DANKMEMES @ EVALITA 2020: The Memeing of Life: Memes, Multimodality and Politics

DANKMEMES is a shared task proposed for the 2020 EVALITA campaign, focusing on the automatic classification of Internet memes. Providing a corpus of 2.361 memes on the 2019 Italian Government Crisis, DANKMEMES features three tasks: A) Meme Detection, B) Hate Speech Identification, and C) Event Clustering. Overall, 5 groups took part in the first task, 2 in the second and 1 in the third. The best system was proposed by the UniTor group and achieved a F1 score of 0.8501 for task A, 0.8235 for task B and 0.2657 for task C. In this report, we describe how the task was set up, we report the system results and we discuss them

EVALITA Evaluation of NLP and Speech Tools for Italian - December 17th, 2020

Welcome to EVALITA 2020! EVALITA is the evaluation campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech Tools for Italian. EVALITA is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC, http://www.ai-lc.it) and it is endorsed by the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA, http://www.aixia.it) and the Italian Association for Speech Sciences (AISV, http://www.aisv.it)

THE COMPLEX SIMPLICITY OF CONTEXT. AFFORDANCES AS FLOWS OF SOCIAL INFORMATION

Affordances are central to consider how sociality and technology intertwine. However, while this entanglement propelled the popularity of the term, it also persistently connected the social and the technical. It is argued how considering affordances as eminently social opens up analytical possibilities to consider cultural, individual, and social contexts, and how these in turn can affect social action in digital environments. This means considering affordances as intersubjective and co-constructed, and posing them in relation to sociological tenets such as that of the social situation. Through 26 interviews with a variety of Reddit users, results suggest how affordances are understood and employed relationally to navigate complex social contexts, to infer dominant social norms and cultural codes and, once internalized, are deployed to sanction deviations or promote compliance to them. It is shown how the concepts of affordances and social situations can be fruitfully employed as an entry point into the cultural and social dynamics of groups and digital environments. Contextually, it challenges the idea of the social situation as a sociological concept rooted in physical interaction

The platformization of gender and sexual identities: an algorithmic analysis of Pornhub

Online pornography, like other forms of cultural production, is increasingly subject to processes of platformization. While research has focused on the diffusion of online pornography and its broader implications, less attention has been paid to the algorithmic infrastructures through which platforms distribute and manage pornographic content, and how this might reiterate socially embedded views and perspectives. To fill this gap, we consider how Pornhub, currently the leading porn platform, establishes the gender identity of its users, and how this affects the structure of the platform and the distribution and recommendation of content within it. We collected data for 1600 variations of Pornhub’s homepages, as well as data for 25,000 videos suggested to 10 accounts with differing self-declared gender identities. Through these data and an analysis of the sign- up procedure, we underline how Pornhub segments, distributes, and manages content based on the profiling of its users, increasingly following the logics of the platformization of content. Findings point to how Pornhub’s algorithmic suggestions and the structure of the platform concur to reiterate a heteronormative perspective on sexual desire, sexuality, and gender identities