Social Media Around the World

Over the past decade, there has been a burgeoning virtual explosion with social media. However, there are cons along with concerning aspects of the technology-based device; for instance, issues include distractions caused by Internet or text messages, and unreliability. The invited panelists will discuss the current status, issues (privacy, ethics, security), pros/cons, and future of social media. The panelists will also discuss current issues and future directions in North America, Europe, and Asia

Why we post – why people use social media around the world

Nine anthropologists from University College London simultaneously spent 15 months in Brazil, Italy, India, China, Trinidad, Turkey, England and Chile to study how people around the world use social media. Alicia Blum-Ross takes a closer look at the Why We Post project and finds that it demonstrates that what young people do online has meaning, and is consequential to themselves and to others. Alicia is a researcher at the LSE’s Department of Media and Communications. She is interested in youth media production and is part of the Parenting for a Digital Future research project

Crowdbreaks: Tracking Health Trends using Public Social Media Data and Crowdsourcing

In the past decade, tracking health trends using social media data has shown great promise, due to a powerful combination of massive adoption of social media around the world, and increasingly potent hardware and software that enables us to work with these new big data streams. At the same time, many challenging problems have been identified. First, there is often a mismatch between how rapidly online data can change, and how rapidly algorithms are updated, which means that there is limited reusability for algorithms trained on past data as their performance decreases over time. Second, much of the work is focusing on specific issues during a specific past period in time, even though public health institutions would need flexible tools to assess multiple evolving situations in real time. Third, most tools providing such capabilities are proprietary systems with little algorithmic or data transparency, and thus little buy-in from the global public health and research community. Here, we introduce Crowdbreaks, an open platform which allows tracking of health trends by making use of continuous crowdsourced labelling of public social media content. The system is built in a way which automatizes the typical workflow from data collection, filtering, labelling and training of machine learning classifiers and therefore can greatly accelerate the research process in the public health domain. This work introduces the technical aspects of the platform and explores its future use cases

Book Review Solidarity without Borders: Gramscian perspectives on migration and civil society alliances, edited by Óscar García Agustín and Martin Bak Jørgensen

In recent years, migration has emerged as one of the most politically charged issues in global society. From the Bangladeshi government\u27s harsh treatment of thousands of Rohingya families fleeing the Burmese army’s genocidal campaign against them in late summer of 2017, to the Trump administration\u27s decision sustained attack on the new “sanctuary movement” and attempts to further militarize the southern border of the United States, news headlines and social media around the world are filled with images of repression against migrants, alongside impassioned calls for solidarity. Despite its ubiquity, the coverage of these events tends to remain rather superficial, making Solidarity without Borders a timely work that succeeds in unpacking some of the underlying issues related to migration and the festering crisis of global capitalism, and hopefully contributing to the development of a more powerful response from the left

Countering or Reinforcing (Gendered) Inequalities? Ramifications of the Covid-19 Pandemic in and Through Media

The Covid-19 pandemic reveals and exacerbates inequalities in various ways. Gender inequalities—intertwined with intersectional differences along class, ethnicity, or origin—are highly visible. Legacy and social media around the world cover and perform these issues as much as they conceal them. On the one hand, they have the ability to give those affected a voice and to intervene in public discourse. On the other hand, they reproduce stereotypes and imbalances and rely on gendered (infra)structures. This thematic issue explores the entanglement between empowering and restricting forms of media discourse and media practices. Ten contributions from different world regions, which analyze various media, and involve diverse methodological approaches, make visible reproductions of established power structures as well as new visibilities and counter-practices of marginalized groups. In sum, they generate a complex body of knowledge about global and local inequalities and the ramifications of the pandemic in and through media

Countering or Reinforcing (Gendered) Inequalities? Ramifications of the Covid-19 Pandemic in and Through Media

The Covid-19 pandemic reveals and exacerbates inequalities in various ways. Gender inequalities - intertwined with intersectional differences along class, ethnicity, or origin - are highly visible. Legacy and social media around the world cover and perform these issues as much as they conceal them. On the one hand, they have the ability to give those affected a voice and to intervene in public discourse. On the other hand, they reproduce stereotypes and imbalances and rely on gendered (infra)structures. This thematic issue explores the entanglement between empowering and restricting forms of media discourse and media practices. Ten contributions from different world regions, which analyze various media, and involve diverse methodological approaches, make visible reproductions of established power structures as well as new visibilities and counter-practices of marginalized groups. In sum, they generate a complex body of knowledge about global and local inequalities and the ramifications of the pandemic in and through media

Factors Influencing Perceptions Toward Social Networking Websites in China

Based on an online national survey of 503 respondents, this study empirically investigates factors influencing perceptions toward social networking websites (SNWs) in China. More specifically, user demographics and media\ud characteristics were examined. While income was found to be a significant predictor of users’ attitude toward SNWs, gender, age, educational level and marital status were insignificant, suggesting that demographic divides may be\ud diminishing when it comes to online social media in China. Both perceived risk and enjoyment were found to have significant positive effects. Managerial implications were discussed

Vírus Nipah: e o Brasil neste surto?

Humanity has witnessed countless epidemics and pandemics throughout its history, events like these are understood as something extremely challenging, and which undoubtedly are in line with complex concepts and contexts that subsidize communication instabilities and, sometimes, collective panic. In parallel, from a unique health perspective, the impacts of human activity on the environment, opportunely lead to promoting and potentially dangerous mechanisms for the emergence of diseases with pandemic potential. In this tension of nature, human beings and animal life meet, which are mutually affected. It is believed that mammals and birds host around 1.7 million unknown viruses, and of this total, around 540,000 - 850,000 have the ability to infect humans. Within this perspective, recent cases of Nipah virus infection in India were reported in newspapers and social media around the world, evoking a resurgent primitive demand for fear among people about the potential of a new global threat.A humanidade vem presenciando inúmeras epidemias e pandemias ao longo de sua história, eventos como estes são entendidos como algo extremamente desafiador, e que indubitavelmente coadunam com conceitos e contextos complexos que subsidiam instabilidades comunicacionais e, por vezes, em pânico coletivo. Em paralelo, sob uma perspectiva de saúde única, os impactos da atividade humana sobre o meio ambiente, conduzem oportunamente mecanismos promotores e potencialmente perigosos para o surgimento de doenças com potencial pandêmico. Nessa tensão da natureza, encontram-se o ser humano e a vida animal, os quais são afetados mutuamente. Acredita-se que mamíferos e aves hospedem cerca de 1,7 milhão de vírus ainda não conhecidos, e desse total, cerca de 540 mil - 850 mil, com a capacidade de infectar humanos. Dentro dessa perspectiva, recentes casos de infeção por vírus Nipah ocorridos na Índia, foram noticiados em jornais e mídias sociais de todo o mundo, evocando uma ressurgente demanda primitiva de medo nas pessoas sobre a potencialidade de uma nova ameaça global

Vírus Nipah: e o Brasil neste surto?

Humanity has witnessed countless epidemics and pandemics throughout its history, events like these are understood as something extremely challenging, and which undoubtedly are in line with complex concepts and contexts that subsidize communication instabilities and, sometimes, collective panic. In parallel, from a unique health perspective, the impacts of human activity on the environment, opportunely lead to promoting and potentially dangerous mechanisms for the emergence of diseases with pandemic potential. In this tension of nature, human beings and animal life meet, which are mutually affected. It is believed that mammals and birds host around 1.7 million unknown viruses, and of this total, around 540,000 - 850,000 have the ability to infect humans. Within this perspective, recent cases of Nipah virus infection in India were reported in newspapers and social media around the world, evoking a resurgent primitive demand for fear among people about the potential of a new global threat.A humanidade vem presenciando inúmeras epidemias e pandemias ao longo de sua história, eventos como estes são entendidos como algo extremamente desafiador, e que indubitavelmente coadunam com conceitos e contextos complexos que subsidiam instabilidades comunicacionais e, por vezes, em pânico coletivo. Em paralelo, sob uma perspectiva de saúde única, os impactos da atividade humana sobre o meio ambiente, conduzem oportunamente mecanismos promotores e potencialmente perigosos para o surgimento de doenças com potencial pandêmico. Nessa tensão da natureza, encontram-se o ser humano e a vida animal, os quais são afetados mutuamente. Acredita-se que mamíferos e aves hospedem cerca de 1,7 milhão de vírus ainda não conhecidos, e desse total, cerca de 540 mil - 850 mil, com a capacidade de infectar humanos. Dentro dessa perspectiva, recentes casos de infeção por vírus Nipah ocorridos na Índia, foram noticiados em jornais e mídias sociais de todo o mundo, evocando uma ressurgente demanda primitiva de medo nas pessoas sobre a potencialidade de uma nova ameaça global

Collecting a corpus of Dutch SMS

In this paper we present the first freely available corpus of Dutch text messages containing data originating from the Netherlands and Flanders. This corpus has been collected in the framework of the SoNaR project and constitutes a viable part of this 500-million-word corpus. About 53,000 text messages were collected on a large scale, based on voluntary donations. These messages will be distributed as such. In this paper we focus on the data collection processes involved and after studying the effect of media coverage we show that especially free publicity in newspapers and on social media networks results in more contributions. All SMS are provided with metadata information. Looking at the composition of the corpus, it becomes visible that a small number of people have contributed a large amount of data, in total 272 people have contributed to the corpus during three months. The number of women contributing to the corpus is larger than the number of men, but male contributors submitted larger amounts of data. This corpus will be of paramount importance for sociolinguistic research and normalisation studies