"I always feel like somebody's watching me": What do the U.S. electorate know about political micro-targeting and how much do they care?

The practice of political micro-targeting (PMT) – tailoring messages for voters based on their personal data – has increased over the past two decades, particularly in the U.S. Studies of PMT have to date concentrated largely on its effects on voters, or its implications for democracy more broadly. Less attention has been given to answering basic descriptive questions about how people perceive, feel and care about this new mode of political communication. This paper fills that gap by reporting findings from an online survey (weighted to be nationally representative on age, gender, ethnicity, region and past vote) that measured public attitudes toward PMT during the 2020 U.S. Presidential campaign. Specifically, we measure voter orientations toward PMT in four key dimensions – awareness, aversion, knowledge, and acceptability at the aggregate level – and explore how these vary according to a range of individual characteristics. Key findings are that public understanding and acceptance of PMT may be higher than current studies indicate, particularly among certain sectors of the population. Such insights are important for academic research to cognize and also policy-makers, as they move toward greater regulation of voter targeting

@Who? Investigating Possible Errors in Studies Linking Survey and Twitter Data

Expanding global usage of social media and growing questions about its societal impact have led scholars to investigate the relationship between individuals' offline and online behaviors and characteristics. Such inquiries, which compare individuals' survey responses to their social media behavior, typically do not address whether the elicitation of survey respondents' social media information introduces any systematic errors. However, making inferences from a survey-linked sample to a social media platform, and finally to a survey sample or broader target population, can be imperiled when systematic differences exist between those who provide and those who deny researchers access to their social media accounts. In this paper, we ask: Do survey respondents who say they use Twitter differ from the subset providing validated Twitter handles, as well as from the overall survey sample? Pooling across five datasets and over 31,000 respondents, we show first that samples of stated Twitter users differ from the initial survey samples from which they are drawn on several socio-demographic characteristics. Second and reassuringly as concerns possible errors due to survey-linkage, we report few systematic differences between those who say they use Twitter and those who provide validated Twitter handles. Nevertheless, we do document differences on some demographics, and we illustrate how errors could carry potential consequences for sample composition of which researchers should be aware. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of our results, their possible generalizability, and areas for future research

Would You Mind Sharing Your Opinion About the Covid-19 Vaccination? Explaining Opinion Expression as a Form of Information Sharing

The present study investigates predictors of opinion expression about the Covid-19 vaccination. Health-related opinion expressions, which can be understood as a specific type of information sharing, are highly relevant since opinions are influential sources for individuals’ health-related attitude formation and decision-making and shape public opinion about health topics. Guided by extensive research on political opinion expression and the current state of research addressing health information sharing, we apply theoretical assumptions of the risk information seeking and processing model (RISP) to opinion expression about vaccination in different social contexts. We conducted an online survey in Germany (N = 833) and empirically analysed our model using regression analyses. A higher likelihood to express one’s opinion was contextual-independently facilitated by more positive attitudes towards sharing, injunctive norms, and sharing efficacy. Context-specific patterns were found for descriptive norms, cognitive risk perceptions, and information seeking. Our results revealed the RISP to be a step towards a theoretically sound framework explaining opinion expression, but demand more specific frameworks developed for opinion expression

Ist das Versenden von «Dick Pics» strafbar?

Mit der Verbreitung von Mobiltelefonen hat auch das Versenden von «Dick Pics» zugenommen. Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht, wie das Versenden unerwünschter Fotos männlicher Genitalien strafrechtlich zu werten ist. In Frage kommen Exhibitionismus (Art. 194 StGB), Pornografie (Art. 197 StGB) und sexuelle Belästigung (Art. 198 StGB). Dabei wird sich zeigen, dass keiner dieser Tatbestände wirklich passt. Auch nach der Revision des Sexualstrafrechts ist das Problem nicht abschliessend gelöst. -- L'envoi de «Dick Pics» a sensiblement augmentéavec la popularisation des téléphones portables. Notre article examine comment l'envoi de photos non désirées d'organes génitaux masculins doitêtre considérédu point de vue du droit pénal. L'exhibitionnisme (art. 194 CP), la pornographie (art. 197 CP) et le harcèlement sexuel (art. 198 CP) entrent en ligne de compte. Il sera toutefois constatéqu'aucune de ces infractions n'est vraiment adaptée. Même après la révision du droit pénal en matiè re sexuelle, le problème n'est pas définitivement résolu. &nbsp

Proud Boys on Telegram

Utilizing an original data set of public Telegram channels affiliated with a right-wing extremist group, the Proud Boys, we conduct an exploratory analysis of the structure and nature of the group’s presence on the platform. Our study considers the group’s growth, organizational structure, connectedness with other far-right and/or fringe factions, and the range of topics discussed on this alternative social media platform. The findings show that the Proud Boys have a notable presence on Telegram, with a discernable spike in activity coinciding with Facebook’s and Instagram’s 2018 deplatforming of associated pages and profiles with this and other extremist groups. Another sharp increase in activity is then precipitated by the attack on the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. By February 2022, we identified 92 public Telegram channels explicitly affiliated with the Proud Boys, which constitute the core of a well-connected network with 131,953 subscribers. These channels, primarily from the United States, also include international presences in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK, and Germany. Our data reveals substantial interaction between the Proud Boys and other fringe and/or far-right communities on Telegram, including MAGA Trumpists, QAnon, COVID-19-related misinformation, and white-supremacist communities. Content analyses of this network highlights several prominent and recurring themes, including opposition to feminism and liberals, skepticism toward official information sources, and propagation of various conspiracy beliefs. This study offers the first systematic examination of the Proud Boys on Telegram, illuminating how a far-right extremist group leverages the latitude afforded by a relatively unregulated alternative social media platform

Semiotic Violence

Semiotic violence against female politicians is a subtype of violence against women in politics or VAWP (Krook, 2017), which operates at the level of portrayal and representation of female politicians –mainly through text and images–, with the aim of delegitimizing or nullifying their presence in political office, for gender-based reasons (Krook and Restrepo, 2016a, 2016b; Krook 2020; Krook 2022; Bardall et al. 2020). Like other types of VAWP, the main objective of this type of violence is to “keep politics as a male domain” (Bardall et al., 2020, p. 923). According to Krook's (2022) conceptualization, there are two types of semiotic violence, namely, i) Semiotic violence as rendering women invisible, referring to the symbolic annihilation of female politicians by not considering their presence and contributions to the political debate, reinforcing the idea that men are the only valid participants in it; and ii) Semiotic violence as rendering women incompetent, referring to the attempt to present women as unfit for political life, using stereotypes about their inability to perform public functions. Both types can cover a wide range of manifestations, from overtly misogynist messages to subtle ones, mobilizing semiotic resources to hurt, discipline and subjugate women (Krook, 2022, p. 372). Field of application/theoretical foundation Semiotic violence remains a less explored dimension of VAWP, in contrast to numerous studies addressing its physical, sexual, psychological, and economic domains (For a systematic review of studies on VAWP, revise Krook and Restrepo (2019)) (Bardall et al., 2020). While theoretical frameworks have been established (Krook 2020, 2022; Kuperberg, 2021), the empirical research on semiotic violence is still pending. The phenomenon has often been approached through neighboring concepts, that on the one hand, highlight how female politicians face distinct forms –and, in some cases, higher levels– of aggression compared to their male counterparts (for example, studies by Rehault et al. (2019), and Solovev and Pröllochs (2022), show the prevalence of gendered violence towards women politicians on Twitter). However, the lack of a common conceptualization demonstrates limitations in fully and exclusively capturing and addressing its occurrence. For example, while Incivility is defined as discourteous behavior that encompasses offenses to individuals or social groups through stereotypes and denial of freedoms (Theocharis et al., 2016), in politics, it can be perceived by men and women, and not all its dimensions have gendered issues. In the case of Hate Speech, which refers to the devaluation of individuals according to personal characteristics such as gender (Hawdon et al., 2017), but not exclusively, it could also encompass other social categories such as ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, etc.). Another common example is the extended concept of Online Misogyny, however, it could be applied in diverse contexts, and it is not necessarily confined to a political one. Semiotic violence, as a concept, holds potential within political science to elucidate dynamics perpetuating gender-based political inequalities. Within the context of digital transformations impacting political spheres (Tucker et al., 2017; Zhuravskaya et al., 2020), studying online semiotic violence becomes crucial due its effortlessly diffusion and the normalization of its occurrence (Kuperberg, 2021; Albaine, 2020; Krook, 2022). Analyzing the associated characteristics of victims and perpetrators, delving into the underlying causal mechanisms behind semiotic violence, and examining its primary consequences to female politicians are critical issues to address. Additionally, in the field of communication, studying semiotic violence in news and media coverage could help address how media act as barriers or facilitators of gender equality in the exercise of power. Finally, within the institutional arena (Such as UN Women, Inter-Parliamentary Union, among other institutions), an empirical perspective on online semiotic violence could benefit efforts to measure and monitor the experiences of female politicians in the online sphere. Information on example study The section below outlines a proposed operationalization of semiotic violence against women in politics in online environments (see Table 1), developed by Olivares 2023 [unpublished manuscript]. This study employed an operationalization to assess the prevalence of semiotic violence content within tweet messages –text format– addressed to Spanish MP female candidates before the national election in November 2019. To that end, a semi-automatized context analysis and text classification was conducted using Quanteda package in R (Kenneth et al., 2018). From a feature extraction perspective (Kharde & Sonawe, 2016), the analysis was conducted on a sample of 431.354 tweets sources from the Q-Dem database at the University of Barcelona. Additional details about this study can be found in Table 2.   The used operationalization was built from Krook’s work on offline semiotic violence (2022) and was adapted for an online context. The codebook considers the two main dimensions –types– of the concept elaborated by Krook outlined above. Details of the conceptualization can be found in the original and translated codebook. Table 1. Online semiotic violence against women in politics Type of semiotic violence Nº Subtypes Examples   Semiotic violence as rendering women invisible 1 Removing female politicians from political spaces Calls and pleas for women to abandon their general presence or specific positions in politics. E.g. “go back and take care of yourself and your family”.   2 Misrecognizing female politicians as not being leaders Direct and indirect appeals to women politicians as lacking in leadership and, consequently, incapable of doing their jobs well. E.g. “God help us if we are left in the hands of these women...”.   3 Applying masculine pronouns to female politicians Denial of the feminization of language associated with women in politics. Note: this may not apply in English.   4 Denying female politicians’ right to speak and to be heard Expressions of inquiring female politicians to "shut up". E.g. “Mrs. Calvo, why don’t you shut up!!?”.   5 Pejorative depictions of feminism Insults associated with feminism, or the feminist movement and it demands. E.g. “She is another sectarian feminazi”. Semiotic violence as rendering women incompetent 6 Ridiculing female politicians as emotional and other gender stereotypes Appeal to binary stereotypes to disqualify female politicians because of an "own emotionality" (sensitive, nervous, angry, crazy), and non-emotional stereotypes such as being liars, dangerous, evil, manipulative, etc. E.g. “Come on, now say it without crying”; “ma'am (…), have you taken your medication?”.   7 Denying female politicians’ qualifications Questioning women’s professional and personal qualifications. Includes lack of education and training, nepotism, addictions, among other elements. E.g. “I don't think she understands anything. We must explain it to her very slowly”; “stop smoking whatever it is you smoke, you're leaving yourself with an intellectual defect that is difficult to solve”.   8 Mansplaining and infantilizing female politicians E.g. “Do you know what division of powers is?”; “Tell that to this little girl”.   9 Sexually and physically objectifying female politicians Reducing women to their body characteristics –in terms of sexual attractiveness and physical appearance. E.g. “Forcing your smile makes you ugly”; “These do not even conquer a pimp”.   10 Slut-shaming female politicians Shaming female politicians for real or imagined sexual behavior. E.g. “we know this girl very well in Sevilla, a slut”.   11 Denying that female politicians are real women Consider the implication that female politicians who display some degree of competence may not be real women. E.g. “She is actually @marianorajoy dressed as a woman”. Source: Own elaboration, based on Krook 2022. Note: Text in italics indicates the main modifications to Krook’s conceptualization, to adapt the definition and subtypes of semiotic violence to the online environment. Table 2. Summary of Example Study Author Sample Unit of Analysis Values Reliability Olivares 2023 [unpublished manuscript] Content type: Tweets addressed to female MP candidates (113 twitter accounts). Country: Spain Sampling period: October 14th to November 6th, 2019. Sample size: N = 431.354 tweets Source: Q-Dem, University of Barcelona Unit of analysis: Tweets addressed to female MP candidates for the November 2019 national election.       Semiotic violence (0/1): Presence or absence of contents of semiotic violence in tweets corpus. Corresponds to the presence of elements from 1-11 subtypes from Table 1 Type of Semiotic Violence (categories): ·       “Invisible” (1-5 subtypes) ·       “Incompetent” (6-11 subtypes) ·       “Both” (1-11 subtypes) ·       “None” Semiotic violence: Accuracy = 0.72 F1 = 0.73   Type of Semiotic Violence:Accuracy = 0.65Macro F1 = 0.63F1 Invisible = 0.58F1 Incompetent = 0.58F1 Both = NA (The NA value represents a minimum co-occurrence of the presence of semiotic violence from subtypes “Invisible” and “Incompetent”, within the analyzed sample)F1 None = 0.70 References Albaine, L. (2021). Violencia contra las mujeres en política: Hoja de ruta para prevenirla, monitorearla, sancionarla y erradicarla. Atenea: por una Democracia 50/50. PNUD, ONU Mujeres e IDEA Internacional. https://lac.unwomen.org/es/digiteca/publicaciones/2021/03/violencia-contra-las-mujeres-en-politica Bardall, G., Bjarnegård, E., & Piscopo, J. (2020). How is Political Violence Gendered? Disentangling Motives, Forms, and Impacts. Political Studies, 68(4), 916-935. https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321719881812 Benoit, K., Watanabe, K., Wang, H., Nulty, P., Obeng, A., Müller, S., & Matsuo, A. (2018). Quanteda: An R package for the quantitative analysis of textual data. Journal of Open Source Software, 3(30), 774. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.00774 Kharde, V., & Sonawane, S. (2016). Sentiment Analysisi of Twitter Data: A survey of Techniques. International Journal of Computer Applications, 139(11), 5-15. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1601.06971 Krook, M. L. (2017). Violence Against Women in Politics. Journal of Democracy, 28(1), 74-88. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2017.0007 Krook, M. L. (2022). Semiotic Violence against Women: theorizing Harms against Female Politicians. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 47(2), 371-397. https://doi.org/10.1086/716642 Krook, M. L. & Restrepo, J. (2016a). Violencia contra las mujeres en política [Violence Against Women in Politics]. A defense of the Concept. Política y Gobierno, 23(2), 459-490. Krook, M. L. & Restrepo, J. (2016b). Género y violencia política en América Latina [Gender and political violence in Latin America]. Concepts, debates and solutions. Política y Gobierno, 23(1), 125-157. Krook, M. L. & Restrepo, J. (2019). The Cost of Doing Politics? Analyzing Violence and Harassment against Female Politicians. Perspectives on Policies. Published Online. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592719001397 Kuperberg, R. (2021). Incongruous and illegitimate. Antisemitic and Islamophobic semiotic violence against women in politics in the United Kingdom. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 9(1), 100-126. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00055.kup Olivares, F. (2023). Mujeres políticas y violencia online: explorando la violencia semiótica a través de Twitter. [master’s thesis]. Rehault, L., Rayment, E., & Musulan, A. (2019). Politicians in the line of fire: Incivility and the treatment of women on social media. Research and Politics, 6(1), 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168018816228 Solovev, K. & Pröllochs, N. (2022). Hate Speech in the Political Discourse on Social Media: Disparities Across Parties, Gender, and Ethnicity. In Proceedings of the ACM The Web Conf (WWW ’22), April 25–29, 2022, Lyon, France. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.06638 Theocharis, Y., Barberá, P., Fazekas, S., Adrian Popa, S., & Parnet, O. (2016). A Bad Workman Blames His Tweets: The Consequences of Citizens‘ Uncivil Twitter Use When Interacting with Party Candidates. Journal of Communication, 66(6), 1007-1031. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.1225

Strategies and challenges for constructing and collecting visual corpora from image-based social media platforms

Visual elements play an important role within the multimodal nature of social media (Pearce et al., 2020). A growing body of research has focused on the analysis of still and moving images from different social media platforms from various perspectives of communication and media studies (Hautea, Parks, Takahashi, & Zeng, 2021; Li & Xie, 2020; Veum & Undrum, 2018). Although the aforementioned studies describe visual data collection, their principal focus does not rely on this collection, but on data analysis. Little attention has been paid to the challenges of collecting visual datasets (Highfield & Leaver, 2016). In this paper, I propose a methodological overview of several strategies for collecting large corpora of visual data from image-based social media platforms. Provided with exemplary publications, I review five strategies for collecting visual corpora: hashtag-based, account-based, metadata-based, random sampling, and mixed approach. Lastly, I present a case study with my own mixed approach to the collection of visual data from Instagram. Considering the usage, advantages and limitations of each strategy, the article will contribute to the developing science of social media research. I believe that a literature analysis of visual data collection strategies and a provided case study can help researchers optimize visual data collection from image-based social media

Künstliche Intelligenz und Schweizer Recht, Januar-Dezember 2023

Entsprechend dem Ziel der «(Zeit-)schriften des Rechts», die von Tag zu Tag anschwellenden und zunehmend verstreuten Veröffentlichungen zum Recht zu sammeln, zu sichten und hieraus eine Auswahl aktuell besonders lesenswerter Texte zu treffen, wird in dieser Ausgabe eine Auswahl der Schriften an der Schnittstelle von Künstlicher Intelligenz (KI) und Schweizer Recht aus dem Zeitraum Januar-Dezember 2023 vor­ge­legt.Entsprechend dem Ziel der «(Zeit-)schriften des Rechts», die von Tag zu Tag anschwellenden und zunehmend verstreuten Veröffentlichungen zum Recht zu sammeln, zu sichten und hieraus eine Auswahl aktuell besonders lesenswerter Texte zu treffen, wird in dieser Ausgabe eine Auswahl der Schriften an der Schnittstelle von Künstlicher Intelligenz (KI) und Schweizer Recht aus dem Zeitraum Januar-Dezember 2023 vor­ge­legt

Death of a Platform? A longitudinal and comparative study of political party Twitter use in Scandinavia

While a series of case studies have provided useful insights into the political uses of Twitter, scholars have pointed to the necessity for longitudinal and cross-country findings in order to further our understanding of social media use in this regard. The study at hand presents a comparative analysis of Scandinavian political party communication on Twitter. Adopting a longitudinal approach, the study details the full histories of party Twitter accounts from Denmark, Norway and Sweden in order to provide overarching, structural insights into how the studied political parties have made use of Twitter – but also how their potential voters have chosen to engage with the tweets posted by the parties. While Twitter once was described as integral for political campaigning and indeed for the hybrid media systems in these countries, the results indicate an overall declining trend when it comes to use - albeit an increase of what could be considered as less demanding types of use for parties and citizens alike. Implications and opportunities for further research are discussed

Psychoanalyse unter Druck: Verwaltung von Gesundheit

Im vorliegenden Text befasse ich mich mit der Frage, wie die öffentliche Verwaltung von Gesundheit in den psychoanalytischen Prozess eingreift, welche Denkweise dabei vorherrscht und in welche Fallstricke sie sich verwickelt, wie die öffentliche Verwaltung den psychoanalytischen Prozess damit formt und verändert und welche Konsequenzen diese Vorgänge für die Anwendung von Psychoanalyse hat, bzw. haben wird, wenn es uns nicht gelingt, die Deutungsmacht der Verwaltung zurückzudrängen und wieder selber zu definieren, was Psychoanalyse ist und was sie leisten kann