Patterns of media coverage repeated in online abuse on high-profile criminal cases

What relationship do the mainstream media have with online abuse on high-profile criminal cases? This article hopes to make a start at answering this question by examining tweets containing the #McCann hashtag, utilised by a highly engaged community of users to comment on all matters related to the disappearance of British child Madeleine McCann. On #McCann, the child’s parents and other players are often singled out as the perpetrators of her disappearance and other crimes, in a blend of harassment, defamation and insults with conspiracy theories, disinformation and a strong anti-establishment vein typical of the posttruth era. Through an experimental digital ethnography blending elements of content and discourse analysis, this research has observed the #McCann conversation and analysed 500 tweets with the hashtag, observing that some of the most offensive theories posted by users on Twitter reprised themes seen in the mainstream media at the time of the disappearance, which resulted in defamation lawsuits by the McCanns and in complaints about unethical reporting at the Leveson Inquiry. This raises questions about the mainstream media’s responsibility and duty of care towards people they report on in the digital age, and showcases a symbiotic yet diffident relationship between anti-establishment online users and traditional news media

Negative emotions set in motion : the continued relevance of #GamerGate

This chapter aims at making sense of the #GamerGate (#GG) online harassment campaign that was particularly active in 2014–2015 but to this day continues to produce hateful speech against certain ideologies and minorities in gaming culture. The campaign was especially successful at building online visibility through harassment, and the affective resonances of the issues it raised have since translated into general online campaigning how-to’s, financial earnings, and even political action outside of the gaming sphere. Although the primary breeding ground for this movement was 4chan (and later, 8chan), it only reached public awareness and visibility – hence, effectiveness – through Twitter and, to a lesser extent, through YouTube. In order to understand the emotional charge and political relevance of this campaign, we rely on both quantitative and qualitative activity analyses of the Twitter users that use the hashtag #GamerGate between 2014 and 2019. In addition to analyzing who were the most active tweeters and what kind of resonance their tweets elicited, we looked into the emotional qualities of their communication. The communication strategies of #GG tweeters took advantage of the language and cultural references of the target demographic to drive a set of topics into public discourse and, further, to political activism. This discourse utilized a combination of affective modes, based mainly on resentment and schadenfreude, that we see echoing in many places on the internet. In the end, we argue that while #GG may have been only one instance of a campaign with harassment elements, the sentiments it cultivated and amplified as well as its operational logics have since been successfully employed in many similar online movements, including the current political campaigning associated with the so-called alt-right.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

ICT Changes Everything! But Who Changes ICT?

Information and communication technology (ICT) has a changing power and digitalization is gradually changing society in all aspects of life. Across the western world, men are in majority in the ICT industry, thus, the computer programs that change “everything” are most often made by men. Unless questioned, this male dominance can be perceived as a “norm” and becomes invisible. Against this background, this paper will provide three examples of how a feminist gaze can contribute to raise important questions and produce an awareness of how exclusion mechanisms have produce a highly homosocial tendency in design of ICT systems in the western world. The three cases illustrate how a feminist gaze leading to feminist interventions can make a difference in various ways. The first author presents a case study of a pilot for involving programming in public education in secondary schools in Norway, where a complete lack of gender awareness makes this an offer for boys in most schools. Author two presents a case study comparing the situation in the IT business in the UK and India, finding challenges not only to the situation in the western world, but also to white western feminism. Author three discusses alternative ways of involving women in ICT work, through practices of feminist pedagogy, emphasizing hands-on work