Emphasizing Sportsmanship in Youth Sport

This essay will examine the shift in cultural norms and social expectations surrounding youth sport and how emphases on sportsmanship in youth sport programs can help salvage some of the wholesome values sought after by parents when signing up their children into sport leagues. There is no major overhaul in sight for youth sport organization and certainly little desire to eliminate sports from the young lives of boys and girls across the country, so how can we work to extend some of the virtues of sport craved by parents for their kids? By emphasizing sportsmanship

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

#HashtagSolidarities: Twitter debates and networks in the MENA region

During the course of the so-called Arab Spring, observers were quick to refer to the uprisings as »Facebook revolutions« or »Twitter revolutions«. Although the important role of social media in the 2011 upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is widely acknowledged, its impact on political processes in the region remains contested and contradictory. Rather than looking at social media through a transformation or security lens, the research presented here focused on how debates on three events in the MENA region – the emergence of a video of a rape on Cairo’s Tahrir Square in June 2014, anti-fracking protests in southern Algeria in early 2015, and Saudi Arabia’s military intervention in Yemen in March 2015 – unfolded on Twitter. Closely tracing Twitter debates on these incidents shed light on Twitter’s role in important social and political discussions as well as on the scope and patterns of Twitter networks and digital solidarities. In other words, it highlighted the various ways in which Twitter was used by ordinary people, activists, media outlets, and officials, and in doing so, it provides an idea of the political impact such debates can have via Twitter. The research also revealed that the breadth of opinion on Twitter far exceeds that of traditional media in the MENA region, and the more repressive a context, the more important Twitter becomes. Furthermore, Twitter, in forging digital solidarities, contributes to deepening existing social and political cleavages. That is, the platform is not an autonomous digital space following logics different from those in the physical world. Rather, the dynamics of Twitter are strongly driven by local historical experience, social patterns, and national politics. (Autorenreferat

Invented borders : tension between grassroots patriotism and state-led patriotic campaigns in China

Funding: Chi Zhang is funded by the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (PF20/100052).Patriotic campaigns and mass mobilization draw on existing xenophobic attitudes of the public, reinforcing the ‘us vs. them’ dualism between China and ‘the West’. However, patriotic campaigns are not always top-down, state-led, nor are they always primarily driven by political ideology. Patriotic content appeals to a growing nationalist audience who consumes a mixed feeling of perceived victimization at the hand of foreign aggression and the pride arising from being a Chinese citizen. This paper argues that the profitability of patriotic content circulating on social media exacerbated the tension between market-driven grassroots patriotism and state-led patriotic campaigns. The tension grows out of, and is manifested in, the online popular debate around economically driven, grassroots ‘patriotic’ content that can challenge the state state-led patriotic rhetoric. While the state sometimes strategically co-opts some patriotic contents into its own patriotic narratives, it also delegitimises other undesired ones through labels such as ‘high-level black’ (gaoji hei) or ‘low-level red’ (diji hong). These labels were initially used to differentiate meticulously crafted political satire and parody from incompetent, illogical and vulgar propaganda pieces that unintendedly blemish the state’s patriotic campaigns, but later evolved into an exercise of power to distance the CCP from undesired patriotic content.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

#TrippinWithTarte: The Immaterial Labour of Selling Calculated Authenticity and Glamour on Instagram

Since 2016, beauty brand Tarte Cosmetics has been utilizing social media influencers to advertise their new product launches by bringing them on sponsored brand trips, also known as #TrippinWithTarte. This growing phenomenon within the beauty industry involves brands paying for airfare, lodging and other expenses of influencers in exchange for promotion of the brand and their products while on the trip. Trippin’ with Tarte destinations are often luxury beach locations like Bora Bora, Costa Rica, and Hawaii. While this certainly looks glamorous to the consumer, these trips should not be mistaken for a vacation. While participating in various excursions, influencers are required to post on Instagram regularly, as this is the reason the brands have invited them, and how they make their living. This paper examines the use of “calculated authenticity” (Pooley, 2010, p. 79) by influencers working for Tarte to create an authentic seeming, yet glamourous, persona to their audience of consumers. It will also critically analyze the hidden and precarious labour behind the work of influencers that is often not discussed. A variety of themes are found in various #TrippinWithTarte Instagram posts by multiple beauty influencers to support these points and the intended research questions. Sponsored brand trips are a relatively new advertising tactic that has been taking over social media, as a result, this paper aims to shed light on this particular topic area that is growing into a phenomenon in the influencer marketing industry

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

Tackling food marketing to children in a digital world: trans-disciplinary perspectives. Children’s rights, evidence of impact, methodological challenges, regulatory options and policy implications for the WHO European Region

There is unequivocal evidence that childhood obesity is influenced by marketing of foods and non-alcoholic beverages high in saturated fat, salt and/or free sugars (HFSS), and a core recommendation of the WHO Commission on Ending Childhood Obesity is to reduce children’s exposure to all such marketing. As a result, WHO has called on Member States to introduce restrictions on marketing of HFSS foods to children, covering all media, including digital, and to close any regulatory loopholes. This publication provides up-to-date information on the marketing of foods and non-alcoholic beverages to children and the changes that have occurred in recent years, focusing in particular on the major shift to digital marketing. It examines trends in media use among children, marketing methods in the new digital media landscape and children’s engagement with such marketing. It also considers the impact on children and their ability to counter marketing as well as the implications for children’s rights and digital privacy. Finally the report discusses the policy implications and some of the recent policy action by WHO European Member States

State of the art 2015: a literature review of social media intelligence capabilities for counter-terrorism

Overview This paper is a review of how information and insight can be drawn from open social media sources. It focuses on the specific research techniques that have emerged, the capabilities they provide, the possible insights they offer, and the ethical and legal questions they raise. These techniques are considered relevant and valuable in so far as they can help to maintain public safety by preventing terrorism, preparing for it, protecting the public from it and pursuing its perpetrators. The report also considers how far this can be achieved against the backdrop of radically changing technology and public attitudes towards surveillance. This is an updated version of a 2013 report paper on the same subject, State of the Art. Since 2013, there have been significant changes in social media, how it is used by terrorist groups, and the methods being developed to make sense of it.  The paper is structured as follows: Part 1 is an overview of social media use, focused on how it is used by groups of interest to those involved in counter-terrorism. This includes new sections on trends of social media platforms; and a new section on Islamic State (IS). Part 2 provides an introduction to the key approaches of social media intelligence (henceforth ‘SOCMINT’) for counter-terrorism. Part 3 sets out a series of SOCMINT techniques. For each technique a series of capabilities and insights are considered, the validity and reliability of the method is considered, and how they might be applied to counter-terrorism work explored. Part 4 outlines a number of important legal, ethical and practical considerations when undertaking SOCMINT work

The refugee/migrant crisis dichotomy on twitter: A network and sentiment perspective

Media reports, political statements, and social media debates on the refugee/migrant crisis shape the ways in which people and societies respond to those displaced people arriving at their borders world wide. These current events are framed and experienced as a crisis, entering the media, capturing worldwide political attention, and producing diverse and contradictory discourses and responses. The labels “migrant” and “refugee” are frequently distinguished and conflated in traditional as well as social media when describing the same groups of people. In this paper, we focus on the simultaneous struggle over meaning, legitimization, and power in representations of the refugee crisis, through the specific lens of Twitter. The 369,485 tweets analyzed in this paper cover two days after a picture of Alan Kurdi - a three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea while trying to reach Europe with his family - made global headlines and sparked wide media engagement. More specifically, we investigate the existence of the dichotomy between the “deserving” refugee versus the “undeserving” migrant, as well as the relationship between sentiment expressed in tweets, their influence, and the popularity of Twitter users involved in this dichotomous characterization of the crisis. Our results show that the Twitter debate was predominantly focused on refugee related hashtags and that those tweets containing such hashtags were more positive in tone. Furthermore, we find that popular Twitter users as well as popular tweets are characterized by less emotional intensity and slightly less positivity in the debate, contrary to prior expectations. Co-occurrence networks expose the structure underlying hashtag usage and reveal a refugee-centric core of meaning, yet divergent goals of some prominent users. As social media become increasingly prominent venues for debate over a crisis, how and why people express their opinions offer valuable insights into the nature and direction of these debates