Social Media and Social Order Frontmatter Contents Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: How Do Social Media Change Social Order The Deep Datafication of Society from Global to Local Scales (and Back Again) 2 The Social Construction of Reality Really! 3 The Dramaturgy of Social Media: Platform Ecology Uneven Networks and the Myth of the Self 4 Clusters of Prestige: Social Media and Social Order in the Norwegian Bible Belt 5 Meme Collectives and Preferred Truths in Assam 6 Insurgent Ways of Looking: Gendering the Witness and the Land in the Visuality of Israel Palestine 7 Gender and Race in the Digital Town Hall: Identity Based Attacks Against US Legislators on Twitter 8 Participatory Propaganda: The Engagement of Audiences in the Spread of Persuasive Communications List of Figures List of Tables Social Media and Social Order combines a structural analysis of the global impact of social media as contributing to the production of a datafied social order with a series of actor focused analyses each examining how roles structured by social media are performed at various sites: enmeshed in European cities entangled in contested Middle Eastern borders and embedded in provincial Indian small town networks. The final section then arcs back to a focus on the general properties of social media networks revealed through two American cases emphasizing the human costs for the recipients of abuse (legislators of color) and the political costs of participatory propaganda for a deliberative understanding of democracy. A central theme is how the principle of differential treatment embedded in the datafied social order is becoming increasingly widespread across social fields. The book demonstrates how social media are implicated in reshaping social order in ways which align with this principle including creating new precarious hierarchies of esteem reinforcing existing social class and religious hierarchies opening political discussion to more participants but at the cost of reinforcing local hierarchies and dominant discourses underlining gendered constructions of national identity amplifying the abuse received by women and people of color in leadership positions and enmeshing users in the circulation of propaganda which resonates with their preconceptions thus deepening societal polarization.