ABSTRACT. Virality is a much-studied topic on popular social media sites, but has been rarely explored on niche sites. Dribbble is a niche social networking site for artists and designers with over 600,000 users. Using a mixed-method approach, we explore virality from a user-centric perspective. Interviews with informants confirm that viral-like events do exist on Dribbble, though what spreads are different. With the interviews, we identify the measures and possible driving factors of viral-like events. While what spreads is different than on other platforms, our work suggests that the measures and mechanics that drive these events are similar. This similarity reflects the same fundamental human behavior underlying social phenomenon across different platforms. Our results are supported by regression modeling using variables identified by our informants. Our work contributes to social media studies since smaller sites like Dribbble are rarely studied, particularly using mixed methods approaches, as well as to the body of research around information diffusion and viral events.

ABSTRACT. This study focuses on understanding what happens when visuality becomes a part of youth’s everyday practices of interaction and how visual communication contributes to youth’s understandings of self. This paper draws on data collected from 25 interviews with youth between the ages of 15-22 across different demographics, capturing variation in socio-economic status, gender, age, and material infrastructure. Preliminary findings suggest that visuality creates new knowledges and practices surrounding key factors such as: age, socioeconomic status, peer group, and parents. The activity of looking adds a new component to young people’s lives, it allows and encourages them to continually remake themselves in a fast paced, digitally mediated environment.

ABSTRACT. There is no doubt that various social media services shape how we approach our daily lives. The ubiquitous nature of these services, afforded by mobile devices means that we can take them with us wherever we go including when we attend life events. Uncovering why individuals use social media during live events can help improve their organization, marketing and experiences of life attendees. Our understanding of the motivations for using social media during live events is however still lacking, especially with regards to emerging live events such as esports This study aims to answer the question: what motivates the use of social media during live eSports events? A survey was conducted (N=255) at the Assembly 2016 LAN-event, a major esports live event. We examine the relationships between using various social media services and the motivations for esports spectating, through the Motivation Scale for Sports Consumption. While the results indicate that using social media services while attending the Assembly 2016 was quite popular, it seemed that in many cases social media usage was a distraction from eSports spectating that is part of attending the live event. The results afford implications as to how marketers of live esports events should encourage or control the attendees of their events to use social media.

ABSTRACT. Sharing platforms for creative content are often closely connected to general purpose social media platforms like Twitter. This also means that coordinated and automated mechanisms for promoting such content are likely to span both sites: that spammers and bots operate across both platforms. This work-in-progress paper presents first results from an effort to develop activity metrics that enable the detection of Twitter bots promoting SoundCloud content.

ABSTRACT. In a UK city, various crocheted protest banners have appeared, containing political statements concerning planned developments in their locations. Photos of these banners are shared across social media, raising awareness and potentially playing a role in local campaigns. This study explored peoples’ perceptions of these banners as photos within social media interactions, focusing on how associated emotions or values influenced their views of the campaigns. The aim was to increase understanding of the impact of images within social media, both on engagement with offline situations and on propensity to forward (e.g. retweet). People who had posted or shared pictures of the banners were interviewed. The study is framed by considering the banners—in both yarn format and digital photos—as memes. This situates the study within contemporary research into public participation online, especially the ways in which information, disinformation, and emotions travel across social media, and the influence of this on democracy. This article uses diverse definitions of memes to draw out insights from the interview data, about participants’ engagement with the banners and with the corresponding local issues, campaigns, and ultimately democracy. Interviewees were engaged by both the medium of the offline banners and the text embroidered onto them. In terms of the medium, the process of crochet was most important—indicating the time invested and encompassing memories. Interviewees were most engaged by those concerning places they passed every day, though they did not agree with all the banners’ messages.

ABSTRACT. The Dakota Access Pipeline did not gain widespread attention until it was nearly complete, despite extensive opposition from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. It was not until images depicting repression circulated on social media that mainstream media and public attention spiked. We use shale gas exploration in New Brunswick, Canada and the Dakota Access Pipeline, as case studies of social media agenda-setting. We consider disruptive public participation to involve constituents who perceive themselves as outsiders to decision-making. In both cases protest was ongoing for significant periods before receiving mainstream media and public attention. Using mixed methods, we show that law enforcement and company crackdown on indigenous communities, and the circulation of dramatic visuals via Twitter, is associated with spikes in social media, as well as media and public attention.

ABSTRACT. This paper maps some of the different obstacles and barriers activists face when using social media for engagement purposes. The data used here are part of a larger collaborative project entitled “Social Media and Canadian Civic Culture: Comparing Emerging Practices of Grass-roots Activism.” This project involves a comparative case study of several grass-roots mobilizations utilizing social media. The article utilizes data from three localized cases across Canada. These cases confirm what others have found; organizers realized significant obstacles stemming from opponents, allies, and the technology being used. In addition to obstacles from the technology and others, this research also finds significant personal obstacles in using social media for grass roots collective action and concludes with recommendations for overcoming the obstacles typical of grassroots civic mobilizations relying on social media.

ABSTRACT. This work-in-progress paper provides an interdisciplinary approach, combining large-scale quantitative Big Data oriented approaches, with small-scale qualitative deep-reading, in order to investigate a polarising debate in the Australian socio-political environment. In 2016, there were calls by some conservative political figures in Australia to make changes to a section of the country’s Racial Discrimination Act (RDA). This particular section of the Act—section 18(C)—they claimed, restricted freedom of speech in the public sphere. The proposed changes created heated discussions between the proponents and opponents, which were also reflected on Twitter. Using digital methods, a corpus of approximately 500,000 tweets was analysed to identify the various discursive communities and structures in the network, investigate information flows between them, and test for the existence of echo chambers and filter bubbles. The findings show that the ideological orientation of actors mostly reflects their long-term positioning in their respective networked discourse communities, and that information is disseminated freely between antagonistic network clusters, with little to no evidence of filter bubbles.

ABSTRACT. The multi-stakeholder approach is a valuable methodology for governance and policy development. In this work-in-progress paper we describe our use of the approach in the ongoing UnBias study. UnBias examines the user experience of algorithm-driven Internet platforms and seeks to identify opportunities for the effective governance of algorithmic online services. We use the multi-stakeholder methodology to bring together experts from relevant sectors including academia, education, government, regulatory oversight organisations, law, civil society organisations, media, and industry and commerce. We outline how our work so far has facilitated open and constructive debate that can drive the development of meaningful policy recommendations. We also outline some challenges of this approach and our next steps towards producing actionable design and policy recommendations, including engagement with international industry standards development.

ABSTRACT. This study investigates social media users’ preferences of encountering or actively avoiding undesired content and conflicts in social interaction with others. Based on a nationwide survey (N=3706) conducted in Finland and using principal component analysis, we identify three different types of social media use in relation to online information sharing and social interaction: conformist, provocative and protective. We then modelled those variations according to demographic variables and life satisfaction. We found that women are more likely to use social media in a conformist and protective way whereas men have higher a probability to be provocative. We also found that younger and more educated people have a higher probability to use social media in a conformist and protective way. Finally, we suggest that subjective life satisfaction more powerfully predicts provocative use compared to age or education.

ABSTRACT. The existence of echo chambers as a phenomenon in social media has been widely debated in recent years. Previous research has attempted to alternatively support or refute the claim that online users strongly favour interacting online with people of similar views. Much of this research has been on social networking sites such as Twitter where users directly connect with each other. A common difficulty faced by researchers of those platforms is how to define, and therefore identify, echo chambers. This research examines a different form of social media, the social news website Reddit, where users interact with each other indirectly as part of topic-based communities. These discrete communities can choose to explicitly define how community members should behave. In this paper we examine two communities : r/The_Donald, which demands echo chamber behaviour, and r/changemyview which actively discourages it. By taking communities which self-categorise their (anti-)echo chamber-ness we are able to determine whether users who choose to participate in an echo chamber or an anti-echo chamber show different levels of participation in other communities. Ultimately, our preliminary research suggests participants of the echo chamber, r/The_Donald are no less active across other communities than the average reddit user. However, we find evidence that participants of the anti-echo chamber r/changemyview are more active than the average platform user.

ABSTRACT. Participation in Open Online Communications (OOC) is anonymous, asynchronous, voluntary, and open to any Internet user or registered community member. In this study, we examine indicators of an OOC comment’s persuasive power in the context of Wikipedia’s Article for Deletion (AfD) discussions. Our preliminary results are in general consistent with the previous persuasion studies in Reddit discussion. Compared to non-persuasive comments, persuasive comments used less pronouns, impersonal pronouns, had lower sentiment level, and scored higher on analytical thinking and lower on authentic category. We also have different findings from the Reddit studies. Specifically, neither length of a comment nor the frequency of transitional phrase is not an indicator in our Wikipedia discussion data. We consider that the different discussion contexts, that is, Wikipedia AfD versus Reddit discussions, contribute to this observed difference. We are in the process of conducting more analysis with the data.

ABSTRACT. This study aim to identify influencers role on political conversations on Twitter and its effect in online public sphere. We analyze data from three days during key moments of the impeachment process of ex-president of Brazil Dilma Rousseff. Using a combination of social network analysis and qualitative approaches such as observation, we discuss these political influencers and their role in the conversations that took place. Our main findings are the presence of highly modularized networks, where groups in favor or opposing the impeachment were tightly connected around different influencers; the identification of three different types of influencers, the “opinion leaders”, the “informational influencers” and the “activists” and their different roles in the influential process and the polarization of the network.

ABSTRACT. This study uses in-depth qualitative focus groups to explore how young people perceive their own persuasive efficacy when posting about their political views on social media. The findings reveal both skepticism and optimism, depending upon how an individual conceptualizes the process of viral influence more broadly. While some young people feel that they lack the reach on social media to make a significant impact or to change the minds of those who hold opposing views, others employ forms of ‘network thinking’ to conceptualize how their political posts contribute to larger network effects and movement-building among their likeminded peers.

ABSTRACT. The upcoming of social media influencers and their commercialization in the form of influencer marketing is currently a very prominent topic in the domain of social media. One of the most pressing questions in this field is the measurement of success. Quantitative success metrics (e.g., number of likes) are mostly readily available and also predominantly used by both influencers themselves and companies. Still, so far it remains unclear what informative value these metrics actually have for influencer marketing and whether they are also a proxy for the quality of the content. We contribute to this area of research by combining secondary data on influencer marketing campaigns from Instagram with an online survey among marketing professionals. We find that in general, professionals consider reach and the number of interactions as the most important success metrics. In contrast, when actual campaigns with multiple metrics are evaluated, professionals predominantly rely on a sentiment measure (i.e., the sentiment of user comments). Moreover, we run a regression analysis showing that only the sentiment measure is positively related to the professional evaluation of the content, thus questioning the use of common quantitative metrics to evaluate social media influencers.

ABSTRACT. The panel addresses conference themes which can be grouped under the banner of ‘the societal impacts of social media’. Panel members examine a paradox: what does the hyper-efficient viral contagion enabled by social media platforms mean for the democratic promise of the original vectors of this diffusion, networks of peers? Championing equal access to information, peer networks stand for openness; multitudes have engaged in the collective production of code and encyclopaedic articles. Social media and its offshoots such as the sharing economy have turbocharged networked collaboration, but this occurs on closed platforms, where behavioural data is harvested and monetised by firms. Seizing this historical moment, we hope to generate a debate about the design, political, commercial and ethical relationships between social media and peer networks. Panel presentations address the co-opting of F/OSS by social media firms, the adverse effects of scalability and critical masses in the sharing economy, data exchanges between news organisations and third-party actors, and how autonomous networking can be compromised by institutional support. In broad terms panelists detect an increasing convergence of peer networks and social media, and seeks to map out the risks and opportunities this generates. The panel will be led and moderated by Johan Soderberg, who will set the scene by asking whether the ‘peer revolution’ has really been betrayed by the sharing economy ‘counter-revolution’. Short presentations by Mathieu O’Neil, Aske Kammer, Lene Pettersen and Gwen Shaffer will discuss how social media alters the DNA of peer networks as boundaries between communal modes of production and for-profit models become blurred. Will social media subsume peer networks? Conversely, can the ethics of peer networks affect social media? Johan Soderberg will moderate a Q&A period consisting first of questions to panel members, and will then open up the Q&A session to the audience for further discussion.

ABSTRACT. The main objective of the panel is to analyse how social media are increasingly shaping non-professionals narratives about the law, especially when it comes to the criminal justice system. The contributors will illustrate this point with reference to the support victims of sexual abuse and asylum seekers seek through social media in dealing with their particular (legal) predicament. The contributions will also seek to explore, through tropes such as ‘trial by social media’, how these spaces may be constructed as being fundamentally incompatible with the rule of law. The panel also seeks to raise some critical questions about the role which social media platforms, as major corporations, are playing in the formation of online legal communities. The main example here will be the way in which the big social media players have become an official and semi-institutionalised channel for courts to communicate with the wider public, including the kind of hard-to-reach groups and sceptical constituencies already referred to.

ABSTRACT. In today’s world, fake news can go viral on Internet with a big impact on our society. It is a real challenge for users not to be persuaded by presented views that have no factual basis. To tackle this challenge, a comprehensive understanding of online persuasion mechanisms and processes is desired. In this panel, our goals are: a) to showcase a variety of research angles taking place that contribute to this understanding, b) to present the identified research gaps in this literature, and c) to form a research group inviting those who are interested in investigating the topic and develop strategic plans to better foster online persuasion research.

ABSTRACT. Video blogging (vlogging) on YouTube has become a growing source of health information for individuals who have HIV/AIDS. Our study investigates the types of information video bloggers (vloggers) choose to share around their experiences managing HIV/AIDS. We conducted a content analysis of 17 vlogs created by 17 different vloggers on YouTube in order to assess their narratives around coping with HIV/AIDS. The results of our study preliminarily indicate that vloggers tend to interweave both informational and emotional support for viewers into their vlogs, which detail their diagnoses and their experiences around the effects of HIV/AIDS on their health, relationships, and other aspects of their lives. The advantages of this type of information provision include instrumental support for viewers in terms of information on managing diagnoses, symptoms, treatments, healthcare providers, other relevant factors. Reducing the stigmatization around HIV/AIDS also may be a major benefit of vlogging. However, the spread of misinformation on HIV/AIDS may be a hurdle as vlogging becomes a more popular form of health communication. The results from our study seem to indicate that vlogs may be a highly useful method for educating viewers on HIV/AIDS in a more contextual and experiential manner, but viewers will also need to learn how to assess the credibility and accuracy of the health content from these types of vlogs.

ABSTRACT. This preliminary study investigated how Facebook users’ fixed or growth mindsets shape their behaviors on SNS. Our experiment (N=75) tested a real-world situation in which patients posted complaints about side effects from a drug on the company’s Facebook page. The results showed that users’ mindsets moderated the effect of company response; growth mindset Facebook users were more receptive to company’s apologies, and perceived other users’ negative opinions less severe than did fixed mindset Facebook users.

ABSTRACT. Many states in the US allow a “belief exemption” for measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccines. People’s opinion on whether or not to take the vaccine could have direct consequences in public health— once the vaccine refusal of a group of population is higher than what herd immunity can tolerate, a disease can transmit fast causing large scale of disease outbreaks. Social media has been one of the dominant communication channels for people to express their opinions of vaccination. Despite governmental organizations’ effects of disseminating information of vaccination benefits, anti-vaccine sentiment is still gaining its momentum, especially on social media. This research investigates the communicative patterns of anti-vaccine and pro-vaccine users on Twitter by studying the retweet network from 660,892 tweets related to MMR vaccine published by 269,623 users after the 2015 California Disneyland measles outbreak. Using supervised learning, we classified the users into anti-vaccination, neutral to vaccination, and pro-vaccination groups. Using a combination of opinion groups and retweet network structural community detection, we discovered that pro- and anti-vaccine users retweet predominantly from their own opinion group while users with neutral opinions are distributed across communities. For most cross-group communication, it was found that pro-vaccination users were retweeting anti-vaccination users than vice-versa. The paper concludes that anti-vaccine users are highly clustered and enclosed communities and this makes it difficult for health organizations to penetrate and counter opinionated information. We believe that this finding may be useful in developing strategies for health communication of vaccination and overcome some the limits of current strategies.

ABSTRACT. It has been suggested in some preliminary and somewhat anecdotal work that the effects of binge watching platforms such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime have been reported to include depression, chronic illness, weight gain, sleep disorders, and even a suffering sex life. This study reports on analyses of survey data comprising college students and finds that increased binge watching shows differential and largely non-negative effects across emotional and health domains.

ABSTRACT. In this article we investigate which characteristics of the developers involved in the creation of Open Source software favor innovation in the Open Source community. The results of the analysis show that higher reputation in the community improves up to a certain degree the probability of gaining collaborators, but developers are also driven by reciprocity. This is consistent with the concept of gift economy. There exists also a statistically significant network effect emerging from standardization – developers using the most popular programming languages in the service are likely to have more collaborators. Providing additional information (valid url to developer’s homepage) improves the chance of having coworkers. The results can be generalized for the population of mature users of GitHub.

ABSTRACT. The paper analyses all communications on the distribution blog of the web series SKAM/SHAME. More than 135 000 comments tell the story of a unique community of followers, fans, and friends communicating with each other and the series framed by a cross-media distributive environment. The analysis shows how SKAM mixes media types in different ways across the four seasons, how certain media types generate more interaction than others, and lastly how user comments, replies and likes follow these structures but also apply rules of their own relating to individual commenters, specific emotional topics, invitations to interact, and feelings of community in the commentary track.

ABSTRACT. Social Media has become an important part of modern-day communication. Advantages span from instant communica-tion via direct messages to sharing and consuming content and experiences. Lately, social media applications have been criticized for assisting the spreading of harmful or fake news and distorting reality by enabling unauthentic self-representation. It is often argued, that social media platforms are solely responsible for these challenges and for offering solutions. This research uses the notion of a digi-tal footprint, a codified representation of a user's social media engagement, to facilitate user reflection. This foot-print, however, is mostly a product of the user's deliberate and conscious engagement. This paper argues that users al-so have a responsibility in addressing the above-mentioned challenges by increasing their awareness of their social me-dia usage. This paper presents a study with close to 300 participants investigating if they are aware of their digital footprint in social media. The paper presents the overall challenges, as well as experimental design and results, with the goal of motivating further debate about user awareness of their social media awareness usage.

ABSTRACT. With pressure on Twitter from governments and others intent on preventing the spread of racist, including anti-Semitic and Islamophobic, messages, it appears that some right-wing populist users have moved to Gab, where they are less likely to be censored. There appears to be a split between those who are willing to play by the new rules on Twitter, and those who prefer the ability to express their racism more openly on Gab. We believe that this split reflects a broader, ongoing split within the far right. In the United States and in Europe, the more "moderate" right, hopeful of electoral successes, conserves its Islamophobic and anti-migrant rhetoric, but is moving away from overt anti-Semitism. Meantime the diehard anti-Semites develop their own, separate networks, online and offline, and these may now include Gab. Our test case is what we call the "Soros Myth," which accuses the Hungarian-born, American-Jewish financier George Soros of instigating or supporting an astonishingly large array of causes and events that right-wing populist resent, including the mass migration of Muslim refugees to Europe. The article discusses the methodology of gathering relevant information on Twitter and Gab, and the preliminary results, which strongly support our working hypothesis that when it comes to the Soros Myth, the more overtly anti-Semitic content is now found on Gab.

ABSTRACT. Using a novel methodological approach to measure emotions in Facebook comments, the present WIP explores the relationship between negative feelings and ideological cross-posting behavior. We collect over 770,000 Facebook comments from three political campaign pages (Stronger In, Vote Leave, and Leave EU) active during the Brexit referendum via the Vox Populi data harvester. After sorting users into ideological camps based on their reactions to campaign posts, we then examine their commenting patterns across ideological lines. Using three different methods of sentiment analysis (EmotionVis, LIWC and SentiStrength), we identify negative and positive emotions and their fine-grained sub-categories in comments. The analysis reveals one quarter of all comments are cross-ideological posts, with Leave supporters overwhelmingly active in commenting on Remain posts. Even though, surprisingly, cross-posting tended to be more neutral or mixed sentiment than strictly negative in tone, a comparison across the campaigns shows that Brexiteers are much more likely to express pure anger than Remainers.

ABSTRACT. How legitimacy is constructed and to whom it is awarded or denied is commonly bound to its social context. How, then, is legitimacy constructed in globally networked publics where contexts increasingly collapse? This study explores how the technological properties of networked publics influence how legitimacy is constructed. It proposes a framework that integrates the concept of context collapse into legitimacy theory and uses news and social media data to reconstruct legitimacy formation in a local cultural-religious conflict in Switzerland that received worldwide attention. The proposed theoretical framework offers an innovative theoretical lens on the globalization of local conflicts.

ABSTRACT. The paper will present the findings of a small-scale qualitative study carried out with the active members of the biggest public Estonian-language based anti-immigration Facebook group “Estonians against refugee quotas”. Semi-structured individual interviews (N=12) with active members of the group were carried out in spring 2016 with an aim to find out their reasons and motivation behind joining an anti-immigration community in Facebook. Furthermore, our intention was also to study what kind of role the members of the group apply to social media and their Facebook group in particular, in Estonian public debates about the refugee crises.We were able to differentiate between both institutional/regional-, national/institutional-, individual- and interactional level drivers behind joining the Facebook community.

ABSTRACT. This study aims to identify the factors that might cause a Facebook post to be “liked” by Facebook users. We analyze all the Facebook posts made by the campaigns of the top three candidates of the U.S. 2016 primary election who remained in the race till their respective national conventions, namely Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Several possible variables were considered, such as the types of Facebook posts, the use of pronouns and emotions, the inclusion of slogans and hashtags, references made to opponents, as well as candidate’s mentions on national television. The results of our Ordinary Least Squared (OLS) regression models show that the use of highly charged (positive and negative) emotions and personalized posts (first-person singular pronouns) increase likes across all three candidates’ Facebook pages whereas visual posts (videos and photos) and the use of past tenses were liked more by Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders’ followers. Television mentions boost likes on Clinton and Sanders’ posts, but have a negative effect on Trump’s. The study offers empirical findings contributing to the growing literature on digitally networked participation [1] and support the development of the emerging notion of the new ‘hybrid media’ system [2] for political communication. The study also raises questions as to the relevance of platforms such as Facebook to the democratic process since Facebook users are not necessarily engaging with the content in an organic, democratic way; but instead might be guided to specific content by the Facebook timeline algorithm.

ABSTRACT. This study explores the influence of social media on the (re)formation of social memory and the production of historical knowledge in society. It takes several contested debates over historical events and figures on Weibo, one of the most widely used social media, as the case to investigate how social media enable people to articulate previously unspoken experiences and memories, question the authenticity and accuracy of official history, and shape social recollection in contemporary China. While social media such as Weibo empowers connected people to organize contentious activities in contemporary contested events, it also allows them to engage in various mnemonic practices, through which people (re)construct social memory and further shape the production of historical knowledge in the society. This study argues that social media embraces a wide variety of diverse individuals as subjects who contribute to various mnemonic practices, facilitates the crowdsourcing and aggregation of alternative or counter narratives of the past, and cultivates the production of historical knowledge as a retrievable and re-activatable process. The contestation facilitated by social media over mnemonic knowledge transcends what happened in history and memory and sheds light on the complex political and cultural contentions and communities in contemporary China.

ABSTRACT. The legal trajectory of the Internet and online social networks in Turkey has been closely linked to the history of the Justice and Development Party’s (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi or AKP) rule as government in the Grand National Assembly since 2002. Almost all Internet-related laws that regulate the online lives of Turkish citizens today have been created and put in effect during the AKP government’s 16-year rule. The AKP government’s contested relationship with the usage of Internet technologies and online social networks in political participation had previously been characterized by utter denunciation, as witnessed during the Gezi Protests of 2013. More recently, the government has focused on maintaining effective strategies and even appropriating similar practices of online political participation. This paper presents a study of Facebook videos posted during and following the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey through a paradigm of original themes and tones. This study aims to explore changes in Internet law and the effect of AKP’s reformed social media strategies on the representation of political participation in Turkey on Facebook and online social networks at large.

ABSTRACT. We present preliminary results from analysis of what topics presidential candidates tweeted about and the public’s response to those tweets in the form of retweets. Using exploratory data analysis and simple correlations to explore the 4,754 tweets posted by U.S. presidential candidates over the last 3 months of the 2016 Election, we find a mismatch between the topics that candidates tweet about the most and the topics that the public retweets the most. We discuss the possible reasons for the mismatch and outline future work that will include a similar analysis with Facebook data and a breakdown by party.

ABSTRACT.  

Abstract

This three-part, mixed-method study focuses on the social media habits of Syrian refugees who migrated to Europe between 2012-2015. Each stage of the study, 1) content analysis, 2) in-depth interviews and, 3) questionnaire, were utilized to understand and identify the reasons affecting a change in Facebook posting habits, and the implications they may hold for online identity formation. Interview participants identified eight main factors and were utilized to develop a matrix questionnaire to measure eight variables. Eighty-two percent (N=53) of questionnaire respondents confirmed that their Facebook posting habits changed after migrating to Europe.  The study findings indicate a break from the common Millennial pattern of maintaining a social-media persona among Syrian refugees in Europe. Instead altered posting habits suggest an increased move towards greater privacy online that may be caused by the experience of authoritative rule in Syria, and a lack of confidence in the efficacy of social media as a medium of change. However instant messaging and private/secret groups remain popular and mimic older Syrian social networks, jama’iya, that migrated onto the internet.

CCS Concepts

• Social media → Facebook; posting habit; online/off line identity; secret/private chat groups, integration
• Arab Spring → Syria; refugee crises; Authoritative rule; censorship

Keywords

Social media behavior, Facebook, Online- Offline identity, Europe, Syrian refugees, Millennials, Arab Spring, Syria, Authoritative rule, Censorship, Integration, Mental health

ABSTRACT. With the proliferation of fashion blogging, fashion images become omnipresent on various platforms of social media. This study draws on an inductive approach in exploring how the post-90s generation relates themselves with the others when browsing fashion images on social media. Eight focus groups were conducted for Hong Kong young fashion readers. Results indicated that a tendency of social comparison occurred as readers indicated preference towards fashion bloggers who perform as self-modelling. The finding reveals a new perspective of social comparison for the young fashion readers towards the notion of ideal beauty. This study contributes to the discourse of academic theories in social media, social comparison on fashion images.

ABSTRACT. ABSTRACT

Background:  As digital media gaining unprecedented popularity among consumers, marketers are trying to figure out which popular social media strategies, relying on user-generated content versus marketer-generated content, will be more attractive consumers of various levels of social closeness.

Objective: The objective of this study is to study whether social media users with social closeness (versus non-social closeness) prefer the brands and products that are promoted through user-generated content (versus marketer-generated content).

Methods: Experimental designs are used in this research. Study 1 uses a 2 (social closeness) X 2 (social media connecting strategy) experimental design. Subsequent studies are to replicate the results in different setting using different social media ads.

Results and implications:  As predicted, an interaction between the two factors emerged. The research has important implications for the changing landscape of digital and social media. The study provides immediate managerial implications to content marketers by showing that failing to consider the digital use styles of various types of consumers when designing digital marketing campaigns and content marketing can lead to ineffective digital marketing communications.

ABSTRACT. Background:

With increasing pressure upon academics to promote themselves and their research online, this poster will present initial findings from a research project focused upon how academic identity is expressed online through social media platforms. This is a complex question, as academic identity online is refracted through a variety of different platforms. Academics may be highly selective of what they choose to post to different sites, through a combination of choosing whether to merge personal and professional identities, and contrasting perceptions about the audiences at different sites.

Previously, co-interpretive interviews with 18 participants about their personal network structures on Academia.edu, ResearchGate and Twitter, suggested that social media site use sits within a spectrum from personal to professional identity being reflected through sites (Jordan, 2017). This elaborates upon Kimmons and Veletsianos (2014) ‘acceptable identity fragments’ (AIFs) for academics online, suggesting that clusters of sites may represent a particular ‘fragment’ between a personal and professional self. However, the concept of AIFs requires further clarification as to at what scale AIFs operate; e.g. a single post, on one platform, or across multiple platforms. This project will test a model of clustered platforms in niches along a continuum from exclusively personal to exclusively professional identity with a larger sample by asking academics about the types of information that they would consider posting to a range of different social networking sites.

Objective:

The main objective is to test the model of how different sites used by academics sit within the spectrum from more personal to more professional identities empirically, by using a survey and larger sample to explore the types of information that academics would share through different sites. This poster will report the findings of the first phase of research, addressing the following research question: How are academics acceptable identity fragments mediated by different platforms?

Methods:

To provide a robust, confirmatory evidence base for the model, an online survey is currently underway in which participants are presented with an inventory of statements about examples of the types of information that they might share through social media (both professional and personal).

Results:

This data will be used to map the extent to which overlap occurs between personal and professional information disclosure on different sites. This analysis will be carried out using network analysis software (Gephi), by converting the information to a weighted bipartite graph and visualising for clusters. The poster will provide a visual representation of the extent to which academics’ identity fragments are defined by particular facets of identity, or different social media platforms.

Future Work:

The question of what is shared on different platforms as a reflection of identity is also linked to a perceived audience. In the second phase of the project, the different and nuanced forms of research impact that academics experience through their professional interactions with contrasting and overlapping audiences (drawing upon the notion of ‘networked publics’; boyd, 2011) on social media platforms will be explored.

References:

boyd, d. (2011) Social network sites as networked publics, in Papacharissi, Z. (Ed.) A networked self: Identity, community, and culture on social network sites, Abingdon, Routledge, pp. 39-58. Jordan, K. (2017) Understanding the structure and role of academics’ ego-networks on social networking sites. PhD thesis, The Open University, UK. Kimmons, R. & Veletsianos, G. (2014) The fragmented educator 2.0: Social networking sites, acceptable identity fragments, and the identity constellation, Computers & Education, 72, 292-301.