Mask making on social media: Women’s mask making practices and advocacy during the COVID-19 pandemic

Background: COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus SARS-COV-2, can create serious respiratory problems, or even death, for those affected. Individuals who share messages about its risks and related risk reduction behaviors have the potential to make a broader health impact. Early in the pandemic, some individuals made homemade masks to address the limited supply of personal protective equipment (PPE) and posted about their efforts on social media. Aim: To understand the grassroots application of the Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication (CERC) theoretical model concerning effective messages in early phases of a crisis. Methods: Using both individual interviews and observations, researchers conducted a study of 15 Appalachian women making masks during the Covid-19 pandemic and analyzed 9 of their social media accounts. Results: Through interviews and observations, the researchers gained understanding as to how mask makers used social media to create and distribute masks and engage their communities. Social media messages often contained calls to action, personal connections to the issue, and supported the mask makers’ efforts to reach a broader network of individuals. Discussion: An evaluation of the grassroots efforts of mask makers extends the CERC framework to the individual level. Conclusions: This study provides insight into the role of grassroots health advocacy, and the role of user-generated social media messaging in pandemic risk reduction

Social media literacy for empowering children with new literacy skills for reading, writing and interacting in the networked digital setting: An Action Research Study of teenage students in Mumbai

This action research study examines the impact of social media literacy education, using a critical social media literacy paradigm, for the children in Indian contexts and reflects how it fits into the wider perspective of media literacy. Through implementing a participatory social media literacy workshop in two high schools in Mumbai—32 participants in School A, and 29 participants in School B—the study inquires how the participants respond to the key concepts of social media literacy. To explore the impact of the workshop, the thesis analyses a diverse collection of data sets— material created by participants during the workshop activities comprising of memes, videos and charts; semi-structured interview responses of 9 participants each from both schools; pre and post-workshop survey data; feedback form responses; and the researcher’s fieldwork notes. A reflexive thematic analysis of fieldwork data gives insights in the area of improvements which the participants make in developing social media capabilities and practices when they participate in social media literacy programmes. The findings show evidence that participatory social media literacy workshops enhance participants’ critical analysis, informed participation, resilience, creative self-expression, and citizenship. The study proposes a critical social media literacy conceptual framework both for implementing social media education in schools and also for conducting further social media literacy research in schools in India. The framework has seven inter-related elements that the thesis diagrammatically presents as social media circuit—platform use, information access, platform knowledge, visibility management, information management, creative self-expression, and participation and citizenship. In this framework, the traditional concepts of media literacy—representation, language, audience, and production—have been adapted and integrated into the contemporary networked digital setting. While children, born in the digital age, easily develop the skills for platform use and information access, their development of other areas of the social media circuit need some form of learning, support, and mentoring

Pseudonymous Influencers and Horny \u27Alts\u27 in the Philippines: Media Manipulation Beyond Fake News\u27

This paper explores the limits of the frame “disinformation” when exploring the growing industry of pseudonymous influencers who occasionally campaign for politicians and seed crisis frames. Pseudonymous influencers in the form of parody accounts, meme pages, and romantic love quotes (hugot) accounts, and horny queer alt accounts have been able to evade disinformation interventions such as fact-checking because their media manipulation objectives are less focused on spreading false news and more directed toward signal boosting politically-slanted hashtags or promoting electioneering politicians. By mapping a diverse ecosystem of pseudonymous influencers in the Philippines, our paper contributes an important global South case study to understand the political economy of disinformation and the complicities of influencer industries with disinformation and “dark PR” (Edwards, 2021)

Branding White Saviorism: The Ethics and Irony of Humanitarian Discourse on Instagram

Humanitarian aid work, service trips, and missionary volunteer opportunities are ingrained in much of Western society. Situated at the intersection of visual culture and rhetorical studies, this thesis uses a postcolonial feminist lens to explore how the online discourse of white saviorism came to be accepted and valorized while making invisible the imperial undertones of humanitarian work, and what strategies or efforts are being made toward disrupting this trend. I look at images and posts by current Peace Corps volunteers on Instagram to explore the performance and ethical substance of today’s humanitarian. Additionally, I examine ironic representations of this discourse through the Barbie Savior Instagram account and explore how the use of comic framing both critiques and contributes to this discourse. I contextualize current humanitarian trends and incorporate work from critical whiteness theory to develop the concept of white saviorism. Some of the major communicative shifts in how we visually document humanitarian acts and suffering on the body stem from visual culture scholarship to today’s digital media research. Through this foundation, I explore how service for others is increasingly becoming a personal branding technique for individuals online and this branding both a performance to be viewed by others and a process in which one crafts the self into the role of the white savior. Rather than land acquisition, domination over others, or relieving suffering, today’s white savior is aimed at creating their best image and brand. The morality found in service for others is not in the act of service itself, but in the framing, photographing, and publicly posting that act on social media, which drives today’s white savior. I conclude that decolonization and communication can come together through both academic research and social media practices to name white saviorism for what it is, debunk the humanitarian myths that perpetuate the white savior fantasy, and decenter Western logics within the discourse

When Disinformation Studies Meets Production Studies: Social Identities and Moral Justifications in the Political Trolling Industry

The field of disinformation studies remains relatively silent about questions of identity, motivation, labor, and morality. Drawing from a one-year ethnographic study of disinformation producers employed in digital black ops campaigns in the Philippines, this article proposes that approaches from production studies can address gaps in disinformation research. We argue that approaching disinformation as a culture of production opens inquiry into the social conditions that entice people to this work and the creative industry practices that normalize fake news as a side gig. This article critically reflects on the methodological risks and opportunities of ethnographic research that subverts expectations of the exceptionally villainous troll and instead uses narratives of creative workers’ complicity and collusion to advance holistic social critique and local-level disinformation interventions

Commodification and transfiguration: Socially mediated identity in technology and theology

Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter allow users to create an online identity with preferences, photos including ‘selfies’ and links to other users. These platforms allow users to present and edit their identities or profiles in accordance with their subjective desires and aspirations as well as in response to feedback from others. Defining individual identity online presents new challenges for many individuals. This article explores those challenges and engages the culture and the practices of online identity formation critically. Identity formation online raises profound theological questions, which are explored in relation to Christian theology and its understanding of personhood as defined in relationship. This view originates in the earliest Christian theology as an attempt to understand the Christian God as three identities that are mutually defined by their relationship to each other. The article asks how the experience of identity formation online in social media can challenge and inform a Christian view of the human relationship with the divine

Tracking digital disinformation in the 2019 Philippine Midterm Election

This report was commisioned by Australian National Universit

Architects of Networked Disinformation: Behind the Scenes of Troll Accounts and Fake News Production in the Philippines

No technology has been weaponized at such an unprecedented global scale as social media. Diverse research approaches now attempt to decipher how laptop screens and smartphones around the world are used to manipulate public debate, hijack mainstream media agenda, and influence political agendas. In this report, we: Narrate deep stories of individual workers positioned at different levels of the hierarchy, not to vilify them but to understand their motivations and social backgrounds. Discuss the labor arrangements that underpin networked disinformation in order to reveal the vulnerabilities of professional industries and institutions to political deception work. Discuss the persuasive techniques that architects of networked disinformation deploy in mobilizing populist sentiment to further clients\u27 elite agendas and for their own economic and political gain. List preliminary recommendations aimed at every level of fake news production\u27s hierarchical structure

shrimpychip YouTube

shrimpychip YouTube is a series of YouTube videos that explore the ways in which digital intimacy and capitalism intersect. The performances, designed for YouTube, strategically exploit emotional responses to the body, the home, and notions of privacy in order to highlight the counterintuitive relationships embodied in digital capitalism. The structural aesthetics of social platforms are deliberately employed in my videos to stress the strangeness of these new economic, cultural, social and personal relationships. In documenting myself using the algorithmic structures embedded in these systems, the work functions as a digital archive of actions and perceptions, providing a firsthand account of the body and thoughts as they are mediated by technology. By tirelessly following trends to the point of ridiculousness, the online persona of shrimpychip empathizes with the internet culture while simultaneously highlighting our vulnerability within these systems

Architects of Networked Disinformation: Behind the Scenes of Troll Accounts and Fake News Production in the Philippines

This report aims to develop a critique of the ecological vulnerabilities in the Philippines that enables politicians to recruit highly skilled, if corruptible, disinformation architects to collude with them without industry self-regulatory sanctions and mechanisms in place. This report also identifies large gaps in Philippine campaign finance legislation and digital platform regulation, and proposes preliminary recommendations to address these issues. Finally, this study aims to invite ethical reflection about the process in which ordinary people become complicit in deception work as they aspire for financial gain or seek political and symbolic power. Through the set of preliminary recommendations we present, we open the conversation as to how we can reinvigorate professional ethics, uphold worker justice, and create cross-sectoral advisory groups with lawyers, academics, platform designers, and creative professionals to address our individual, social, and cultural complicity in networked disinformation