feel and act intersect with the performance of digital memory work. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the particular ‘feeling rules’ (Kanai, 2019) articulated by the young women and consider more broadly the role that emotion plays in shaping the performance of digital memory work on Instagram and Facebook. I draw on data gathered from semi-structured interviews with young women aged between 18 and 21 living in London, and ethnographic observations of their Instagram and Facebook profiles. This is complemented with a socioeconomic platform analysis (van Dijck, 2013) and a technical walkthrough (Light et al. 2016), carried out to examine how Instagram and Facebook encourage particular emotions to be expressed and the entanglement of memory and emotion in their memory product. The analysis explores the overlap between the encouragement by platforms and expectations of the postfeminist environment for happy moments to be shared with the way that different emotions influence what is shared by participants.
INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES (ICTS) AS OPPRESSORS OF	SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: A POWER PERSPECTIVE
Authors: Azer Evronia , Zheng Yingqin , Harindranath G.
Published: October 2020

While the literature discusses ICTs as enablers of activism, this paper discusses the manipulation of power through ICTs in activism. Power makes using ICTs in activism dangerous and risky. This paper is a product of 30 semi-structured interviews with Arab Spring grassroots human rights groups that operated before 2015 but no longer do because of oppression and how it affected them physically and psychologically. The paper explains power structures enabled by ICTs inside and outside social movements. It also discusses how the power manifested through ICTs creates much risk of different types for activists: technical, social, psychological and political. First, ICTs created more ways for authoritarian regimes to watch over activists. The asymmetry of visibility (Brighenti, 2010) is one result of the advancements in ICTs that directly affected activists’ mental health by creating anxiety among them, not knowing when and how they are being watched. This asymmetry has also endangered activists’ lives, because if they are unaware of being under surveillance and take no precautionary measures, they are an easy target for state oppression. The two conflicting sides, activists and the state, both make use of ICTs as a space for action turning ICTs into an arena for power struggle. Another side of power that this paper discusses exists within social movements that are claimed to be leaderless. Even though activists do not want to be in an authoritarian system, they create a situation whereby their refusal to decide who is in charge may lead to an implicit power hierarchy.
INFORMATION ACTIVISM IN THE FIRST DIGITAL COPYRIGHT DECADE: A CASE	STUDY OF THE DIGITAL FUTURE COALITION, 1996-2002 AND THE INTERNET THAT NEARLY	WAS
Authors: Bello Bryan , Aufderheide Patricia
Published: October 2020

The Digital Future Coalition (1996-2002), was an unprecedented public interest coalition on Internet and copyright policy, with much farther-ranging effects than has been recognized previously. Uniting commercial and noncommercial stakeholders to push back against IP maximalism on the nascent Internet, it altered both treaty and legislative language, blocked U.S. copyright protection for databases, enhanced popular engagement with fair use and set the stage for the “Right to Repair” movement. This historical research was accomplished primarily by interviewing representatives of the DFC and opposing groups, as well as one ex-government official, and by consulting a hitherto untapped, private archive of documents relevant to the history of the DFC. We consider our topic within contexts in three areas: the history of the formation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA;) public interest coalition characteristics in communication; and the political roles of coalitions. In this article, we accept the assessment of the DMCA as legislation that both foreclosed options for the Internet’s development and created an enduring regime to protect copyright monopolies on the Internet. However, we argue that a closer look at the DFC’s actions, goals and long-range effects can reposition that coalition productively in the history. Such repositioning helps to understand how different the DMCA today is from the originally-proposed policy and the implications of those differences. Finally a detailed accounting of the DFC’s dynamics and tactics may prove instructive in assessing the efficacy of contemporary information activist groups.
WHOSE SHAREDPLANS? SCRIPTS, COLLABORATION, AND FEMINIST AI	RESEARCH
Authors: Bergmann Rachel
Published: October 2020

This paper examines a network of women in AI research who together expanded the range of methodologies and disciplines usually included in AI in the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, Barbara Grosz and Candace Sidner’s concept of $2 offered a way to model conversational context and collaboration in multi-agent AI environments. Drawing on archival work, interviews, conference proceedings, white papers, and departmental reports, I consider the cultural, institutional, and intellectual forces that shaped this network and their research. Using a technofeminist framework (Wajcman 2004; Haraway 1990) and borrowing from Michelle Murphy’s (2012) concept of protocol feminism, this paper examines their “feminist AI protocol.” I outline on one hand an assemblage of techniques, values, methods, and practices that illustrate a protocol rooted in community, interdisciplinarity, and care; these researchers formalized human-computer dialogue as fundamentally collaborative, grounding their approach in the diverse goals and desires of real users. I argue their philosophy of “language as action” mirrors ideas circulating in feminist and critical STS simultaneously. On the other hand, this network of researchers did so from within a particular set of cultural and epistemological parameters of their computer science departments. The research practices of this network offer an opportunity to consider the limits of any feminist AI protocol without a deeper commitment to feminist epistemologies. There remains an urgent need to reflect on how to build feminist AI technologies that make room for and include many different standpoints.
BULLYING IN CON/FFLATING SPACES – WHY A ‘SPACE’ PERSPECTIVE MATTERS	FOR UNDERSTANDING YOUNG PEOPLE’S EXPERIENCES AND PRACTICES OF BULLYING
Authors: Bork-Hueffer Tabea , Mahlknecht Belinda , Kaufmann Katja
Published: October 2020

There is an urgent need for the currently mostly disparate and quantitative research on traditional or cyberbullying, to not only take note of each other, but also to analyse the interdependences, intersections and conflation of bullying in digital and offline spaces in a more comprehensive manner. More recent conceptualisations of ‘space’ offer valuable contributions to a reflection upon the epistemological and related methodological considerations when seeking to understand the lifeworlds, practices and experiences of young people involved in bullying. In this sense, we have recently advanced the concept of “cON/FFlating situational spaces and places” (Bork-Hüffer and Yeoh 2017: 93) in an attempt to integrate existing algorithmic, (post-)feminist and relational perspectives to the analysis of bullying (cf. Bork-Hüffer et al. 2020). We ask: Whether and how does bullying in physical and digital spaces intersect in school contexts? We applied narratives produced by young people themselves in Austria with the objective to let them speak with their own voice when describing their experiences and involvement with (cyber)bullying. Even when bullying practices themselves seemed to be restricted to digital spaces, they are still entangled within the spatialities of participants’ relations, practices, identities and life-worlds that stretch across inseparable socio-material and technological spheres. The results reflect how the ontogenesis of socio-technological developments shapes the opportunities for, types of, frequencies and harshness of bullying attacks.
"GOOD SOCIAL MEDIA?": UNDERREPRESENTED YOUTH PERSPECTIVES ON THE	ETHICAL AND EQUITABLE DESIGN OF SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS
Authors: Brough Melissa , Literat Ioana , Ikin Amanda
Published: October 2020

This study investigates underrepresented youths’ perspectives on social media design and how these may inform the development of more ethical and equitable social media apps. In contrast to the tradition of universal design in the field of human-computer interaction, this research centers difference to investigate how users’ perspectives and expectations, shaped by their identities, help determine the affordances of social media and their ethical implications. Twenty-five in-depth interviews and youth-guided “think aloud” social media tours were carried out with a diverse range of young people from underrepresented groups. Findings illustrate how young people perceive and experience empowering and disempowering aspects of social media design. Interviewees expressed a palpable sense of underrepresentation in the digital technology design sector and noted several ways in which design elements of social media can exacerbate a sense of inadequacy. The negative implications of user profile design and popularity rating systems that encourage conformity were found to be of particular concern for low-income youth, youth of color, and other underrepresented groups. However, our findings also illuminate youth perceptions on how social media can sometimes serve as a tool to counter negative stereotypes and build social capital. The analysis includes concrete suggestions from underrepresented youth for more ethical and equitable social media design.
DETECTION ALGORITHMS AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR PARTICIPATION: THE	CASE OF MASHUPS
Authors: Brøvig-Hanssen Ragnhild , Jones Ellis
Published: October 2020

‘Mashup’ is a form of music that, in its use of samples from existing popular music recordings, has often been seen as an exemplar of the participatory cultural environment that many expected the internet to foster. It is a musical form that remains widely produced and consumed today. However, the contemporary internet is a complex environment for media distribution, with dominant platforms making use of a wide range of automatic and algorithmic regulatory tools in order to police, monitor, and remove unwelcome content – including that which is seen, rightly or wrongly, as copyright infringing. Drawing on recent empirical research on and with mashup producers – including 30 semi-structured interviews and an extensive survey (n=92) – this article explores the impact of platform regulation on mashup music today. It concludes that current regulation has significant stifling effects on this kind of remix creativity, including a substantial impact on where mashup producers distribute their music, on the aesthetics of their music, and – most pertinently – on their overall motivation to create. Having outlined these key findings, we argue that the ‘shutdown’ status of mashup producers raises profound questions concerning the balance between regulating online content in terms of protecting the artists’ rights, and cultivating participation and culturally valuable artistic expression. As such, this paper offers a timely contribution to scholarship on the complex relationship between popular music and new media in its critical exploration of internet’s detection algorithms and their implications for mashup music and cultural participation more generally.
THE EVOLUTION OF FACEBOOK'S GRAPH API
Authors: Burkhardt Marcus , Helmond Anne , Seitz Tatjana , Van der Vlist Fernando
Published: October 2020

Facebook’s application programming interfaces (APIs) enable third-party app developers to access data and functionality and have become central to many of the platform’s ongoing data scandals and privacy concerns. Understanding how the platform and its APIs evolve and how it responds to issues requires looking closely and empirically at the evolution of access points, data structures, and graph data structures. The technicity of APIs is crucial for understanding the politics of data sharing and how APIs represent and structure phenomena and temporarily stabilise them. Instead of using APIs as an umbrella term for data retrieval, we conduct historical “technical fieldwork” for examining the evolving architecture and interfaces of Facebook’s web APIs. We contribute an in-depth technical and empirical perspective on the evolution of Facebook’s Graph API since 2006, and how it evolved into one of the most significant web APIs and an integral part of contemporary advertising infrastructures and web development cultures. Our empirical historical analysis of Facebook’s Graph API is based on the entire corpus of available archived developer documentation held by the Internet Archive. As we show, key changes in the Graph API evolution are characterized by phases of experimentation, standardization, commercialization, and regulation. We provide a “scalable reading” of the evolution of Facebook’s Graph API which provides insights in how data and data flows are governed through changes in data structures and permissions. By considering the evolving structures of APIs and individual data objects, we may develop further empirically informed critiques of platforms, APIs, and their data.
LIFE WITH DICK AND DICK: RACE AND MALE PORNOGRAPHIC	SELF-REPRESENTATION ON REDDIT
Authors: Bury Rhiannon , Easton Lee
Published: October 2020

This paper broadly focuses on the sharing of male pornographic self-representation (PSR) on the Reddit forum, Massive Cock. Our previous study examined how gay-straight relations are recoded on the forum. Drawing on new data currently being collected, we focus on the operation and intersection of racialized masculinities as afforded by hybrid networked technologies, platforms, and screens. Based on preliminary data collection and analysis, we argue that Massive is a space of unmarked whiteness, with a paucity of racialized dick pics. We discuss the ways in which the less than 10 percent of posters of colour mark out their racialized identities, including through the mobilization of the problematic trope of the BBC (“big black cock”), with its roots in interracial pornography. We also examine the ways in which a much smaller number of racialized men, who are not black, mark out their racial/ethnic identity. Finally we look at the few white men who draw attention to their race through appropriation of the BBC discourse as BWC ("big white cock"). Taken together it is clear that Massive is a “fraternity of the [white] cock” (Waugh, 2004) but it is one that is disrupted and unsettled by the presence of racialized PSR.
DEEPFAKES: A PRELIMINARY SYSTEMATIC REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
Authors: Carvajal Laura , Iliadis Andrew
Published: October 2020

Deepfakes are becoming a key topic in debates around politics and misinformation on the internet today. While the phenomenon of deepfakes is relatively new with the first documented public appearances recorded in 2017, there is already a growing scholarly literature about deepfakes and the various methods that can be used to help understand and combat them. This paper presents a preliminary systematic review of the academic literature on deepfakes. We assessed a representative sample (N=1049) of sources from four popular electronic databases, including Google Scholar, Scopus, Crossref, and Web of Science. We then coded those articles according to academic subject, theoretical approach, and theme.
FOLLOW THE MONEY: A LARGE-SCALE INVESTIGATION OF MONETIZATION AND	OPTIMIZATION ON YOUTUBE
Authors: Coromina Oscar , Matamoros-Fernández Ariadna , Rieder Bernhard
Published: October 2020

While YouTube has become a dominant actor in the global media system, the relationship between platform, advertisers, and content creators has seen a series of conflicts around the question of monetization. Our paper draws on a critical media industries perspective to investigate the relationship between YouTube’s evolving platform strategies on the one side and content creators’ tactical adaptations on the other. This concerns the search for alternative revenue streams as well as content and referencing optimization seeking to grow audiences and algorithmic visibility. Drawing on an exhaustive sample (n=153.770) of “elite” channels (more than 100.000 subscribers) and their full video history (n=138.340.337), we parse links in video descriptions to investigate the appearance and spread of crowdfunding platforms like Patreon, but also of affiliate links, merchandise stores, or e-commerce websites like Etsy. We analyze the evolution of video length and posting frequency in response to platform policy as well as visibility tactics such as metadata and category optimization, keyword stuffing, or title phrasing. Taken together, these elements provide a broad picture of “industrialization” on YouTube, that is, of the ways creators seek to develop their channels into media businesses. While this contribution cannot replace more qualitative, in-depth research into particular channels or channel groups, we hope to provide a representative picture of YouTube’s elite channels and their quest for visibility and success from their beginnings up to early 2020.
DISPLACED DISCUSSION: THE IMPLICATIONS OF REDDIT QUARANTINE AND THE	MOVEMENT OF THEREDPILL TO SELF-HOSTING
Authors: Cousineau Luc S.
Published: October 2020

Reddit.com is a social media site with huge volumes and varieties of content, both hosted on their platform, and imported from other providers. It is also a place of counterpublic community action. Sub-Reddits like r/the_donald, and r/theredpill expound, in turn, alt-right and anti-feminist views. Along with various posts, links, and outside content, the communities support millions of words of user discussion. These communities are policed, at least in part, by their exposure to the community at large, and push-back from other people and groups to their content. When a community sees that its action on a site like Reddit is limited, and perceives that its ideas and ideologies are being silenced, what happens? This paper uses data from a digital ethnography of r/TheRedPill, a sub-community of Reddit dedicated to “discussion of sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men.” The community was quarantined by Reddit in September of 2018, and since that time has engaged in regular discussion about the movement of community discussion and forums away from Reddit to their own hosting site www.trp.red. Beyond simply allowing versus limiting speech, the case of r/TheRedPill provides an opportunity to engage in a discussion about whether progressive sanction is the right way to manage the intersection of counterpublic views with the needs of tech firms. This paper hopes to further that discussion using a community that is less generally associated with hate speech, and can therefore exist on the margins of acceptability.
PRESENTING PERFECTION: CONSTRUCTING IDENTITY IN THE REHEARSAL STAGE OF	ONLINE INTERACTION
Authors: Ditchfield Hannah
Published: October 2020

Social media platforms such as Facebook have been understood to present new possibilities for interaction. Yet, there have been concerns surrounding the reducing quality of our interaction and conversation. Such debates, however, have not considered the pre-post dimension of online environments: that is, the preparatory work that occurs to online posts before they are shared with their audience. Based on real time recordings of Facebook Messenger interactions, this paper asks what the pre-post perspective tells us about the quality of our interactions online. The analysis is theoretically informed by Goffman and methodologically by conversation analysis and addresses this question with a focus on processes of identity construction. Specifically, this paper questions how the practice of pre-post editing (the editing of messages before sending) is used by users to represent self online and what this then tells us about the quality of our online talk. In presenting innovative screen capture data, this paper argues against claims that our interaction online is declining in quality instead showing the ways users perfect their online posts by elaborating a new stage of online communication: the ‘rehearsal’ stage. In doing this, this work reflects on the wider implications the affordance of pre-post editing has on users’ social media experiences questioning the impacts constructing ‘perfect lives’ has and the potential for creating ‘reduced’ versions of self within our online interactions.
POLICING "FAKE" FEMININITY: ANGER AND ACCUSATION IN INFLUENCER	"HATEBLOG" COMMUNITIES
Authors: Duffy Brooke Erin , Miltner Kate , Wahlstedt Amanda
Published: October 2020

While social media influencers are held up in the popular imagination as self-enterprising cultural tastemakers, their requisite career visibility opens them up to intensified public scrutiny and, consequently, networked hate and harassment. Key repositories of such critique are influencer “hateblogs”—online spaces wherein anti-fans collectively police the activities of highly visible Instagrammers, YouTubers, and the like. This in-progress, mixed methods study brings together analyses of two “hateblog” communities: Get Off My Internets (GOMI) and the now-defunct Reblogging Donk (RBD), both of which targeted women social media personalities almost exclusively. Our analysis reveals an overarching critique of influencers' perceived duplicity or “fakery'' in the realms of parenting/domesticity, relationships, and personal appearance. Such accusations cast influencers as deceitful, avaricious, and lazy charlatans who unfairly profit off of ersatz performances of perfection. Yet as moral discourses (Gray, 2005), these critiques seem to dismantle the tropes of entrepreneurial femininity, suggesting a form of displaced anger. That is, while such expressions may be deployed in disavowal of individual performances of feminine-coded ideals, they are ostensibly rooted in broader sociocultural critiques connected to gendered expectations of authenticity, labor, and privilege. But while hatebloggers’ purport to disillusion us by exposing the artifice of social media, their expressions do little for progressive gender politics. We thus conclude by highlighting the limitations of this expressive act—one that seeks to liberate women from normative constraints while simultaneously engaging in gendered forms of symbolic violence.
FACELESS YOUTUBERS: HOW CONTENT CREATORS SHAPE AUDIENCE	EXPECTATIONS
Authors: Dunham Ian
Published: October 2020

YouTube's maturation as a platform can be seen through a collection of social norms, audience expectations, and politics, all of which weave themselves into the technosocial fabric of digital life. As such, certain practices that regulate the flow of information have become normalized across a certain subset of YouTube channels. This paper will look at this practice among YouTubers that are “faceless”—content creators who do not reveal their faces on camera while voluntarily revealing many other aspects of their identity. Specifically, a content analysis is performed on these channels: The Lockpicking Lawyer, AvE, SteadyCraftin, This Old Tony, bigclivedotcom, CGP Grey, and fastASMR. The wide range of categories these channels belong to (DIY, self help, science and technology, home crafting, electrical appliance teardown, and audio therapy) indicates that choosing to remain faceless is not a function of a certain type of material, but rather a salient trend that crosscuts YouTube genres. The channels analyzed suggest that these YouTubers feel empowered through remaining faceless, allowing for increased disclosure about the topic at hand. They also demonstrate that Faceless YouTubers selectively share information depending on a range of motivations, all of which revolve around imparting meaningful content to specific audiences while maintaining a specifically-constructed notion of privacy. As a platform that is continually evolving,this paper represents an advance in the study of YouTube.
ILLUMINATI(NG) THE SEARCH PROCESS: THEORIZING THE RESEARCH PRACTICES	OF "ALTERNATIVE" OR "CONTROVERSIAL" RESEARCH
Authors: Eadon Yvonne Melisande
Published: October 2020

Previous scholarship has examined how conspiracy theories spread online; addressed the question of what conspiracy theorists believe and why; asked whether or not conspiracy theorizing is a reasonable form of sense-making; and characterized the socio-cultural effects of conspiracy theories. Yet, the research practices of those who explore topics that have been labeled “conspiracy theories,” remain under-examined and under-theorized. Existing at the convergence of three interdisciplinary areas of scholarship—the study of conspiracy theory/ies, information seeking and behavior (e.g., research practices), and archival studies--this project will present preliminary dissertation research. The data will come from in-depth, qualitative interviews with individuals who regularly conduct research into one of three topics: the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the 1947 incident in Roswell, New Mexico, and the Missing 411 phenomenon. Interviews are semi-structured, addressing participants’ experiences of different modes of research: within a research community, in isolation (by themselves), and with the help of a reference archivist or librarian, among others that may emerge. This paper will also feature reflexive grounded theory analysis of my own feminist standpoint as a researcher and interviewer.
MOONWALKING: TRACING REDDITORS’ DIGITAL MEMORY WORK ON MICHAEL	JACKSON
Authors: Esteve Del Valle Marc , Smit Rik
Published: October 2020

This paper investigates the memory work concerning Michael Jackson on the social content aggregation site Reddit. By means of their posts, comments and replies, people contributing to this site—Redditors—enter into a process we call the dynamics of mnemonic stabilization. This is a collaborative process in which networked individuals share their memories about, in this case, Michael Jackson. This process resembles Jackson’s dance technique called moonwalking: Redditors seem to go back in time, but they continually alter how Jackson is remembered and forgotten, depending on the (personal) context of the present and an imagined future. These theoretical observations are empirically assessed by a content analysis of mnemonic comments and replies (N=917) posted on the subreddit /r/MichaelJackson between June 25, 2009, and December 31, 2018. This revealed that most posts with a mnemonic dimension focus on personal memories of Michael Jackson’s music, performances and (perceived) positive characteristics
BETWEEN LIVE AND LIFE: EXPLORING THE ONLINE PRESENCE OF PERFORMANCE	ARTISTS
Authors: Gemini Laura , Brilli Stefano
Published: October 2020

In the last decade, the use of social media in the theatre scene has fueled debates on the possibility to redefine the performer-audience relationship on a wide scale. Scarce attention, however, has been paid on empirically studying how performance artists balance their use of social media between the need to promote their work and the ambition to experiment creatively on the medium affordances. This paper explores the use of social media by Italian contemporary theatre artists and companies. The study aims to explore the relational labour (Baym 2018) of performance artists in tracing the boundaries between online/offline performativity and between personal self-narration and artistic promotion. Through a combination of profile analysis and in-depth interviews, we want to understand how this artistic scene - that always experimented on intermedial and participatory possibilities - is making sense of social media. Preliminary results show how social media interaction and content production is becoming an integrated part of companies working routines. Companies position their social media activity outside a purely promotional logic. This anti-promotional ethos translates to a lack of efficacy in terms of strategic communication. However, it also lays the basis for the use of social media to expand performative practices. Although the interviewed companies do not exclude such a possibility, they lament their current inability in making such an attempt. Lacking resources is the most quoted explanation of this failure, followed by the refusal to compromise with the constraints of online languages, and the distrust of social media to reach wider audiences.
THE STATE OF GLOBAL HARMFUL CONTENT REGULATION: EMPIRICAL	OBSERVATIONS
Authors: Gorwa Robert
Published: October 2020

Online intermediaries have always been regulated, locked in heated battles around intermediary liability for copyright or privacy reasons (Tusikov, 2016; Gorwa 2019). But a notable trend is the rapidly growing use of policy to try and govern user-generated content with a host of other perceived social or individual harms, such as disinformation, hate speech, and terrorist propaganda (Kaye, 2019; York 2019; Suzor 2019). Even as increasing academic and policy attention is paid to the global ‘techlash’, and leading voices outlining the various ways in which expression online is currently under threat, our understanding of the overall policy landscape remains ad hoc and incomplete. The goal of this paper is thus to present some initial observations on the state of harmful content regulation around the world, drawing upon a new original dataset that seeks to capture the global universe of harmful-content regulatory initiatives for user-generated content online. The first part of the paper presents descriptive results, showing the evolution (and notable increase) in policy development in the past two decades. The second half of the paper provides insight into which specific issue areas have attracted the most formal and informal regulatory arrangements, and assesses the scope (what kind of actors are seen as being a ‘platform,’ and how that is defined), key policy mechanisms (takedown regimes, transparency rules, technical standards), and sanctioning procedures (fines, criminal liability) enacted in these regulations.
HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE SEEN BY A MACHINE LIVELY DEVICES IN DIGITAL	HORROR
Authors: Gunderson Marianne
Published: October 2020

What does it feel like to be watched by a machine? How do we make sense of our present state of concurrent awareness of and obliviousness of living our everyday lives under ubiquitous surveillance? This presentation will explore these questions through an analysis of a selection of creepypasta stories that draw their horror from the experience of being watched by - or through - a machine. Conceptualized as “digital urban legends” and “contemporary folklore” creepypastas are short internet-based horror stories often posted anonymously and copied and pasted from forum to forum and collected in online archives.The stories analysed in this paper bring their horror to the technological devices that permeate our everyday lives, such as web cameras, GPS navigation, home security systems, and baby monitors. In these stories, the topic of surveillance and the experience of being watched is a pervasive theme, and quotidian technological devices take on a threatening presence. Sometimes the threat is connected to the idea of surveillance by nefarious corporations or hostile individuals, while in other stories the horror emerges from the realization that the watcher is not human at all. Combining horror tropes with the idea of digital surveillance, these stories function as affective articulations that reveal the anxieties that haunt our relationship with the devices with which we surround ourselves. Through its analysis, this paper argues that the fears articulated in these stories revolve around how machine vision technologies mediate our relationship with reality and redistribute agency within human/machine assemblages.