Mobilizing Diasporas: Understanding Transnational Relief Efforts in the Age of Social Media

Social media have reconfigured the international relief landscape by creating discursive spaces for grassroots activism. In this study, I use semantic networks to systematically investigate the role of social media in mobilizing a new actor – diasporas – for providing humanitarian aid. I visualize the structure of conversations among Ukrainian diaspora communities to illuminate the social contexts for two sets of behaviors: political advocacy, the traditional pathway for diaspora engagement with their country of origin; and humanitarian relief, an emergent collective behavior in which grassroots actors supply aid to their homeland directly, bypassing institutional brokers such as international nonprofit organizations. Leveraging data from online discussions within ten diaspora communities on Facebook, I demonstrate how social media facilitate diasporic activism by reinforcing horizontal ties between benefactors and affected communities. This comparative case study contributes to a deeper understanding of diasporic involvement in relief in the age of social media

Translating Protest: Networked Diasporas and Transnational Mobilisation in Ukraine’s Euromaidan Protests

This study combines ethnographic and computational approaches to critically examine what gets 'lost in translation' when studying intersecting social contexts of diasporic mobilisation around homeland politics. Considering how Ukrainians living in the U.S. engaged with homeland politics during the Euromaidan protests, we map transnational diasporic mobilisation, shining light on the various material, discursive, and affective connections that emerged in the process. We find that Euromaidan protests were a point of passage – and thus, convergence – between the often incongruous notions of national identity across regional as well as national territorial borders. Translating the local meanings and cultural codes associated with the Euromaidan protests, diasporas sought to amplify them to reach global audiences through their use of the grammars and vocabularies of socially mediated protest. Situating our inquiry in networked diasporic discourses and building on a decolonial understanding of Ukraine's history and politics, our approach illuminates the possibilities for studying transnational mobilisation and activism as a heterogeneous network of publics, discourses, and identity practices

Online Privacy Bill: Exposure Draft - Submission to the Attorney General’s Department

This submission refers to the Online Privacy Bill Exposure Draft, where the OP Code has identified children as one of the key vulnerable groups especially concerned with social media services. The three scholars named in the submission have recently secured a funded research project with the eSafety Commissioner to explore further the key issues identified in this document. Within the next 12 to 18 months, the research data from this project will be available to clearly articulate the emerging issues for young Australians and their parents or carers who engage with social media. The project is a co-designed approach to place the voice of young Australians and their parents/carers at the centre of the findings while prioritising a shared responsibility for their online safety. Two members of the project research team also attended the Attorney-General Department’s Consultation - Privacy Protections for Children held on the 19th November, 2021

Interval-censored Transformer Hawkes: Detecting Information Operations using the Reaction of Social Systems

Social media is being increasingly weaponized by state-backed actors to elicit reactions, push narratives and sway public opinion. These are known as Information Operations (IO). The covert nature of IO makes their detection difficult. This is further amplified by missing data due to the user and content removal and privacy requirements. This work advances the hypothesis that the very reactions that Information Operations seek to elicit within the target social systems can be used to detect them. We propose an Interval-censored Transformer Hawkes (IC-TH) architecture and a novel data encoding scheme to account for both observed and missing data. We derive a novel log-likelihood function that we deploy together with a contrastive learning procedure. We showcase the performance of IC-TH on three real-world Twitter datasets and two learning tasks: future popularity prediction and item category prediction. The latter is particularly significant. Using the retweeting timing and patterns solely, we can predict the category of YouTube videos, guess whether news publishers are reputable or controversial and, most importantly, identify state-backed IO agent accounts. Additional qualitative investigations uncover that the automatically discovered clusters of Russian-backed agents appear to coordinate their behavior, activating simultaneously to push specific narratives

TRACE: A Stigmergic Crowdsourcing Platform for Intelligence Analysis

Crowdsourcing has become a frequently adopted approach to solving various tasks from conducting surveys to designing products. In the field of reasoning-support, however, crowdsourcing-related research and application have not been extensively implemented. Reasoning-support is essential in intelligence analysis to help analysts mitigate various cognitive biases, enhance deliberation, and improve report writing. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to designing a crowdsourcing platform that facilitates stigmergic coordination, awareness, and communication for intelligence analysis. We have partly materialized our proposal in the form of a crowdsourcing system which supports intelligence analysis: TRACE (Trackable Reasoning and Analysis for Collaboration and Evaluation). We introduce several stigmergic approaches integrated into TRACE and discuss the potential experimentation of these approaches. We also explain the design implications for further development of TRACE and similar crowdsourcing systems to support reasoning

Battlefront Assemblages: Civic Participation in the Age of Mediatized Warfare

Digital war is an emerging field, in which scholars seek to comprehend the structural changes brought about by the advancement of digital media to the ways that contemporary wars are fought, represented, made sense of, and remembered. One of the most interesting changes in the conduct of mediatized warfare is the emergence of unprecedented participatory opportunities afforded by the online media platforms. As audiences and consumers have become the networked publics of the digital age, some of them found innovative ways to use digital media for nonviolent, yet productive resistance to the military conflict. Straddling sociology, media studies, and military studies, I shed light on affordances for civic participation in military conflicts. The ongoing Ukrainian conflict, which started in 2014 with the annexation of the Crimean peninsula, provides a rich empirical context to explore civic participation in mediatized warfare. The dissertation consists of a theory chapter and three empirical chapters that were published as peer-reviewed journal articles. Each of the chapters answers one of the three research questions. How are digital media used to enable/foster/facilitate public participation in a military conflict? How do mediated narratives mobilize networked publics to resist impending occupation? Finally, what are the mechanisms of transnational participation in military campaigns in the digital age? To answer these questions, the dissertation triangulates ethnographic and computational methods. Specifically, I make use of infrastructure ethnography, which includes 28 semi- structured interviews, narrative analysis, social network analysis, and semantic mapping. On the micro-level, I illuminate the specific features of digitally-mediated environments that enable public participation in military conflicts. On the meso-level, I analyze networked communities of people who use digital media to resist the Russian occupation by supporting the Ukrainian army. On the macro-level, I shed light on diasporas as transnational actors that challenge the status quo of the military conflict in Ukraine. Mediating a connection between personal and political, between local and global, and between symbolic and material, these objects of analysis – affordances, local communities of volunteers, and international humanitarian networks – can each be viewed as sociotechnical assemblages nested within a larger battlefront assemblage. This project adds a unique dimension to an emerging body of literature that examines the phenomena of mediatization and platformization by theorizing on the role that battlefront assemblages play in the context of a mediatized military conflict. Summarizing the key contribution of this dissertation to the field of media studies in general, and digital war in particular, I demonstrate that mediatized warfare operates through surveillance assemblages, and power is reconfigured, reconstituted and negotiated within these assemblages

CROWDFUNDING IN REMOTE CONFLICTS: BOUNDING THE HYPERCONNECTED BATTLEFIELDS

Recent political conflicts in Eastern Europe, including the armed conflicts in Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Belarus have demonstrated that the scope of digitally mediated participation in war-related activities goes far beyond the information domain. In this context, a rapidly emerging sociomaterial practice is the use of crowdfunding platforms to provide aid to the conflict-affected military and civilian populations. Situating the inquiry in this empirical context, we ask: how do crowdfunding platforms constitute relationships between spectators and the hyperconnected battlefield, and what is the role of remote human suffering therein? Drawing on data craft, a theory/method package for critical internet studies, we investigate two sets of boundary objects that mediate the connection between zones of conflict and their remote participants. We find that conflict-related crowdfunding is a new form of identity proclamation with regard to the users’ positionality, which creates the conditions of possibility for post-conflict reconstruction and a future after the military conflict. This suggests that representations of distant human suffering are not the only mediators between spectators and the hyperconnected battlefield, adding a new research direction to our understanding of values that drive remote humanitarianism in the digital age

EXPLORING NETWORKED IDENTITY AND TRANSNATIONAL MOBILIZATION IN UKRAINE’S EUROMAIDAN PROTEST

Social media are a prominent space for diasporic mobilization and activism, opening new avenues for studying transnational communities living outside of their countries of origin. This study uses a hybrid methodological approach to consider how Ukrainians living in the United States engaged with homeland politics during the 2013-2014 Euromaidan protest and how their use of social media intervened in their transnational protest politics. This study contributes to the broader scholarship on studying transnational mediated protest participation by examining a case of diasporic mobilization of the Ukrainian community in the United States. Triangulating semantic mapping data from online diasporic communities on Facebook with in-depth interviews, we show how diaspora members engaged in the protest despite distance and how their activity and tactical decisions were mediated by social networks. We specifically examine how diasporic personal networks and networked technologies enmesh into a set of hybrid networked practices, circumscribing how Ukrainian Americans interpret political engagement and how they strategically use the affordances of social media for protest participation

Exploring networked identity and transnational mobilization in Ukraine's Euromaidan protests

This study combines ethnographic and computational approaches to critically examine what gets 'lost in translation' when studying intersecting social contexts of diasporic mobilisation around homeland politics. Considering how Ukrainians living in the U.S. engaged with homeland politics during the Euromaidan protests, we map transnational diasporic mobilisation, shining light on the various material, discursive, and affective connections that emerged in the process. We find that Euromaidan protests were a point of passage – and thus, convergence – between the often incongruous notions of national identity across regional as well as national territorial borders. Translating the local meanings and cultural codes associated with the Euromaidan protests, diasporas sought to amplify them to reach global audiences through their use of the grammars and vocabularies of socially mediated protest. Situating our inquiry in networked diasporic discourses and building on a decolonial understanding of Ukraine's history and politics, our approach illuminates the possibilities for studying transnational mobilisation and activism as a heterogeneous network of publics, discourses, and identity practices