Ethical Dimensions of the Information Society

Internet users\u27 behaviors are dependent on their ethical dimensions. But ethics are quite relative concepts and they have dimensionality over culture, situation, and personal interests. Due to the various ethical dimensions, conflicts arise at an individual level, collective level, and societal level. In this paper, such ethical dimensions in the information society are discussed in the context of conflict dynamics, and how the conflicts affect our societies

Cross-Partisan Discussions on YouTube: Conservatives Talk to Liberals but Liberals Don't Talk to Conservatives

We present the first large-scale measurement study of cross-partisan discussions between liberals and conservatives on YouTube, based on a dataset of 274,241 political videos from 973 channels of US partisan media and 134M comments from 9.3M users over eight months in 2020. Contrary to a simple narrative of echo chambers, we find a surprising amount of cross-talk: most users with at least 10 comments posted at least once on both left-leaning and right-leaning YouTube channels. Cross-talk, however, was not symmetric. Based on the user leaning predicted by a hierarchical attention model, we find that conservatives were much more likely to comment on left-leaning videos than liberals on right-leaning videos. Secondly, YouTube's comment sorting algorithm made cross-partisan comments modestly less visible; for example, comments from conservatives made up 26.3% of all comments on left-leaning videos but just over 20% of the comments were in the top 20 positions. Lastly, using Perspective API's toxicity score as a measure of quality, we find that conservatives were not significantly more toxic than liberals when users directly commented on the content of videos. However, when users replied to comments from other users, we find that cross-partisan replies were more toxic than co-partisan replies on both left-leaning and right-leaning videos, with cross-partisan replies being especially toxic on the replier's home turf.Comment: Accepted into ICWSM 2021, the code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/avalanchesiqi/youtube-crosstal

Text on Instagram as emerging genre: A framework for analyzing discursive communication on a visual platform

Against the backdrop of Instagram’s transforming platform culture, this contribution proposes a framework for analyzing text posts as form of discursive communication. Text posts on the formerly mainly visual platform are understood as both a new social media genre and an emerging social practice. First, the genre is contextualized and grounded by recent evidence of a modal expansion, as well as through the reconstruction of transforming platform affordances. Secondly, based on long-term online ethnographic involvement and data collection, recurring categories and properties are identified within the emerging genre and differentiated in four discursive dimensions: text types, forms of (re)mediation, stance, and tonality. Variations within the dimensions are further distinguished and illustrated and their relevance scrutinized. These discursive dimensions are designed to be used as heuristics and / or analytical categories in combination with various methodological approaches from in-depth qualitative explorations to large-scale automated analyses. Finally, possible broader sociocultural implications of the emerging genre are discussed

“You’re trolling because…” – A Corpus-based Study of Perceived Trolling and Motive Attribution in the Comment Threads of Three British Political Blogs

This paper investigates the linguistically marked motives that participants attribute to those they call trolls in 991 comment threads of three British political blogs. The study is concerned with how these motives affect the discursive construction of trolling and trolls. Another goal of the paper is to examine whether the mainly emotional motives ascribed to trolls in the academic literature correspond with those that the participants attribute to the alleged trolls in the analysed threads. The paper identifies five broad motives ascribed to trolls: emotional/mental health-related/social reasons, financial gain, political beliefs, being employed by a political body, and unspecified political affiliation. It also points out that depending on these motives, trolling and trolls are constructed in various ways. Finally, the study argues that participants attribute motives to trolls not only to explain their behaviour but also to insult them

From healthy communities to toxic debates: Disqus’ changing ideas about comment moderation

This article examines how the commenting platform Disqus changed the way it speaks about commenting and moderation over time. To understand this evolving self-presentation, we used the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to analyse the company’s website and blog between 2007 and 2021. By combining interpretative close-reading approaches with computerised distant-reading procedures, we examined how Disqus tried to advance online discussion and dealt with moderation over time. Our findings show that in the mid-2000s, commenting systems were supposed to help filter and surface valuable contributions to public discourse, while ten years later their focus had shifted to the proclaimed goal of protecting public discourse from contamination with potentially harmful (“toxic”) communication. To achieve this, the company developed new tools and features to keep communities “healthy” and to facilitate and semi-automate active and interventive forms of moderation. This rise of platform interventionism was fostered by a turn towards semantics of urgency in the company’s language to legitimise its actions

Platform Algorithms and Their Effect on Civic and Political Arenas

The purpose of this research was to analyze the ways that social media platform algorithms affect user experience and thus, civic and political arenas. This paper analyzes literature on the topic that will illuminate specific ways that algorithms dictate to the user what is invisible or invisible, considered "fresh" or "irrelevant" and the implications of such digital curating.Master of Science in Information Scienc

Reducing the Burden of Decision in Digital Democracy Applications: A Comparative Analysis of Six Decision-making Software

The more digital democracy applications lower the costs of political participation, allowing ordinary citizens to propose their own policy initiatives, the more they increase the burden of decision for the very same citizens, who are required to debate and vote on many issues. Drawing from this paradox, this article considers how the designers and administrators of six popular decision-making software (DMS) have introduced software features and norms of use whose function is to reduce the aggregate burden of decision for participants in digital democracy initiatives (DDIs). Building upon Andrew Feenberg\u2019s definition of the design code of technology as a technical stabilization of social demands, this article considers how different DMS stabilize the democratic interventions of a plurality of actors, affecting political equality along two axes of the democratic process: the relationship between the exchange of opinions and the synthesis of opinion and the relationship between agenda setting and voting. This article concludes that the design code of digital democracy software reflects an ongoing tension between the need of governing actors to make the democratic process manageable and the pressure of social actors to make it more equal and inclusive

Understanding appropriation of a social media technology to manage chronic illness: The Facebook case

With the rapid increase of social media appropriation globally, there has been a surge in the number of chronically ill adults who leverage social media tools as part of their illness management practice. While numerous studies discuss the potential benefits of appropriation there seem to be limited studies that have explored appropriation of social media by investigating how and why these technologies have been appropriated by these patients. This paper applies an interpretive case study with mixed methods to examine appropriation of Facebook by these cohorts. Our results highlight the patterns of social media appropriation: lurking as passive learning; liking and reacting to show support and; borderless appropriation of multiple social media tools. Among a range of influences, crafting a positive illness identity, communal filtering of misinformation were found to be positive influences and barriers like emotional overload were found to influence appropriation for chronically ill adults on social media

Theorizing an Online Politics: How the Internet is Reconfiguring Political Space, Subjectivity, Participation, and Conflict

This work considers how politics can be reinvigorated through the use of the internet. The argument consists of two parts, the first of which develops a theoretical understanding of politics, meant to differentiate it from the anti-political status quo, which draws on the theories of participatory and agonistic democracy. It then precedes to develop and adapt this understanding of politics to the context of the internet. This is done by breaking politics up into four terrains of contestation which can be configured to be more or less political. Politics requires, first of all, a common place to gather. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s theory of the political realm, I argue that such a political realm could flourish online, as the internet can be used to create a common space that is accessible to all. What is means to be political in this political realm, is approached by drawing on the theories of political subjectivity advanced by Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Rancière. Subjectivity is posited as an empty universal against the identifying impulse of anti-politics. I argue that the internet enhances our ability to become political subjects, as it can enable us to hide our private identities which so often are used by the state to classify us as objects incapable of taking part in politics. What the political subjects do in the political realm consists of participation in speech and action and engaging in conflict. Taking Arendt’s participatory politics as a starting point, I argue that the ability to participate in political debate and decision making is essential for political freedom. This form of freedom can flourish online where the problems of scale and size, which have traditionally been used to argue that representative government is the only viable form of democracy, are less of an issue. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s theory of agonistic pluralism, I posit the embrace of conflict and disagreement as what calls politics into existence. Ultimately I argue that the internet enhances plurality, which allows us to come into contact with a wider range of views, which enables more civil disagreements to play out