From Causality to Emergence: re-evaluating social media’s role in the 2011 English riots

This paper is an attempt to re-evaluate the role of social media on the riots. It draws upon interviews and qualitative analysis of tweets posted during the riots to examine how digital modalities reconfigure power relations between vulnerable and invulnerable populations as collectives seek to enact social change. The importance of social media for understanding collective action, I argue, lies in its relevance for conveying what one could call the performativity of public space. My thesis emerges in response to the rise of big data analytics as a means to predict and respond to political unrest, exploring the limits of predictive analyses with regard to issues of trust, power, memory and emotions. My claim is that understanding the power of the digital requires a more sophisticated understanding of emotions. To this end, I emphasize the need to employ multi-method approaches to study new forms of “mediated crowd” membership that combine digital methods with more traditional approaches to emotions research

Tackling Misinformation and Disinformation in the Context of COVID-19

Misinformation and disinformation have emerged as major public issues during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, I analyse how misinformation spreads online, the challenges of combatting misinformation and what interventions can be made to tackle false and misleading advice

Low-altitude measurements of 2–6 MeV electron trapping lifetimes at 1.5 ≤ L ≤ 2.5

During the Halloween Storm period (October–November 2003), a new Van Allen belt electron population was powerfully accelerated. The inner belt of electrons formed in this process decayed over a period of days to years. We have examined quantitatively the decay rates for electrons seen in the region of 1.5 ≤ L ≤ 2.5 using SAMPEX satellite observations. At L = 1.5 the e-folding lifetime for 2–6 MeV electrons was τ ∼ 180 days. On the other hand, for the half-dozen distinct acceleration (or enhancement) events seen during late-2003 through 2005 at L ∼ 2.0, the lifetimes ranged from τ ∼ 8 days to τ ∼ 35 days. We compare these loss rates to those expected from prior studies. We find that lifetimes at L = 2.0 are much shorter than the average 100–200 days that present theoretical estimates would suggest for the overall L = 2 electron population. Additional wave-particle interaction aspects must be included in theoretical treatments and we describe such possibilities here

The Belle Gibson scandal: The rise of lifestyle gurus as micro-celebrities in low-trust societies

The Belle Gibson scandal that broke in 2015 is a testament to the growing phenomenon of lifestyle gurus in the twenty-first century. In this article, our aim is not to explain the psychology behind Gibson’s lies. Rather, we focus on the social, cultural and technological conditions that enabled Gibson’s persona to flourish and their impact on contemporary understandings of the self. Lifestyle gurus embody the para-social, trading off the appeal of intimacy, authenticity and integrity. We demonstrate how social media has increased the levels of emotional investment, trust and attention capital in para-social relationships by providing ubiquitous access to native experts and creating the platform to achieve influence and microcelebrity status. Finally, we contend that the growing number of lifestyle gurus providing the public with health advice and scientific knowledge, points to the need to examine critically the social and cultural landscape that enables micro-celebrities to emerge

'Good Morning Fitfam': Top posts, hashtags and gender display on Instagram

Social networking sites are important platforms for visual self-presentation online. This article investigates how content producers present their gender identities on the social networking site, Instagram. We draw upon and develop Goffman’s analytic framework to understand the self-presentation techniques and styles users employ online. Conducting a visual content analysis of clean eating–related top posts, we examine how users deploy clean eating hashtags and how the architecture of Instagram constrains and enables certain identities around shared lifestyles and commercial interests. Our findings reveal the symbolic significance of hashtags for group membership and the degree to which gender identities on Instagram are configured around platform interfaces

Misinformation: tech companies are removing ‘harmful’ coronavirus content – but who decides what that means?

The “infodemic” of misinformation about coronavirus has made it difficult to distinguish accurate information from false and misleading advice. The major technology companies have responded to this challenge by taking the unprecedented move of working together to combat misinformation about COVID-19. Part of this initiative involves promoting content from government healthcare agencies and other authoritative sources, and introducing measures to identify and remove content that could cause harm. For example, Twitter has broadened its definition of harm to address content that contradicts guidance from authoritative sources of public health information. Facebook has hired extra fact-checking services to remove misinformation that could lead to imminent physical harm. YouTube has published a COVID-19 Medical Misinformation Policy that disallows “content about COVID-19 that poses a serious risk of egregious harm”. The problem with this approach is that there is no common understanding of what constitutes harm. The different ways these companies define harm can produce very different results, which undermines public trust in the capacity for tech firms to moderate health information. As we argue in a recent research paper, to address this problem these companies need to be more consistent in how they define harm and more transparent in how they respond to it

The Challenges of Responding to Misinformation during a Pandemic: content moderation and the limitations of the concept of harm

Social media have been central in informing people about the COVID-19 pandemic. They influence the ways in which information is perceived, communicated and shared online, especially with physical distancing measures in place. While these technologies have given people the opportunity to contribute to public discussions about COVID-19, the narratives disseminated on social media have also been characterised by uncertainty, disagreement, false and misleading advice. Global technology companies have responded to these concerns by introducing new content moderation policies based on the concept of harm to tackle the spread of misinformation and disinformation online. In this essay, we examine some of the key challenges in implementing these policies in real time and at scale, calling for more transparent and nuanced content moderation strategies to increase public trust and the quality of information about the pandemic consumed online