SOCIAL MEDIA AND LITERATURE

Navigating Social Media in #Ophthalmology

Solace in Social Media: Women Unite Under COVID-19

PA/LTC Goes Around the World in Online Communities

Driven by the need to enhance user traffic on social media (SM) platforms for increasing their advertising revenues, SM platforms are experimenting with new content creation features. However, it is unclear if such initiatives are also beneficial for SM profile owners such as influencers, who are the prime content creators on the SM platforms who use SM posts to build their influence within their network of followers. Our study investigates the effect of introducing one such new SM feature: the “story” on the creation and consumption of SM posts. Leveraging social penetration theory, we hypothesize the influence of introducing story feature on (1) the frequency of SM post creation by profile owners and (2) the extent of follower engagement with SM posts. Employing a quasi-experimental design, we find that the introduction of the story feature reduces the frequency of SM post creation, but the enhanced self-disclosure through the story feature increases follower engagement with the SM posts. However, these effects are moderated by the situating culture of the SM communities: while low-power-distance cultures value profile owners’ self-disclosure, high-power-distance cultures exhibit a mixed influence. Advancing literature on social penetration theory and SM user engagement, our study demonstrates that new self-disclosive SM content creation features do not necessarily benefit all the concerned stakeholders and that the effectiveness of such features might vary from one community to another. Hence, the intended impact of introducing new SM features needs to be carefully evaluated by SM platforms in a holistic manner.

This chapter examines the phenomenon of internet users attempting to report and prevent online child sexual exploitation (CSE) and child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in the absence of adequate intervention by internet service providers, social media platforms, and government. The chapter discusses the history of online CSE, focusing on regulatory stances over time in which online risks to children have been cast as natural and inevitable by the hegemony of a “cyberlibertarian” ideology. We illustrate the success of this ideology, as well as its profound contradictions and ethical failures, by presenting key examples in which internet users have taken decisive action to prevent online CSE and promote the removal of CSAM. Rejecting simplistic characterizations of “vigilante justice,” we argue instead that the fact that often young internet users report feeling forced to act against online CSE and CSAM undercuts libertarian claims that internet regulation is impossible, unworkable, and unwanted. Recent shifts toward a more progressive ethos of online harm minimization are promising; however, this ethos risks offering a new legitimizing ideology for online business models that will continue to put children at risk of abuse and exploitation. In conclusion, we suggest ways forward toward an internet built in the interests of children, rather than profit.

Our societies are approaching and engaging with a number of policy moments, we are presented with opportunities to develop the discourse surrounding a sustained vitality of the worlds in which we live. One way of undertaking this is through extensive consultation with those of whom the discussions impact the most. Often this includes industry and government stakeholders, but more importantly is the process of including the voices of the groups and individuals who will be left to function within and around these policy interventions. This article highlights several moments there has been a successful consultation process within policy and internet arenas, and also highlights some key examples of when user consultation failed or was marginalised, resulting in less than acceptable outcomes. Further to this, policy intervention is a unique opportunity for scholarly research to demonstrate some of its best impact: its inclusion of intensive and often publicly funded research within the societies it examines. The contemporary take on the inclusion of user perspectives and scholarly research provides the backdrop for the seven articles of this issue that in many ways integrate this approach and highlight the importance of all voices within the policy development for the internet and its surrounding technological and cultural spaces. Secure global net-zero by mid-century and keep 1.5° within reach. Adapt and protect communities and natural habitats. Mobilize Finance. Work together to deliver the outcomes (ukcop26, 2021). This list seems a feasible agenda for a gathering of this sort, yet it was not without its own controversies as leaders gathered from most countries to talk through their strategies for the next 5 years. Central to these discussions was the communication of the critical information about climate change. In the lead up to the summit, and in the moment of the Pandemic, we have seen such an increase in misinformation, which has been fuelled too often by disinformation. Entangled in this space are also “propaganda, selective reporting, conspiracy theory, inadvertent misinformation, and deliberate disinformation” (Angus et al., 2021, p. 1), where these scholars argue misinformation is not new in itself but is being amplified by users and algorithmic distribution techniques. It is the information communication input and output moments of COP26 that is crucial for citizens around the world to ensure we are across the current debates, science and outcomes of this critical gathering for climate change. Yet in all this discussion, there remains one thing that is missing: us. And this is a somewhat common practice at these often-high-level policy-generating gatherings between our global leaders, where the focus could be for reasons other than the titles on the banners. Aditya Chakrabortty (2021) of the Guardian makes a wonderful argument for just that: it's a great idea to get everyone wanting the same thing, but in reality it's just unworkable. The key point to take away from his discussion is that any significant moment, movement or policymaking gesture should always try to make change with people and not just for them. While discussions are underway at the global level for environmental decisions that are, and continue to remain, unfolding at time of writing, the user-focus is something that is still relatively un-inclusive and emblematic of our communication and technology policy dialogue. In our last Editorial for Issue 13, volume 3, we revisited the Mark Deuze concept of living in the media to make sense of some of the contemporary media and technology policymaking moments currently underway (Stilinovic & Hutchinson, 2021). Yet in the 3 months since its publication, the adaptation of top-down driven regulatory decisions has appeared across several our favorite and everyday platforms—a return to the enduring issues that plague Tumblr. In 2012, Tumblr changed its content publishing policy to remove all blogs that were related to self-harm, attempting to improve the so-called quality of its published content. This was driven internally, and the decision was made in the interest of “all” users. However, as Tiidenberg et al. (2021) articulate, this was catastrophic for users who found community and belonging on Tumblr when they had been pushed away from other online spaces. The questions then emerge, where do these users go and what happens when they cannot connect with other users? Could the policy of this one social media platform been derived in a better method to not other, alienate or displace digital users? How might we learn from the outcomes of Tumblr and apply those insights to other aspects of our digital communication environments? The absence of users, particularly in the online environment, is nothing new and we have seen this occur across a number of settings. To briefly return to Tumblr as one of the most fascinating cases studies in recent times, it's useful to highlight the spectrum of issues at play when activities come under the policy re-shaping spotlight. Seko and Lewis (2018) made a critical observation of Tumblr and the fringe sorts of online communities that gather in that space, highlighting the importance of community-making though online cultural curation. In describing the unique reblogging affordance of the Tumblr platform, they describe how online community has formed, consolidating what Marwick and Boyd (2011) argued as avoiding a fear of being stigmatized online. Seko and Lewis argue “that unique affordances of the Tumblr platform shape distinct ways in which SI (self-harm) is told and shared. These affordances also imply the broader sociocultural context drawn by the particular audiences in making sense of the shared story” (2016, p. 182). The important takeaway from these scholars and others working in this space is the variety of users and how they rely on a broad range of sociocultural affordances in their online selves, communities and existence. For Tumblr, they were trying to combat the public view that providing a place for those interested in self-harming would encourage the activity to occur. In fact, as the research indicates, this type of content provides a place for users to gather, provide support, share knowledge, and feel included. Instagram has shown a consultative approach towards policy design, but also has significant leaps to make that work for its large user base. In 2019, the platform made a move to restrict content that includes dieting, detoxing, losing weight, and cosmetic surgery (iweigh, 2020). What was of note here is the consultative approach they used to include the users themselves, body positivity campaigners (see, e.g., Jameela Jamil), alongside academics researching in this space (see, e.g., Dr. Ysabel Gerrard), to produce policy that was inclusive and representative. While this may seem a positive step forward, it also introduces the broad discussion of content moderation and the role it plays within policymaking, especially for areas such as young social media users and their health. Further to this, content moderation demonstrates the role that those who administer or police these sorts of policies play across social media, but also in other spaces of communication and technology. “Emerging policies will be limited if they do not draw on the kind of expansive understanding of content moderation that scholars can provide” (Gillespie et al., 2020, p. 2). These scholars highlight that what is happening on social media platforms, is reflective of what then happens across other digital spaces—it is a call for academics to take an increasingly important role in policymaking. Yet they further argue academic involvement in policymaking discussions “must be grounded in an understanding of moderation as an expansive socio-technical phenomenon, one that functions in many contexts and takes many forms” (p. 3). Beyond the location of content moderation of social media platforms, the point of socio-technical phenomenon is a grounding standard for all policymaking processes. The current focus within the communication and media space is very much on the regulation of platforms as a key issue for a variety of governments, it is important to also be considerate of how this discussion extends beyond platforms alone and towards other aspects of policymaking. In this conversation, it is important to highlight the importance of the user voice and perspective when these debates emerge and indeed when the action of policymaking occurs. Further to this, the inclusion of these voices, such as activists, campaigners, interest groups, lobbyists and academics, the holistic understanding of the social and cultural affordances of these spaces are critical—these are the indicators on how good policy should be designed and implemented. This is where much of our policymaking falls short in the contemporary space. While the policymaking is accommodating for certain sectors of the userbase, it is inherently ignorant of others which often causes sever ruptures of the status-quo—this has consistently been the experience in the Australian context. we want to better match people's evolving expectations of how advertisers may reach them on our platform and address feedback from civil rights experts, policymakers and other stakeholders on the importance of preventing advertisers from abusing the targeting options we make available (Mudd, 2021, n.p.) Yet, the outcome is less than desirable for a breadth of Facebook stakeholders. Jordan Taylor (2021) wrote on Twitter that this move not be a good thing: “Public health researchers & communicators, local advocacy groups, and Big Pharma likely use this feature to target ads related to HIV treatment and prevention. Removing this targeting may make reaching marginalized communities more difficult for small advertisers.” This is but one area of a policy change that will impact a significant group of stakeholders on the platform. Albury (2021) continued Taylor's support against this policy change by highlighting the continued difficulties academics and researchers face when trying to interface with social media platforms: “…these kinds of policies make it very hard to do health promotion—or recruit research participants.” In many cases, these moves are as Burgess (2021) noted, going to cause harm if they are not connected to context and theories of power. This is an important backdrop for the setting of this issue of Policy & Internet: the importance of users and their social and technological contexts when policymaking consultation emerges and through its implementation. Good policymaking is done with a sincere and thorough understanding of all those who will be effected by changes, and done with a view to increasing the status quo of the environment. It is also important to continually highlight that while this is happening in the media and communication space, particularly in the social media space, it is representative of how policymaking should be undertaken more broadly. It is a continuing discussion between the users (Hoffmann et al., 2018), the technologies (Hutchinson, 2021), the socio-cultures (Cabalquinto & Soriano, 2020), the moderators (Gerrard & Thornham, 2020), the researchers (Gillespie et al., 2020) and the policymakers that enable good policy design and implementation. With an undertow for more scholarly research for and within policymaking as a thematic thread throughout this issue, the first article by Suominen and Hajikhana (2021) systematically explores the implication of big data on the policymaking processes. Through three key indices that have emerged from nine communities engaging in this study—namely the policy cycle, data-base decision-making, and productivity—these authors articulate a research agenda for further studies in public policy through big data. That is, these scholars are grounding the research agenda for policymaking in the context of what it seeks to regulate. The second article in this issue turns its attention toward the China context, specifically looking at the role social media has played on the country's family planning policy. As the media landscape has shifted and changed in the last ten years, so too has the agenda setting mechanisms for policy surrounding public issues, where a strong focus was on the revision of the one-child policy. Deng et al. (2021) have engaged text-mining analysis across a corpora of 74,000 Sina Weibo user comments on The People's Daily published content to understand how the agenda has shifted. They specifically focus on the interactions between users and state-run news media to reveal how other public issues have emerged as important to the Weibo users during this time and how approaches towards agenda setting have changed over time. Konikoff (2021) explores the space of toxicity and abusive content policy for Twitter in our third article, and argues for how we might reconceptualize policy within this communication space. By implementing a gatekeeper theory approach, and engaging in a discourse analysis, Konikoff presents a compelling argument that the policy and the technological affordances indeed perpetuate the toxicity of hate and vitriol content on the Twitter platform. This article signals how the freedom of speech rhetoric is not a useful mechanism to limit hate speech, which can also be applied to other social media platforms beyond Twitter itself. Public policy discussion between the US and the UK come under the comparison lens in our fourth article by Barrett et al. (2021). These scholars identify six common ideals across the UK and the US for digital threats to democracy: transparency, accountability, engagement, informed public social solidarity, and freedom of expression. They also argue that policymaking is out of step with current literature by demonstrating how the framing of these democratic ideals often lead to specific sorts of evocative practices and promotion of the ideals themselves. This study is especially important with the growing rise of right-wing politics and other democratic crises. Costa e Silva and Lameiras (2021) provide a Portuguese perspective on civil society and internet governance in our fifth article of this issue. By taking a national-level perspective, these scholars critically examine the impact of participation on the conditions of civil society by reviewing activism within Portugal, based on the Portuguese and EU policy space. Through the integration of mobilization theory, these scholars identify a lack of horizontal networking because of the lack of civil structural resources such as knowledge and legitimization which is often achieved through international collaboration. Ultimately, they argue, and are in support of, multistakeholderism is a core principle for European civil society, yet the Portuguese case provides unique insights and a space for learning for the broader European context. Ng and Taeihagh (2021) turn to a more technology approach in the sixth article of this issue, in How does fake news spread? Understanding pathways of disinformation spread through APIs. As an often-overlooked stakeholder for internet policy, these scholars ask how technology infrastructures are impacting on how disinformation spreads through our networks. Through extensive analysis of how application interface programs (APIs) operate—especially their code repositories on GitHub and the like—across Telegram, Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. Through this analysis, these scholars highlight a four-stage framework that enables disinformation to travel across social media platforms, with a view to providing policy input on how APIs can be better managed. This study provides unique insights on how platform governance can continue to evolve for improved regulation on social media networks. The final article in this issue focusses on the scholarship of digital diplomacy while exploring the Twitter use of three countries: Israel, Turkey, and Russia (Danziger & Schreiber, 2021). Through a content analysis and topic mapping, these scholars highlight how the countries’ Ministries of Foreign Affairs use Twitter to present an international and somewhat positive face to their audiences. What is of interest here is how these digital diplomacy efforts act differently towards their Ministry's strategies to promote their foreign policy goals. By highlighting that Twitter is a legitimate platform to implement foreign state policy, and through a sociopragmatic framework, it can be seen that each country is addressing foreign audiences within the international arena.

Spatial Patterns of Purposeful Social Networking and Socioeconomic Influences: Towards a Mature, Inclusive Networked Society in the U.S.

This study provides a distinctive perspective to the use of social media within corporations for communication. The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between a fashion based organization and its stakeholders on the basis of their communication using social media. For the study, I chose content analysis as the research methodology since it allowed me to efficiently analyze the content uploaded by the brands- H&M and Zara on various social media platforms. After researching on the topic, I was able to develop 10 parameters based on which the influence of social media on communication patterns could be understood. The findings of the study show that solely audio-visual content uploaded on social media is incomplete in initiating conversations with stakeholders without certain written context. The limitation of the study is that content analysis does not allow first-hand interaction with the brand’s consumers, not providing detailed insight on the research topic. With the rising trend of social media in recent years, there are yet various aspects of the topic that have not been studied in detail. Thus, research on techniques to engage conversations with stakeholders on social media is still underdeveloped. Majority of the studies explore the idea of social media as a promotional tool, but this study emphasises the idea of social media as a communication tool for an organisation.

The paper sets out to evaluate the effects that social media marketing (SMM) can have on the success and eventual sustainability of the small businesses sampled. Other specific objectives were to assess the level at which businesses adopt the usage of social media and identify the most prominent of all available social media platforms that the companies utilise. The quantitative survey method was employed to collect data from 200 employees of small-sized businesses in Oshogbo, Osun State, Nigeria. The collected data was analysed using both descriptive (percentages, mean, standard deviation etc.) and inferential (ANOVA and regression analysis) statistics with the assistance of SPSS v22. With regards to the take up of social media for marketing purposes, almost all the questionnaire items indicated a high level of SMM adoption for the businesses, to the extent that it was actively used, resources were allocated, contents were frequently posted, metrics were tracked, and they reportedly had dedicated teams to engage with the social media platforms. In terms of the types of Social Media (SM) platforms, the businesses have prominence for marketing; Instagram recorded the highest, and in descending order, followed by YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, WhatsApp, and LinkedIn. The results on the effects of SMM on the sustainability of the businesses indicated a strong correlation between the two variables. Firstly, the model was well fitted to the data, significant at F, 28.075; p ≤ .01; and Adjusted R2 = .611, implying that the predictor variable explained 61.1% of the variance in the dependent variable, even after the model was adjusted for errors. When some of the items representing the Independent Variables were disaggregated, the following constructs were very important in explaining the businesses' success with SMM adoption in descending order of importance: allocation of resources, tracking of social media metrics, having a team dedicated to monitoring the platforms, and making social media a priority for their businesses. The remaining factors were insignificant. The study concluded that Social Media Marketing (SMM) significantly impact the sustenance of small businesses if adequately managed and resourced, and for 21st-century businesses, digital marketing and online presence afford the businesses the opportunity to interact with the consumers of their products and services for future lasting engagement and potential benefits that could eventually impact the bottom line positively.

BackgroundPrevious studies have shown that suicide reporting in mainstream media has a significant impact on suicidal behaviors (eg, irresponsible suicide reporting can trigger imitative suicide). Traditional mainstream media are increasingly using social media platforms to disseminate information on public-related topics, including health. However, there is little empirical research on how mainstream media portrays suicide on social media platforms and the quality of their coverage.ObjectiveThis study aims to explore the characteristics and quality of suicide reporting by mainstream publishers via social media in China.MethodsVia the application programming interface of the social media accounts of the top 10 Chinese mainstream publishers (eg, People’s Daily and Beijing News), we obtained 2366 social media posts reporting suicide. This study conducted content analysis to demonstrate the characteristics and quality of the suicide reporting. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines, we assessed the quality of suicide reporting by indicators of harmful information and helpful information.ResultsChinese mainstream publishers most frequently reported on suicides stated to be associated with conflict on their social media (eg, 24.47% [446/1823] of family conflicts and 16.18% [295/1823] of emotional frustration). Compared with the suicides of youth (730/1446, 50.48%) and urban populations (1454/1588, 91.56%), social media underreported suicides in older adults (118/1446, 8.16%) and rural residents (134/1588, 8.44%). Harmful reporting practices were common (eg, 54.61% [1292/2366] of the reports contained suicide-related words in the headline and 49.54% [1172/2366] disclosed images of people who died by suicide). Helpful reporting practices were very limited (eg, 0.08% [2/2366] of reports provided direct information about support programs).ConclusionsThe suicide reporting of mainstream publishers on social media in China broadly had low adherence to the WHO guidelines. Considering the tremendous information dissemination power of social media platforms, we suggest developing national suicide reporting guidelines that apply to social media. By effectively playing their separate roles, we believe that social media practitioners, health institutions, social organizations, and the general public can endeavor to promote responsible suicide reporting in the Chinese social media environment.

In recent years, a number of social events have attracted widespread attention on various different social media platforms. Among them, the public perceptions of the same event are different on different media platforms. Because of the different privacy of different social media platforms, they have different degrees of influence on the self-construction of users, the composition of interpersonal relationships on social media platforms, and the tendency of public opinion on social media platforms. This paper focuses on two different social media, WeChat and Weibo, and examines the reasons for the phenomenon of "WeChat being silent and Weibo being active" from the perspective of their functions and characteristics and investigates the impact of this phenomenon on public opinion tendencies. This paper concludes that people are more neutral and conservative in commenting on socially focused events on social media platforms where privacy is disclosed to easy acquaintances because of the psychology of building a positive self-image, but on social media platforms with fewer acquaintances, people do not need to be responsible for their own statements, so they are less burdened when speaking, and therefore their statements have more obvious tendencies. Under the influence of this tendency, social media platforms with more privacy will have a more conservative opinion tendency and vice versa, a more aggressive opinion tendency.

While hospitals’ health promotion via social media has the potential to be a critical source of health information, research shows racial and ethnic disparities exist in health-related knowledge that may be, in part, related to media representation. The purpose of this study is to examine the racial and ethnic representation of people featured in Washington, D.C. hospitals’ social media platforms to understand how hospitals embed cultural competency into their health communication. By comparing the diversity of images on hospitals’ social media platforms with the demographics of hospitals’ neighboring communities, the researchers intend to highlight opportunities to improve targeted health messaging to underserved communities, particularly Black and Hispanic communities. By analyzing the images and videos posted on the three most popular social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube – for a one-month period, the researchers found that Whites and Asians were over-represented while Hispanics were severely under-represented in hospitals’ social media representation as compared to the community demographics. Increasing the diversity of minority representation on hospitals’ social media-based health promotion may contribute to addressing the social disparities in healthcare.

Social media platforms have transformed communication, engagement, and consumer interaction, significantly influencing sustainable consumption behaviour. With the vast array of social networking and media options available, marketing professionals actively leverage these platforms to shape consumer preferences and purchasing decisions. This study investigates the impact of social media platforms on the sustainable consumption decisions of young people. Adopting a quantitative research methodology, the study employed judgemental sampling to select participants. Data were gathered from 450 respondents via an online questionnaire, and the proposed relationships were assessed using structural equation modelling (SEM) with SmartPLS version 4 to provide a thorough statistical evaluation. Research findings indicate that social media marketing has a substantial impact on sustainable purchase intentions, content quality, and behavioural engagement. Furthermore, the quality of content and levels of behavioural engagement significantly affect sustainable purchase intentions. However, the findings suggest that the social media platforms used for information retrieval do not significantly influence intentions to make sustainable purchases. This study contributes to marketing research by developing a model that examines how social media platforms influence young people’s intentions to purchase sustainably, as well as the impact of social media marketing, engagement, and content quality on these intentions.

Neo-Gnosticism and the American Dissident Right

Social media and on-line interaction can be as significant as the offline environment in shaping youth health behaviour, possibly explaining the association between social media and alcohol use by youth. Social media also presents opportunities for new prevention and intervention strategies. Social media are inherently social, and people are inevitably influenced by the interactions therein [5]. Ng Fat et al. propose that the association between heavier social media use and higher likelihood of more frequent drinking by youth could be due to cultural norms of drinking which are transferred through the on-line context [1, 6]. Prior research work on norms concerning addictive behaviours [7-9] provide support to this notion, suggesting that observed norms are a powerful transferer of health behaviours. The challenge of social media is that they are likely to distort the user's perception of reality due to user activity, contacts and various algorithms [10]. Perceptions of alcohol norms or the impression of how much others are drinking are often over-estimated [2, 11]. This poses a risk to young people who are particularly susceptible to social norms and can lead to many unwanted and harmful behaviour patterns, such as increased drinking. Ng Fat et al. did not investigate the effect of social norms as such, although they discussed youths' sociability both on- and off-line as a potential factor influencing greater alcohol use. However, their results highlight where the gaps exist in understanding how social media and on-line relationships could impact the behaviour of developing youths. Emerging research in the field suggests that social media and virtual interaction in general can be as powerful as the off-line environment in terms of shaping youth behaviour [12]. Ng Fat et al. defined social media use as belonging to social media sites, including Facebook, Myspace and Bebo. However, social media are much more diverse and manifold, warranting wider and more nuanced consideration. Research indicates that social media platforms differ greatly when it comes to interface and content [13]. Social media such as Facebook and Instagram are more user-orientated and on these types of platforms, users typically have a visible identity. Interaction in these services is based on people's mutual relationships and content is mainly shared among a certain set of other users (i.e. friends, followers) [13]. It is possible that, on platforms such as these, social interaction is more meaningful and social influence and behavioural diffusion occur more easily. Social media such as YouTube and Twitter are more content-orientated where networks are established around users’ shared interests. Other users or audiences are more far-reaching and often anonymous [14]. Young individuals are likely to turn towards more interactional social media platforms where communication is mutual [15, 16]. This could also partly explain the clearer pattern between social media use and higher likelihood of more frequent drinking among the 10–15 age group. It is noteworthy that Ng Fat et al. conclude that no direct evidence was found indicating that the rise of social media platforms could be contributing to the increase in non-drinking among youth [17]. While social media use has been associated with adverse health behaviours, the opportunities to employ different on-line platforms for prevention and intervention strategies are abundant. However, future longitudinal research is needed, as social media are rapidly expanding and evolving. New forms of social media may present unforeseeable risks for youth alcohol use and other off-line risk behaviours, but also opportunities for prevention. None.