Exploring Russian Cyberspace: Digitally-Mediated Collective Action and the Networked Public Sphere

This paper summarizes the major findings of a three-year research project to investigate the Internet's impact on Russian politics, media and society. We employed multiple methods to study online activity: the mapping and study of the structure, communities and content of the blogosphere; an analogous mapping and study of Twitter; content analysis of different media sources using automated and human-based evaluation approaches; and a survey of bloggers; augmented by infrastructure mapping, interviews and background research. We find the emergence of a vibrant and diverse networked public sphere that constitutes an independent alternative to the more tightly controlled offline media and political space, as well as the growing use of digital platforms in social mobilization and civic action. Despite various indirect efforts to shape cyberspace into an environment that is friendlier towards the government, we find that the Russian Internet remains generally open and free, although the current degree of Internet freedom is in no way a prediction of the future of this contested space

The Emergence of Social Media as Boundary Objects in Crisis Response: A Collective Action Perspective

During a series of recent natural catastrophes, social media has played an increasingly prominent and varied role in crisis response, ranging from facilitating the recruitment of volunteers during an earthquake to supporting spiritual recovery after a hurricane. In this paper, we propose that social media, beyond the conventional role of information support, can also function as boundary objects, which are crucial in spanning the boundaries among involved parties that inherently restrict crisis response. Using the 2011 Thailand floods as a case study, we present a conceptual model of the role of social media in enabling a coordinated response to disasters. More specifically, the model presents three distinct processes of emergence and the corresponding boundary objects enabled by the use of social media, which are important in bridging the cognitive, relational and social boundaries among the various entities involved in crisis response

The social media life of climate change: Platforms, publics, and future imaginaries

Social media is a transformative digital technology, collapsing the “six degrees of separation” which have previously characterized many social networks, and breaking down many of the barriers to individuals communicating with each other. Some commentators suggest that this is having profound effects across society, that social media have opened up new channels for public debates and have revolutionized the communication of prominent public issues such as climate change. In this article we provide the first systematic and critical review of the literature on social media and climate change. We highlight three key findings from the literature: a substantial bias toward Twitter studies, the prevalent approaches to researching climate change on social media (publics, themes, and professional communication), and important empirical findings (the use of mainstream information sources, discussions of “settled science,” polarization, and responses to temperature anomalies). Following this, we identify gaps in the existing literature that should be addressed by future research: namely, researchers should consider qualitative studies, visual communication and alternative social media platforms to Twitter. We conclude by arguing for further research that goes beyond a focus on science communication to a deeper examination of how publics imagine climate change and its future role in social life

Performance, Politics and Media: How the 2010 British General Election leadership debates generated ‘talk’ amongst the electorate.

During the British General Election 2010 a major innovation was introduced in part to improve engagement: a series of three live televised leadership debates took place where the leader of each of the three main parties, Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative, answered questions posed by members of the public and subsequently debated issues pertinent to the questions. In this study we consider these potentially ground breaking debates as the kind of event that was likely to generate discussion. We investigate various aspects of the ‘talk’ that emerged as a result of watching the debates. As an exploratory study concerned with situated accounts of the participants experiences we take an interpretive perspective. In this paper we outline the meta-narratives (of talk) associated with the viewing of the leadership debates that were identified, concluding our analysis by suggesting that putting a live debate on television and promoting and positioning it as a major innovation is likely to mean that is how the audience will make sense of it – as a media event

Perspective Scaling and Trait Detection on Social Media Data

abstract: This research start utilizing an efficient sparse inverse covariance matrix (precision matrix) estimation technique to identify a set of highly correlated discriminative perspectives between radical and counter-radical groups. A ranking system has been developed that utilizes ranked perspectives to map Islamic organizations on a set of socio-cultural, political and behavioral scales based on their web site corpus. Simultaneously, a gold standard ranking of these organizations was created through domain experts and compute expert-to-expert agreements and present experimental results comparing the performance of the QUIC based scaling system to another baseline method for organizations. The QUIC based algorithm not only outperforms the baseline methods, but it is also the only system that consistently performs at area expert-level accuracies for all scales. Also, a multi-scale ideological model has been developed and it investigates the correlates of Islamic extremism in Indonesia, Nigeria and UK. This analysis demonstrate that violence does not correlate strongly with broad Muslim theological or sectarian orientations; it shows that religious diversity intolerance is the only consistent and statistically significant ideological correlate of Islamic extremism in these countries, alongside desire for political change in UK and Indonesia, and social change in Nigeria. Next, dynamic issues and communities tracking system based on NMF(Non-negative Matrix Factorization) co-clustering algorithm has been built to better understand the dynamics of virtual communities. The system used between Iran and Saudi Arabia to build and apply a multi-party agent-based model that can demonstrate the role of wedges and spoilers in a complex environment where coalitions are dynamic. Lastly, a visual intelligence platform for tracking the diffusion of online social movements has been developed called LookingGlass to track the geographical footprint, shifting positions and flows of individuals, topics and perspectives between groups. The algorithm utilize large amounts of text collected from a wide variety of organizations’ media outlets to discover their hotly debated topics, and their discriminative perspectives voiced by opposing camps organized into multiple scales. Discriminating perspectives is utilized to classify and map individual Tweeter’s message content to social movements based on the perspectives expressed in their tweets.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

Gaining a better understanding of online polarization by approaching it as a dynamic process

Polarization is often a clich{\'e}, its conceptualization remains approximate and no consensus has been reached so far. Often simply seen as an inevitable result of the use of social networks, polarization nevertheless remains a complex social phenomenon that must be placed in a wider context. To contribute to a better understanding of polarization, we approach it as an evolving process, drawing on a dual expertise in political and data sciences. We compare the polarization process between one mature debate (COVID-19 vaccine) and one emerging debate (Ukraine conflict) at the time of data collection. Both debates are studied on Twitter users, a highly politicized population, and on the French population to provide key elements beyond the traditional US context. This unprecedented analysis confirms that polarization varies over time, through a succession of specific periods, whose existence and duration depend on the maturity of the debate. Importantly, we highlight that polarization is paced by context-related events. Bearing this in mind, we pave the way for a new generation of personalized depolarization strategies, adapted to the context and maturity of debates

Vox and journalistic information: use and criticism of the media in the 2019 General Election campaigns

The general elections held in 2019 gave Vox enough votes to enter the Spanish Parliament as the third most popular political party. The growing role of this radical right-wing party has revealed a complex relationship with the media. The objective of this study is to characterise the relationship between Vox and the media by analysing the party's electoral discourse using quantitative techniques - posts made on Facebook and Twitter (n = 224) - and qualitative techniques, exploring the framing used in the closing rallies of the campaign. References to the media dominated the messages Vox posted on Twitter during the November campaign, whose main purpose was to repost content previously broadcast in traditional media. However, almost one in four of the messages were also critical of at least one media outlet, which also occurred at rallies. The institutionalisation of Vox entails a growing mediatisation of its discourse

Why Information Matters: A Foundation for Resilience

Embracing Change: The Critical Role of Information, a research project by the Internews' Center for Innovation & Learning, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, combines Internews' longstanding effort to highlight the important role ofinformation with Rockefeller's groundbreaking work on resilience. The project focuses on three major aspects:- Building knowledge around the role of information in empowering communities to understand and adapt to different types of change: slow onset, long-term, and rapid onset / disruptive;- Identifying strategies and techniques for strengthening information ecosystems to support behavioral adaptation to disruptive change; and- Disseminating knowledge and principles to individuals, communities, the private sector, policymakers, and other partners so that they can incorporate healthy information ecosystems as a core element of their social resilience strategies

Community engagement for disaster resilience: flood risk management in Jakarta, Indonesia

Understanding dynamics of interactions between community groups and government agencies is crucial to improve community resilience for flood risk reduction through effective community engagement strategies. Overall, a variety of approaches are available, however they are limited in their application. Based on research of a case study in Kampung Melayu Village in Jakarta, further complexity in engaging community emerges in planning policy which requires the relocation of households living in floodplains. This complexity arises in decision-making processes due to barriers to communication. This obstacle highlights the need for a simplified approach for an effective flood risk management which will be further explored in this paper. Qualitative analyses will be undertaken following semi-structured interviews conducted with key actors within government agencies, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and representatives of communities. The analyses involve investigation of barriers and constraints on community engagement in flood risk management, particularly relevant to collaboration mechanism, perception of risk, and technical literacy to flood risk. These analyses result in potential redirection of community consultation strategies to lead to a more effective collaboration among stakeholders in the decision-making processes. As a result, greater effectiveness in plan implementation of flood risk management potentially improves disaster resilience in the future

All the ties that bind. A socio-semantic network analysis of Twitter political discussions

Social media play a crucial role in what contemporary sociological reflections define as a ‘hybrid media system’. Online spaces created by social media platforms resemble global public squares hosting large-scale social networks populated by citizens, political leaders, parties and organizations, journalists, activists and institutions that establish direct interactions and exchange contents in a disintermediated fashion. In the last decade, an increasing number of studies from researchers coming from different disciplines has approached the study of the manifold facets of citizen participation in online political spaces. In most cases, these studies have focused on the investigation of direct relationships amongst political actors. Conversely, relatively less attention has been paid to the study of contents that circulate during online discussions and how their diffusion contributes to building political identities. Even more rarely, the study of social media contents has been investigated in connection with those concerning social interactions amongst online users. To fill in this gap, my thesis work proposes a methodological procedure consisting in a network-based, data-driven approach to both infer communities of users with a similar communication behavior and to extract the most prominent contents discussed within those communities. More specifically, my work focuses on Twitter, a social media platform that is widely used during political debates. Groups of users with a similar retweeting behavior - hereby referred to as discursive communities - are identified starting with the bipartite network of Twitter verified users retweeted by nonverified users. Once the discursive communities are obtained, the corresponding semantic networks are identified by considering the co-occurrences of the hashtags that are present in the tweets sent by their members. The identification of discursive communities and the study of the related semantic networks represent the starting point for exploring more in detail two specific conversations that took place in the Italian Twittersphere: the former occured during the electoral campaign before the 2018 Italian general elections and in the two weeks after Election day; the latter centered on the issue of migration during the period May-November 2019. Regarding the social analysis, the main result of my work is the identification of a behavior-driven picture of discursive communities induced by the retweeting activity of Twitter users, rather than determined by prior information on their political affiliation. Although these communities do not necessarily match the political orientation of their users, they are closely related to the evolution of the Italian political arena. As for the semantic analysis, this work sheds light on the symbolic dimension of partisan dynamics. Different discursive communities are, in fact, characterized by a peculiar conversational dynamics at both the daily and the monthly time-scale. From a purely methodological aspect, semantic networks have been analyzed by employing three (increasingly restrictive) benchmarks. The k-shell decomposition of both filtered and non-filtered semantic networks reveals the presence of a core-periphery structure providing information on the most debated topics within each discursive community and characterizing the communication strategy of the corresponding political coalition