Ozgur Can Seckin, Aybuke Atalay, Ege Otenen, Umut Duygu, Onur Varol
{"title":"Mechanisms Driving Online Vaccine Debate During the COVID-19 Pandemic","authors":"Ozgur Can Seckin, Aybuke Atalay, Ege Otenen, Umut Duygu, Onur Varol","doi":"10.1177/20563051241229657","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051241229657","url":null,"abstract":"The prevalence of the anti-vaccine movement in today’s society has become a pressing concern, largely amplified by the dissemination of vaccine skepticism. During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the vaccination debate sparked controversial debates on social media platforms such as Twitter, which can lead to serious consequences for public health. What determines anti-vax attitudes is an important question for understanding the source of the campaigns and mitigating the misinformation spread. Compared with other countries, Türkiye differentiates itself with high vaccination rates and lack of political support for anti-vaxxers despite its highly polarized political system. Analyzing Turkish Twittersphere, we explore several mechanisms capturing content production and behaviors of accounts within the pro- and anti-vax segments in online vaccine-related discussions. Our findings indicate there is no relation between political stance and anti-vaccine attitude. Both supporters of vaccination (pro-vaxxers) and opponents (anti-vaxxers) can be found across the political spectrum. Moreover, linguistic differences reveal that anti-vaxxers employ more emotional language, while pro-vaxxers express more skepticism. Notably, automated accounts are less prevalent leading to difficulty in assessing genuine support for vaccines, while anti-vaccine bots produce slightly more content. These findings have crucial implications for vaccine policy, emphasizing the importance of understanding diverse language patterns and beliefs among anti-vaxxers and pro-vaxxers to develop effective communication strategies at the national level.","PeriodicalId":47920,"journal":{"name":"Social Media + Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139938920","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Social Media and Perceived Political Polarization: Role of Perceived Platform Affordances, Participation in Uncivil Political Discussion, and Perceived Others’ Engagement","authors":"Macau K. F. Mak, Mengyu Li, Hernando Rojas","doi":"10.1177/20563051241228595","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051241228595","url":null,"abstract":"This research applies a perceived affordance approach to examine the distinctive role of social media technologies in shaping (mis)perceptions of political polarization. We argue that users’ perceptions of platform affordances influence both (a) their self-participation in uncivil political discussion on social media and (b) perceptions of others’ engagement, which eventually shape their perceptions of polarization. Our analysis of US survey data found that perceptions of lower privacy and stronger network association on Facebook are related to perceptions of a higher level of uncivil discussion by other users, which in turn predicts greater perceived polarization. Perceptions of higher anonymity relate to higher self-participation in uncivil discussion, which is surprisingly associated with perceptions of reduced polarization. Our follow-up experimental study illustrated that participants with more frequent engagement in uncivil discussion, irrespective of interacting with civil or uncivil comments, showed consistently higher levels of intrapersonal reflection, which reduces perceived polarization.","PeriodicalId":47920,"journal":{"name":"Social Media + Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139938938","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"When Stories Turn Institutional: How TikTok Users Legitimate the Algorithmic Sensemaking","authors":"Dragoș M. Obreja","doi":"10.1177/20563051231224114","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231224114","url":null,"abstract":"Educational, political, or moral/religious content is increasingly present on TikTok, so contemporary social dynamics legitimize the process of digital mediation regarding these institutional values. Based on 286 open-ended survey answers and subsequent interviews with 45 Romanian TikTok users, this article applies social constructivism to explore the intersubjective side of algorithmic experiences. The significance of such a framework lies in its ability to elucidate the manner in which users actively construct their social environments, which may initially appear as isolated individual experiences but ultimately unveil shared algorithmic interpretations. Thus, the participants highlight three recurrent institutional themes in relation to TikTok’s algorithm: (1) algorithm as political profiling, (2) algorithm as moral plethora, and (3) algorithm as educational benchmark. Findings show that users’ stories related to algorithms are widely conceived within institutional frameworks. These narratives play a role in shaping what Berger and Luckmann call “intersubjective sedimentation” within the intricate interconnection between institutional and algorithmic realities. The ways in which TikTok users legitimize the presence of these institutional actors on their For You page should be seen as a form of agency negotiation between users and machines. The legitimating role of stories about algorithms also highlights the institutional necessity of intergenerational socialization, which is why the contents made by such institutional actors are more and more actively mediated through TikTok.","PeriodicalId":47920,"journal":{"name":"Social Media + Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139939050","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Memes Save Lives”: Stigma and the Production of Antivaccination Memes During the COVID-19 Pandemic","authors":"Stephanie Alice Baker, Michael James Walsh","doi":"10.1177/20563051231224729","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231224729","url":null,"abstract":"Disinformation research is increasingly concerned with the hierarchies and conditions that enable the strategic production of false and misleading content online. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was revealed that 12 influencers were responsible for a significant volume of antivaccine disinformation. This article examines how influencers use antivaccination memes for commercial and political gain. Drawing on a 12-month digital ethnography of three disinformation producers on Instagram and Telegram, we conceptualize their strategy of meme warfare in terms of the logics of spoiled identity, demonstrating how stigma is used to galvanize and recast the antivaccination movement around themes of persecution and moral superiority. Dispensing with the idea that content moderation has forced disinformation “underground,” we find that disinformation producers configure memes to adapt to specific platforms by directing mainstream audiences to less regulated platforms, personal newsletters, and sites. By examining the tactics and techniques disinformation producers use to spread antivaccination messaging online, we question the effectiveness of content moderation policies as a solution to regulate influencers whose visibility and status strategically straddle multiple sites in the broader information ecosystem.","PeriodicalId":47920,"journal":{"name":"Social Media + Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139939006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Alex Kresovich, Andrew H. Norris, Chandler C. Carter, Yoonsang Kim, Ganna Kostygina, Sherry L. Emery
{"title":"Deciphering Influence on Social Media: A Comparative Analysis of Influential Account Detection Metrics in the Context of Tobacco Promotion","authors":"Alex Kresovich, Andrew H. Norris, Chandler C. Carter, Yoonsang Kim, Ganna Kostygina, Sherry L. Emery","doi":"10.1177/20563051231224268","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231224268","url":null,"abstract":"Influencer marketing spending in the United States was expected to surpass $6 billion in 2023. This marketing tactic poses a public health threat, as research suggests it has been utilized to undercut decades of public health progress—such as gains made against tobacco use among adolescents. Public health and public opinion researchers need practical tools to capture influential accounts on social media. Utilizing X (formerly Twitter) little cigar and cigarillo (LCC) data, we compared seven influential account detection metrics to help clarify our understanding of the functions of existing metrics and the nature of social media discussion of tobacco products. Results indicate that existing influential account detection metrics are non-harmonic and time-sensitive, capturing distinctly different users and categorically different user types. Our results also reveal that these metrics capture distinctly different conversations among influential social media accounts. Our findings suggest that public health and public opinion researchers hoping to conduct analyses of influential social media accounts need to understand each metric’s benefits and limitations and utilize more than one influential account detection metric to increase the likelihood of producing valid and reliable research.","PeriodicalId":47920,"journal":{"name":"Social Media + Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139943149","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“It Was Very Hard for Me to Keep Doing That Job”: Understanding Troll Farm’s Working in the Arab World","authors":"Marina Ayeb, Tiziano Bonini","doi":"10.1177/20563051231224713","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231224713","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the production culture and routines of “troll farms” in three Arab countries—Tunisia, Egypt, and Iraq—from a production studies approach. A production studies approach enables us to focus on the working conditions of paid trolls. We employed qualitative methods to look inside the “black box” of Arab troll farms. From February to April 2020, we conducted semi-structured interviews with eight disinformation workers at both managerial and staff levels. We propose to understand disinformation work as a specific type of digital labor, characterized by very intense shifts and emotionally burdensome daily tasks, absence of legal job contracts, and highly surveilled work environments. The article contributes to understand disinformation practices outside and beyond the West; it situates disinformation activities within the broader context of digital media industries; it provides a detailed analysis of the features that distinguish troll farms in the Arab world from those that emerged in other regions of the Global South; and it reconnects the research on disinformation to digital labor studies.","PeriodicalId":47920,"journal":{"name":"Social Media + Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139943147","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Make-Do-With Listening: Competence, Distinction, and Resignation on Music Streaming Platforms","authors":"Massimiliano Raffa","doi":"10.1177/20563051231224272","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231224272","url":null,"abstract":"In an age where music streaming platforms have become the primary media for music listening, the experiences of musically competent users are often overlooked. Employing a mix of research methods (semi-structured interviews, reflective diaries, and analysis of on-platform-activity metadata provided by Spotify’s APIs), this contribution aims to explore the viewpoints of musically competent users from Italy, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands regarding music streaming platforms. Through critical analysis, the study investigates both the subjective and objective aspects of their listening experience, as well as their interpretation of algorithmic mediation and platform affordances. The findings illustrate that competent users perceive the usage patterns afforded by streaming services to be insufficient in meeting their needs and the platforms to have been progressively diluting the quality of their listening experiences. Despite this, the study shows that streaming platforms lack alternatives to such an extent that even knowledgeable subjects prefer making do with this condition—they consider appropriate to their current lifestyle—rather than striving to enhance their consumption experiences. Furthermore, hypotheses are posited, suggesting that adopting a “platform criticism” stance may be a distinction marker of competence status.","PeriodicalId":47920,"journal":{"name":"Social Media + Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139636103","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Making of #CovidTwitter: Who Were the Loudest “Covid Influencers” and What Did They Say About the COVID-19 Pandemic?","authors":"S. Jaworska, Michael K. Goodman, Iwona Gibas","doi":"10.1177/20563051231222240","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231222240","url":null,"abstract":"This study explores COVID-19 communications disseminated by the top 100 most followed Twitter profiles—what we call the Twitter influencing elite. Focusing on a critical period from January to July 2020, we conducted a quantitative and qualitative analysis of 6,602 tweets about COVID-19 produced by these Covid Influencers. The findings reveal that approximately two-thirds of the COVID-19 tweets in our sample originated from established global media organizations. While these sources were prominent, they were not the “loudest” in terms of engagement and virality. That belonged to powerful politicians like Trump and Obama, popular singers such as Harry Styles and Taylor Swift, and business personalities like Elon Musk. What is more, our qualitative analysis highlights how the affordances of the digital space and the context of the pandemic were leveraged by these influential Twitter users to advance their own agendas. For instance, some blended health information and caring narratives with promotional appeals, while others, such as Elon Musk and Donald Trump, engaged in political agitation and/or anti-care discourses creating a staccato of conflicting messaging and mis/dis-information. These findings demonstrate that the Twitter space is as political and politicized as it is commercial and commercialized. We conclude that digital influencers and celebrities cannot just simply be used to produce communications during times of crisis as many across the study of health and medical communication have argued. The involvement by digital influencers and celebrities—much like the Covid Influencers we examined here—in spreading information must be critically scrutinized, considering the potential for mixed motives, agendas, and real-world outcomes.","PeriodicalId":47920,"journal":{"name":"Social Media + Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139457261","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Platformization of Violence: Toward a Concept of Discursive Toxicity on Social Media","authors":"R. Recuero","doi":"10.1177/20563051231224264","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231224264","url":null,"abstract":"Discourse has long been recognized as a source of symbolic violence, perpetuating power relations and reinforcing existing social hierarchies. With the rise of social media platforms, the influence of discourse on society has gained renewed attention. These platforms, while enabling social interactions, also serve as catalysts for violent behaviors, reinforcing and legitimizing forms of oppression and symbolic violence, particularly the violence of language. While the concept of toxicity is frequently used to describe this phenomenon, its meaning and connection to language often remain unexplored. This article aims to address this gap by examining the significance of toxicity in discourse and how the infrastructure of social media platforms facilitates the emergence of toxic discourses. It argues that while toxicity and violence are related, they are distinct phenomena. Toxicity, as a dimension of symbolic violence, contaminates debates and discourses, and is enabled by the characteristics of platformization in online interactions. Thus, toxicity is an effect of platforms mediating social interactions.","PeriodicalId":47920,"journal":{"name":"Social Media + Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139537585","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Shadow Politics: Commercial Digital Influencers, “Data,” and Disinformation in India","authors":"Sahana Udupa","doi":"10.1177/20563051231224719","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231224719","url":null,"abstract":"This article builds on ethnographic research among an emergent group of self-styled political consultants and digital influencers in India to highlight the contours of what is defined here as “shadow politics” and its implications for disinformation research and policy. Shadow politics refers to the dual structure of “official” and “unofficial” streams of campaign organization that can integrate diverse influence actors with the party campaign system. The specificity of this form of political influence management emerges from the growing uptake for digital tools and how commercial consultants anchor “data” to the goal of “narrative building” to favor their political clients, thereby delinking data practices from the moor of political moralities. It sets the stage to draw extreme content as one data type among many to choose from. Through such data practices, a vast substratum of indirectly sanctioned influence operators is linked to the public campaign stream as a “shadow,” with incentive structures to “innovate” upon excitable and inflated content.","PeriodicalId":47920,"journal":{"name":"Social Media + Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139540151","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}