Combating extremism in a public sphere at risk: platforms' affordances, dilemmas and opportunities of social media campaigns

The spread of social media highlights controversial changes in the public sphere: new opportunities of access and expression in fact go alongside aberrant phenomena of extremist propaganda. In recent years, civil society institutions and bodies have responded to the wave of hatred and violence on social media through online awareness-raising campaigns aimed at combating ideological propaganda and offering alternative narratives to vulnerable individuals. The essay develops a critical reflection on some of these initiatives in view of social media affordances and the communication strategies adopted by promoters. What is the role of social media campaigns in consideration of the public sphere at risk? What are the limits and criticalities for issuers? What are the potential effects on audiences? Starting with a number of case histories, the contribution highlights that issuers often find themselves facing the conservative dilemma between the possibility of using social media strategically and the risk of legitimising extremist organisations that use the same media channels. The study also reveals that awareness-raising messages, developed in the form of a counter-narrative or alternative narrative, can trigger counterproductive actions such as the backfire effect which reinforce, rather than mitigate, the polarisation between individuals, particularly online, and which thereby invalidate the arguments and critical intentions of the campaigns

Combating extremism in a public sphere at risk: platforms' affordances, dilemmas and opportunities of social media campaigns

The spread of social media highlights controversial changes in the public sphere: new opportunities of access and expression in fact go alongside aberrant phenomena of extremist propaganda. In recent years, civil society institutions and bodies have responded to the wave of hatred and violence on social media through online awareness-raising campaigns aimed at combating ideological propaganda and offering alternative narratives to vulnerable individuals. The essay develops a critical reflection on some of these initiatives in view of social media affordances and the communication strategies adopted by promoters. What is the role of social media campaigns in consideration of the public sphere at risk? What are the limits and criticalities for issuers? What are the potential effects on audiences? Starting with a number of case histories, the contribution highlights that issuers often find themselves facing the conservative dilemma between the possibility of using social media strategically and the risk of legitimising extremist organisations that use the same media channels. The study also reveals that awareness-raising messages, developed in the form of a counter-narrative or alternative narrative, can trigger counterproductive actions such as the backfire effect which reinforce, rather than mitigate, the polarisation between individuals, particularly online, and which thereby invalidate the arguments and critical intentions of the campaigns

QUALITY CONTENTS CREATION IN A COMMONS-BASED PEER PRODUCTION ON LINE ENVIRONMENT: THE IT.WIKIPEDIA EXPERIENCE

The increasing growth of Wikipedia poses many questions about its organizational model and its development as a freeopen knowledge repository. Yochai Benkler describes Wikipedia as a CBPP (commons-based peer production) system: a platform which enables users to easily generate knowledge contents and to manage them collaboratively and on freevoluntary basis. The quality of its output is one of the main concerns related to Wikipedia. How would a CBPP environment guarantee at the same time the openness of its organization and a good level of accreditation? Which aspects of the project have more influence on quality? The paper offers an overview of one of the quality processes in it.wiki (Italian Wikipedia): the Vetrina section (Featured Articles). It also suggests an explanation to quality accreditation issue which questions Benkler’s hypothesis. Thanks to a qualitative analysis carried out through in-depth interviews to Wikipedia users and through a period of ethnographic observation, the paper outlines Vetrina’s organization and the social factors related to quality definition. The goal of the analysis is to give a better understanding of co-generation of contents processes and at the same time it tries to investigate quality assessment in one of the best known open knowledge on line project

Proximity search heuristics for wind farm optimal layout

A heuristic framework for turbine layout optimization in a wind farm is proposed that combines ad-hoc heuristics and mixed-integer linear programming. In our framework, large-scale mixed-integer programming models are used to iteratively refine the current best solution according to the recently-proposed proximity search paradigm. Computational results on very large scale instances involving up to 20,000 potential turbine sites prove the practical viability of the overall approach

Smart working during the Covid19 pandemic in Italy: Twitter narratives in female-centered communities.

While the recent pandemic has accelerated the spread of smart working dynamics in Italy, social media increased their importance as platforms to vehiculate information and points of view and shape public opinion. In the face of extended confinement and a looming health crisis, society has had to fundamentally rethink its daily work practices, social relations, family relationship management, and work-life balance. As a result, the radical and abrupt migration to networked platforms has been a disruptive and unprecedented phenomenon. We aimed to investigate the Twitter debate on smart working during the pandemic by focusing mainly on social concerns and thematics related to work-life balance by addressing the following research questions: RQ1: How was the topic of smart working debated on Twitter during the Covid19 pandemic (2020-2021) in Italy, and which narratives and issues fuelled the debate the most? RQ2: How the public debate has received the Italian government's worklife balance measures?RQ3: Which topics were most discussed by women on smart working? We used Digital Methods to cope with re-proposing data to depict collective phenomena, social transformations, and cultural expressions by analyzing natively digital data on social media platforms. We gathered more than 750.000 tweets between 28 February 2020 and 30 November 2021, and we mapped narratives and communities by using social network analysis. This allowed for the selection of the more intriguing ones to define various sub-datasets on which to conduct a topic modeling study, which aided in understanding more nuanced aspects of the highly fragmented topic. By studying the italian debate, we identified specific communities which debated government measures to help families during the pandemic and discussed digitalization and smart working as a new paradigm for work. We found DAD (Didactic at Distance, aka homeschooling) as a transversal topic that highly affected how people experienced smart working

Adjustable Robust Optimization with Discrete Uncertainty

In this paper, we study adjustable robust optimization (ARO) problems with discrete uncertainty. Under a very general modeling framework, we show that such two- stage robust problems can be exactly reformulated as ARO problems with objective uncertainty only. This reformulation is valid with and without the fixed recourse assumption and is not limited to continuous wait-and-see decision variables unlike most of the existing literature. Additionally, we extend an enumerative algorithm akin to a branch-and-cut scheme for which we study the asymptotic convergence. We discuss how to apply the reformulation on two variants of well-known optimization problems, a facility location problem in which uncertainty may affect the capacity values and a multiple knapsack problem with uncertain weights, and we report extensive computational results demonstrating the effectiveness of the approach