It’s the Methodology For Me: A Systematic Review of Early Approaches to Studying TikTok

Research on TikTok has grown along with the app’s rapidly rising global popularity. In this systematic review, we investigate 58 articles examining TikTok, its users, and its content. Focusing on articles published in journals and proceedings across the domains of human-computer interaction, communication, and other related disciplines, we analyze the methods being used to study TikTok, as well as ethical considerations. Based on our analysis, we found that research on TikTok tends to use content analysis as their primary method and mainly focus on user behavior and culture, effects of use, the platform’s policies and governance, and very few articles discuss the ethical implications of collecting and analyzing such data. Additionally, most studies employ traditional forms of data collection when the affordances of TikTok tend to differ from other social media platforms. We conclude with a discussion about possible future directions and contribute to ongoing conversations about ethics and social media data

Social media metrics for new research evaluation

This chapter approaches, both from a theoretical and practical perspective, the most important principles and conceptual frameworks that can be considered in the application of social media metrics for scientific evaluation. We propose conceptually valid uses for social media metrics in research evaluation. The chapter discusses frameworks and uses of these metrics as well as principles and recommendations for the consideration and application of current (and potentially new) metrics in research evaluation.Comment: Forthcoming in Glanzel, W., Moed, H.F., Schmoch U., Thelwall, M. (2018). Springer Handbook of Science and Technology Indicators. Springe

Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge

The intersection of scholarly communication librarianship and open education offers a unique opportunity to expand knowledge of scholarly communication topics in both education and practice. Open resources can address the gap in teaching timely and critical scholarly communication topics—copyright in teaching and research environments, academic publishing, emerging modes of scholarship, impact measurement—while increasing access to resources and equitable participation in education and scholarly communication. Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge is an open textbook and practitioner’s guide that collects theory, practice, and case studies from nearly 80 experts in scholarly communication and open education. Divided into three parts: *What is Scholarly Communication? *Scholarly Communication and Open Culture *Voices from the Field: Perspectives, Intersections, and Case Studies The book delves into the economic, social, policy, and legal aspects of scholarly communication as well as open access, open data, open education, and open science and infrastructure. Practitioners provide insight into the relationship between university presses and academic libraries, defining collection development as operational scholarly communication, and promotion and tenure and the challenge for open access. Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge is a thorough guide meant to increase instruction on scholarly communication and open education issues and practices so library workers can continue to meet the changing needs of students and faculty. It is also a political statement about the future to which we aspire and a challenge to the industrial, commercial, capitalistic tendencies encroaching on higher education. Students, readers, educators, and adaptors of this resource can find and embrace these themes throughout the text and embody them in their work

Social impact in social media: A new method to evaluate the social impact of research

The social impact of research has usually been analysed through the scientific outcomes produced under the auspices of the research. The growth of scholarly content in social media and the use of altmetrics by researchers to track their work facilitate the advancement in evaluating the impact of research. However, there is a gap in the identification of evidence of the social impact in terms of what citizens are sharing on their social media platforms. This article applies a social impact in social media methodology (SISM) to identify quantitative and qualitative evidence of the potential or real social impact of research shared on social media, specifically on Twitter and Facebook. We define the social impact coverage ratio (SICOR) to identify the percentage of tweets and Facebook posts providing information about potential or actual social impact in relation to the total amount of social media data found related to specific research projects. We selected 10 projects in different fields of knowledge to calculate the SICOR, and the results indicate that 0.43% of the tweets and Facebook posts collected provide linkages with information about social impact. However, our analysis indicates that some projects have a high percentage (4.98%) and others have no evidence of social impact shared in social media. Examples of quantitative and qualitative evidence of social impact are provided to illustrate these results. A general finding is that novel evidences of social impact of research can be found in social media, becoming relevant platforms for scientists to spread quantitative and qualitative evidence of social impact in social media to capture the interest of citizens. Thus, social media users are showed to be intermediaries making visible and assessing evidence of social impact

Misinformation Mayhem: Social Media Platforms’ Efforts to Combat Medical and Political Misinformation

Social media platforms today are playing an ever-expanding role in shaping the contours of today’s information ecosystem. The events of recent months have driven home this development, as the platforms have shouldered the burden and attempted to rise to the challenge of ensuring that the public is informed – and not misinformed – about matters affecting our democratic institutions in the context of our elections, as well as about matters affecting our very health and lives in the context of the pandemic. This Article examines the extensive role recently assumed by social media platforms in the marketplace of ideas in the online sphere, with an emphasis on their efforts to combat medical misinformation in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as their efforts to combat false political speech in the 2020 election cycle. In the context of medical misinformation surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, this Article analyzes the extensive measures undertaken by the major social media platforms to combat such misinformation. In the context of misinformation in the political sphere, this Article examines the distinctive problems brought about by the microtargeting of political speech and by false political ads on social media in recent years, and the measures undertaken by major social media companies to address such problems. In both contexts, this Article examines the extent to which such measures are compatible with First Amendment substantive and procedural values. Social media platforms are essentially attempting to address today’s serious problems alone, in the absence of federal or state regulation or guidance in the United States. Despite the major problems caused by Russian interference in our 2016 elections, the U.S. has failed to enact regulations prohibiting false or misleading political advertising on social media – whether originating from foreign sources or domestic ones – because of First Amendment, legislative, and political impediments to such regulation. And the federal government has failed miserably in its efforts to combat COVID-19 or the medical misinformation that has contributed to the spread of the virus in the U.S. All of this essentially leaves us (in the United States, at least) solely in the hands, and at the mercy, of the platforms themselves, to regulate our information ecosystem (or not), as they see fit. The dire problems brought about by medical and political misinformation online in recent months and years have ushered in a sea change in the platforms’ attitudes and approaches toward regulating content online. In recent months, for example, Twitter has evolved from being the non-interventionist “free speech wing of the free speech party” to designing and operating an immense operation for regulating speech on its platform – epitomized by its recent removal and labeling of President Donald Trump’s (and Donald Trump, Jr.’s) misleading tweets. Facebook for its part has evolved from being a notorious haven for fake news in the 2016 election cycle to standing up an extensive global network of independent fact-checkers to remove and label millions of posts on its platform – including by removing a post from President Trump’s campaign account, as well as by labeling 90 million such posts in March and April 2020, involving false or misleading medical information in the context of the pandemic. Google for its part has abandoned its hands-off approach to its search algorithm results and has committed to removing false political content in the context of the 2020 election and to serving up prominent information by trusted health authorities in response to COVID-19 related searches on its platforms. These approaches undertaken by the major social media platforms are generally consistent with First Amendment values, both the substantive values in terms of what constitutes protected and unprotected speech, and the procedural values, in terms of process accorded to users whose speech is restricted or otherwise subject to action by the platforms. The platforms have removed speech that is likely to lead to imminent harm and have generally been more aggressive in responding to medical misinformation than political misinformation. This approach tracks First Amendment substantive values, which accord lesser protection for false and misleading claims regarding medical information than for false and misleading political claims. The platforms’ approaches generally adhere to First Amendment procedural values as well, including by specifying precise and narrow categories of what speech is prohibited, providing clear notice to speakers who violate their rules regarding speech, applying their rules consistently, and according an opportunity for affected speakers to appeal adverse decisions regarding their content. While the major social media platforms’ intervention in the online marketplace of ideas is not without its problems and not without its critics, this Article contends that this trend is by and large a salutary development – and one that is welcomed by the vast majority of Americans and that has brought about measurable improvements in the online information ecosystem. Recent surveys and studies show that such efforts are welcomed by Americans and are moderately effective in reducing the spread of misinformation and in improving the accuracy of beliefs of members of the public. In the absence of effective regulatory measures in the United States to combat medical and political misinformation online, social media companies should be encouraged to continue to experiment with developing and deploying even more effective measures to combat such misinformation, consistent with our First Amendment substantive and procedural values

Alternative Venture Capital: The New Unicorn Investors

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has promulgated new rules designed to harmonize and improve the patchwork exempt offering framework, protect investors and facilitate capital formation. Additionally, the U.S. Department of Labor announced that the fiduciary responsibility provisions of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 do not prohibit fiduciaries of 401(k) and other individual account plans from investing in, and undertaking exposure to, private equity investments. These policies address the concern that retail investors are missing out on investment opportunities, due to fewer listed firms and initial public offerings, the greater role of the private market in raising money, and the rise in the number of unicorn firms. This Article details these concerns, assesses the policy changes within the broader context of private capital formation, and argues that some of them not only fail to provide a remedy, but may also induce greater harm and should not have been undertaken. Most importantly, policymakers must consider the rise of alternative venture capital ( AVC ) investors, and the ways in which those investors affect a unicorn firm, its capital needs, and the lack of disclosure of information, all of which affect future investors. Finally, this Article argues that to adequately protect retail investors, AVC investors ought to be considered when formulating policy decisions relating to investor protection and the capital formation needs of private companies. Increasingly seems like we are entering a new reality in Unicorn land. If you have raised more than $250mm & are NOT public, the presumption is you are losing WAY too much money, and you probably have sh[***]y unit economics. There was a theory that the public and private markets for tech company shares had become disconnected, that venture capitalists and (particularly) non-traditional venture investors like mutual funds and (most particularly) SoftBank were now willing to pay higher prices than the public markets were, and that when those private investors eventually tried to sell to the public markets they\u27d run into trouble

Mythical Unicorns and How to Find Them: The Disclosure Revolution

Our federal and state securities laws are centered around two vital requirements for economic growth: capital formation and investor protection. Section 12(g) sits in the middle of these two concepts by attempting to ensure the latter without jeopardizing the former. However, since the passage of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (“JOBS”) Act in 2012, exempt capital formation in the unregulated private market has increased dramatically. Companies raise nearly limitless capital from a wide range of sources while remaining outside of the public reporting regime. The overall shift has led to worse corporate governance outcomes, a decline in IPO volume and quality, and has major implications for employees in both their investing and employment decisions. Accompanying these changes is the exposure of an increasing amount of the public’s capital to riskier investments in a sphere where information is unavailable in the best of times and deliberately hidden in the worst. Based on a hand selected data set compiled from public filings, we have found that these companies have an increasing number of shareholders prior to their IPOs and that a number of these companies have used investment structures to artificially reduce this number to take advantage of a JOBS Act-created loophole. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) indicated its intention to narrow the disclosure gap between publicly-listed and privately-held companies. It recently embarked upon a formative rulemaking process that would require more disclosures from large private companies that are valued at over $1 billion – “unicorns.” The SEC’s initiative is likely to meet with a mixed reaction from the investor community. Despite this latent opposition, regulatory action in this area is gaining momentum worldwide. This Article gives recommendations on reforms to Section 12(g) in order to bring more companies into the public reporting sphere without jeopardizing the capital formation process

How Much Research Shared On Facebook Happens Outside Of Public Pages And Groups? A Comparison of Public and Private Online Activity around PLOS ONE Papers

Despite its undisputed position as the biggest social media platform, Facebook has never entered the main stage of altmetrics research. In this study, we argue that the lack of attention by altmetrics researchers is due, in part, to the challenges in collecting Facebook data regarding activity that takes place outside of public pages and groups. We present a new method of collecting aggregate counts of shares, reactions, and comments across the platform—including users’ personal timelines—and use it to gather data for all articles published between 2015 to 2017 in the journal PLOS ONE. We compare the gathered data with altmetrics collected and aggregated by Altmetric. The results show that 58.7% of papers shared on Facebook happen outside of public spaces and that, when collecting all shares, the volume of activity approximates patterns of engagement previously only observed for Twitter. Both results suggest that the role and impact of Facebook as a medium for science and scholarly communication has been underestimated. Furthermore, they emphasize the importance of openness and transparency around the collection and aggregation of altmetrics

Mainstream News Articles Co-Shared with Fake News Buttress Misinformation Narratives

Most prior and current research examining misinformation spread on social media focuses on reports published by 'fake' news sources. These approaches fail to capture another potential form of misinformation with a much larger audience: factual news from mainstream sources ('real' news) repurposed to promote false or misleading narratives. We operationalize narratives using an existing unsupervised NLP technique and examine the narratives present in misinformation content. We find that certain articles from reliable outlets are shared by a disproportionate number of users who also shared fake news on Twitter. We consider these 'real' news articles to be co-shared with fake news. We show that co-shared articles contain existing misinformation narratives at a significantly higher rate than articles from the same reliable outlets that are not co-shared with fake news. This holds true even when articles are chosen following strict criteria of reliability for the outlets and after accounting for the alternative explanation of partisan curation of articles. For example, we observe that a recent article published by The Washington Post titled "Vaccinated people now make up a majority of COVID deaths" was disproportionately shared by Twitter users with a history of sharing anti-vaccine false news reports. Our findings suggest a strategic repurposing of mainstream news by conveyors of misinformation as a way to enhance the reach and persuasiveness of misleading narratives. We also conduct a comprehensive case study to help highlight how such repurposing can happen on Twitter as a consequence of the inclusion of particular narratives in the framing of mainstream news