How do tweets reflect the long-standing disparities between the northern and southern regions of Nigeria? This study presents a qualitative analysis of Twitter users' responses (n = 101,518) to the tweets of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) regarding the production and prosecution of cybercrime. The article uses postcolonial perspectives to shed light on the legacies of British colonial efforts in Nigeria, such as the amalgamation of the northern and southern protectorates in 1914. The results revealed significant (...) discrepancies between Nigeria's northern and southern regions regarding cybercriminal arrest, conviction, and sentencing. Specifically, the results showed that the EFCC's criminalization of Southerners differs substantially from that of Northerners. The contemporary manifestation of inequalities concerning the production and prosecution of cybercrime on Twitter reflects long-standing contestations (e.g., economic, political, cultural, geological) between the northern and southern parts of Nigerian society. Therefore, since the North-South divide in present-day Nigeria originated from British colonization, colonialism is the base that shaped the superstructure comprising political, religious, historical, geological (e.g., crude oil), and economic factors. In turn, the article spotlights that regional differences in educational attainment, originating from differing experiences of Christianization and colonization, interact with regional disparities in the production of cybercrime. More research is required to better understand how these contextual disparities in society interact with the production and prosecution of cybercrime, given that Nigerian cybercriminals defraud victims all over the world. (shrink)

Online communication can often seem different to offline talk. Structural features of social media sites can shape the things we do with words. In this paper, I argue that the practice of ‘quote-tweeting’ can cause a single utterance that originally performed just one speech act to later perform several different speech acts. This describes a new type of illocutionary pluralism—the view that a single utterance can perform multiple illocutionary acts. Not only is this type more plural than others (if one (...) utterance can acquire many kinds of illocutionary force), but it also shows how illocutionary forces can be accumulated over time. This is not limited to online utterances—some offline contexts are similarly structured, and so offline utterances can also come to perform many different speech acts. (shrink)

Mining social network data and developing user profile from unstructured and informal data are a challenging task. The proposed research builds user profile using Twitter data which is later helpful to provide the user with personalized recommendations. Publicly available tweets are fetched and classified and sentiments expressed in tweets are extracted and normalized. This research uses domain-specific seed list to classify tweets. Semantic and syntactic analysis on tweets is performed to minimize information loss during the process (...) of tweets classification. After precise classification and sentiment analysis, the system builds user interest-based profile by analyzing user’s post on Twitter to know about user interests. The proposed system was tested on a dataset of almost 1 million tweets and was able to classify up to 96% tweets accurately. (shrink)

This contribution focusses on some of the digital theological expressions of Stephan Joubert from an auto-ethnographic angle. Orientating from a practical theology perspective, I have chosen the social media platform Twitter, and more specifically the @stephanjoubert domain, as source to chart some significant tweet expressions for the purpose of describing the character and value of an aphoristic theology. In order to do so, I have used some randomly selected tweets of Stephan Joubert, spanning the period 2020–2021, which express aspects (...) of a relevant contemporary ecclesiology. Against the backdrop of the disastrous impact of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as some important dates on the Christian calendar, I specifically emphasise the significance of the formulation of an aphoristic theology using amongst other markers of simplicity, contextuality and relevance.Contribution: I conclude the reflection with some critical-evaluative remarks on the significance of aphoristic expressions for the development of a meaningful contemporary ecclesiology and theology. (shrink)

Social media makes an important contribution to a rapidly changing world in which various domains of meaning are described anew. The evolving nature and dynamic character of social media therefore provides for a rich praxis terrain with which to interact from a practical theological orientation. More specifically associated with the theme of this contribution, the social media sphere also provides an excellent space not only to rethink but also to reenact expressions of dignity in society. The research is facilitated from (...) a practical theological orientation, with particular focus on a normative dimension as embodied in aspects of dignity. Through the use of an interdisciplinary approach and methodology, some contours of dignity specifically associated with South African politics as well as the so-called Charlie Hebdo attacks in 2015 in Paris expressed on the social media platform, Twitter, are described and discussed. From this empirical analysis, description and discussion, a practical theological reflection is offered in which aspects of dignity associated with a normativity function are described. Some practical theological perspectives contributing to future relevant tweeting on dignity are also formulated and provided in conclusion. (shrink)

This article rejects the received view that Post-Truth is a new, unprecedented political phenomenon. By showing that Truth and Post-Truth share the same genesis, this article will submit the idea of a Consensus Theory of Post-Truth. Part 1 looks at the difference between Post-Truth, lies and bullshit. Part 2 suggests reasons behind the current preoccupation with Post-Truth. Part 3 focuses on Habermas’s influential consensus theory of truth to suggest that truth and Post-Truth have more in common than is generally assumed. (...) Part 4 puts forward the Consensus Theory of Post-Truth. Part 5 suggests three ways to emasculate the potentially destructive effect of Post-Truth on democratic society. (shrink)

Death and bereavement are human experiences that new media helps facilitate alongside creating new social grief practices that occur online. This study investigated how people’s postings and tweets facilitated the communication of grief after pop music icon Michael Jackson died. Drawing on past grief research, religion, and new media studies, a thematic analysis of 1,046 messages was conducted on three mediated sites (Twitter, TMZ.com, and Facebook). Results suggested that social media served as grieving spaces for people to accept Jackson’s (...) death rather than denying it or expressing anger over his passing. The findings also illustrate how interactive exchanges online helped recycle news and “resurrected” the life of Jackson. Additionally, as fans of deceased celebrities create and disseminate web-based memorials, new social media practices such as “Michael Mondays” synchronize tweets within everyday life rhythms and foster practices to hasten the grieving process. (shrink)

Sharing social media research datasets allows for reproducibility and peer-review, but it is very often difficult or even impossible to achieve due to legal restrictions and can also be ethically questionable. What is more, research data repositories and other research infrastructure and research support institutions are only starting to target social media researchers. In this paper, we present a practical solution to sharing social media data with the help of a social science data archive. Our aim is to contribute to (...) the effort of enhancing comparability and reproducibility in social media research by taking some first steps towards setting standards for sustainable data archiving. We present a showcase for sharing social media data with the example of a big dataset containing geotagged tweets through a research data archive. We provide a general background to the process of long-term archiving of research data. After some consideration of the current obstacles for sharing and archiving social media data, we present our solution of archiving the specific dataset of geotagged tweets at the GESIS Data Archive for the Social Sciences, a publicly funded German data archive for secure and long-term archiving of social science data. We archived and documented tweet IDs and additional information to improve reproducibility of the initial research while also attending to ethical and legal considerations, and taking into account Twitter’s terms of service in particular. (shrink)

As part of the search for relevant and contextual articulations of theology, this article provides an overview of a comprehensive research project that explored, described and analysed Christian motifs on Twitter. Based on the brief overview of the project, perspectives for the formulation of a Twitter theology are presented from a practical theological orientation. Two central markers are indicated and described as primary drivers of a Twitter theology: the first marker places its focus on the relationship, dynamics and functioning of (...) aspects of authority and normativity in facilitating a Twitter theology. The second marker puts particular emphasis on the value and significance of using aphoristic formulations in the elucidation of a comprehensible Twitter theology. The article presents important strategic perspectives on the practice of a Twitter theology, as well as the formulation of a relevant contextual theology. (shrink)

Research Ethics, Volume 18, Issue 2, Page 93-113, April 2022. Twitter is an increasingly common source of rich, personalized qualitative data, as millions of people daily share their thoughts on myriad topics. However, questions remain unclear concerning if and how to quote publicly available social media data ethically. In this study, focusing on 136 education manuscripts quoting 2667 Tweets, we look to investigate the ways in which Tweets are quoted, the ethical discussions forwarded and actions taken, and the (...) extent to which quoted Tweets are “discoverable.” A concerning result is that in almost all manuscripts, and for around half of all quoted Tweets, the original author could be identified. Drawing on our findings we share some ethical dilemmas, including those that arise from an apparent lack of understanding of the technical aspects of the platform, and offer suggestions for promoting ethically-informed practice. (shrink)

We study how messages on Twitter by large non-governmental organizations (NGOs), targeting companies from the S&P500, affect these companies’ stock prices. With a sample of 1,611 tweets between 2009 and 2017 by 18 large NGOs, we observe significant changes in the stock prices of the targeted firms. More specifically, NGO tweets stating a positive message about the environmental, social, or governance (ESG). Actions of the firm have a positive effect on stock prices, while negative tweets have a (...) negative effect. Nevertheless, we find that the presence of institutional owners hampers this effect: firms with high institutional ownership value positive tweets more negatively, and negative tweets more positively. These results support the idea that shareholders react significantly to NGO tweets but they react differently depending on their time horizon: for shareholders who have a more short-term horizon, typically institutional owners, the reaction diverges societal expectations about how firms should contribute to society. (shrink)

Cet article synthétise les acquis et développements issus de projets de recherche menés depuis 2013 à propos de l’analyse d’un type particulier de données CMC (Computer-mediated communication) : les tweets politiques. Après une caractérisation de ce genre de discours, et des problématiques soulevées, l’article développe les enjeux de l’exploration des corpus de ce genre ; l’appréhension et la constitution de ces données sociales en corpus ; la production de résultats scientifiques, et la mise en place de différents types d’exploration (...) de corpus. Les méthodes de constitution de corpus, la standardisation et la mise au format TEI, l’utilisation d’outils d’analyse des données textuelles, et le développement de plateformes, sont ainsi présentés, comme différents points d’une même recherche qui vise à caractériser et comprendre une pratique sociale avec une méthode scientifique et une portée citoyenne. L’exploration de corpus peut ainsi passer par des nouvelles productions de ressources, outils, interfaces, dont l’interactivité, l’hypertextualité, et l’ouverture, garantissent la validité des corpus, et la possibilité d’y accéder de manière contextuelle, et outillée. (shrink)

Dans cet article, nous appuyant sur un corpus de 3 444 075 tweets correspondant à 44 107 210 tokens (mots, signes de ponctuation, émojis, émoticônes, etc.) recueillis en décembre 2016, nous nous intéressons aux procédés de segmentation à l’œuvre dans les tweets. Après avoir évoqué certaines caractéristiques de ces écrits particuliers, nous rappelons les procédés généraux de segmentation à l’écrit : les signes de ponctuation et les connecteurs. Nous nous penchons ensuite sur la segmentation opérée dans les (...) class='Hi'>tweets par ces deux procédés généraux. Enfin, nous montrons que les émoticônes et les émojis constituent des procédés spécifiques permettant de diversifier les stratégies de segmentation des utilisateurs de tweets (et d’autres écrits numériques, tels les SMS et les courriels). (shrink)

Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Volume 27, Issue 1, Page 57-59, January-March.

In late March of 2020, a new hashtag, #FilmYourHospital, made its first appearance on social media. The hashtag encouraged people to visit local hospitals to take pictures and videos of empty hospitals to help “prove” that the COVID-19 pandemic is an elaborate hoax. Using techniques from Social Network Analysis, this case study examines how this conspiracy theory propagated on Twitter and whether the hashtag virality was aided by the use of automation or coordination among Twitter users. We found that while (...) much of the content came from users with limited reach, the oxygen that fueled this conspiracy in its early days came from a handful of prominent conservative politicians and far right political activists on Twitter. These power users used this hashtag to build awareness about the campaign and to encourage their followers to break quarantine and film what is happening at their local hospitals. After the initial boost by a few prominent accounts, the campaign was mostly sustained by pro-Trump accounts, followed by a secondary wave of propagation outside the U.S. The rise of the #FilmYourHospital conspiracy from a single tweet demonstrates the ongoing challenge of addressing false, viral information during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the spread of misinformation can be potentially mitigated by fact-checking and directing people to credible sources of information from public health agencies, false and misleading claims that are driven by politics and supported by strong convictions and not science are much harder to root out. (shrink)

Twitter integrates with streaming data technologies and machine learning to add new value to healthcare. This paper presented a real-time system to predict breast cancer based on streaming patient’s health data from Twitter. The proposed system consists of two major components: developing an offline building model and an online prediction pipeline. For the first component, we made a correlation between the features to determine the correlation between features and reduce the number of features from the Breast Cancer Wisconsin Diagnostic dataset. (...) Two feature selection algorithms are recursive feature elimination and univariate feature selection algorithms which are applied to features after correlation to select the essential features. Four decision trees, logistic regression, support vector machine, and random forest classifier have been used on features after correlation and feature selection. Also, hyperparameter tuning and cross-validation have been applied with machine learning to optimize models and enhance accuracy. Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, and Twitter Streaming API are used to develop the second component. The best model with the highest accuracy obtained from the first component predicts breast cancer in real time from tweets’ streaming. The results showed that the best model is the random forest classifier which achieved the best accuracy. (shrink)

Twitter is an instrument used not only for sharing public or personal information, but also for persuading the audience. While specific platforms and software have been developed for analyzing macro-analytical data, and specific studies have focused on the linguistic dimension of the tweets, the argumentative dimension of the latter is unexplored to this date. This paper intends to propose a method grounded on the tools advanced in argumentation theory for capturing, coding, and assessing the different argumentative dimensions of the (...) messages posted on Twitter, focusing on the types of argument communicated, the quality of their premises, and the fallacies committed – including the use of unshared presuppositions and emotive words. This method is applied to a corpus of 843 tweets published by the Italian Minister of the Interior, Mr. Matteo Salvini, from the date of his appointment to the beginning of his campaign for the European elections. The quantitative data provide general indications for detecting the strategies that characterize the argumentative profile of Salvini, which are then analyzed qualitatively. (shrink)

Drawing upon lived experiences, this article explores challenges facing feminist academics sharing work in the media, and the gendered, raced intersections of ‘being visible’ in digital cultures which enable direct, public response. We examine online backlash following publication of an article about representations of Meghan Markle’s feminism being co-opted by the patriarchal monarchy. While in it we argued against vilification of Markle, we encountered what we term distortions of research remediation as news outlets reported our work under headlines such as (...) ‘academics accuse Meghan of dropping feminism like a hot potato’. Negative responses were polarised: anti-Meghan, and pro-Meghan. In response, we received accusations of sexist, racist bullying, debate over definitions of feminism, claims feminism has gone ‘too far’, variously worded directives to ‘shut up’, gendered personal insults, and threats of doxxing. This article examines the tenor of public discourse around feminism and visible feminists. It questions the responsibility of institutions benefiting from public intellectuals for the wellbeing of employees in the public eye, particularly in the anti-intellectual socio-political context of Brexit and Donald Trump, where the costs for ‘visible’ women and feminist activism are ever higher. It also considers our responsibility as researchers to ensure our contributions to public discourse do not exacerbate existing harms of a white-supremacist, classist society. This article interrogates the risks – of misrepresentation, hyper-visibility, and reputational, psychological and potentially physical harm – faced by those engaging in acts of public feminism. (shrink)

The present article is part of a preliminary study concerning the discursive manifestations of US President Trump’s sexist beliefs. While many studies have focused on Trump’s usage of hostile sexism, this work examines the linguistic strategies utilised by Trump to convey benevolent sexism, a form of discrimination based on the idea that women are weak and need to be protected, that they should respect traditional male-centric gender roles, and that they should be idolised by men. Drawing upon Fiske and Glick’s (...) Ambivalent Sexism Theory, the study will analyse a corpus of all the positive tweets addressing women tweeted by Trump since the beginning of his 2016 campaign. The study sheds a light on how President Trump’s usage of hostile and benevolent sexism are actually two sides of the same coin: they both confirm the idea of women as an inferior sex. (shrink)

Social network services such as Twitter are important venues that can be used as rich data sources to mine public opinions about various topics. In this study, we used Twitter to collect data on one of the most growing theories in education, namely Self-Regulated Learning and carry out further analysis to investigate What Twitter says about SRL? This work uses three main analysis methods, descriptive, topic modeling, and geocoding analysis. The searched and collected dataset consists of a large volume of (...) relevant SRL tweets equal to 54,070 tweets between 2011 and 2021. The descriptive analysis uncovers a growing discussion on SRL on Twitter from 2011 till 2018 and then markedly decreased till the collection day. For topic modeling, the text mining technique of Latent Dirichlet allocation was applied and revealed insights on computationally processed topics. Finally, the geocoding analysis uncovers a diverse community from all over the world, yet a higher density representation of users from the Global North was identified. Further implications are discussed in the paper. (shrink)

Communication and interaction today happen in simply one mouse click away. Language and self-expression do not only develop as a recognized tool for oneself but is an avenue for others’ re-expression and identification. Through using Twitter, the elaboration of social interaction becomes easier and accessible. It becomes the primary method of doing things together and establishes a shared meaning that becomes the common ground of understanding by individuals and groups alike. The study aims to analyze the tweets of Kris (...) Aquino, known as the Philippines’ Queen of Multimedia using speech act categories of Searle and predict the meaning based on the speech acts committed. The study used content analysis for it represents systematic and objective means of describing and quantifying phenomena. The results showed that most tweets contained the ‘assertive’ label which refers to ‘those kinds of speech acts that state what the speaker believes to be the case or not’. Further, her influence as a public figure contributed to the forceful implication of realizing the speech act reflected by her readers. Since impression is reality and intention cannot be quantified, what the general audience perceives on a certain person serves to be the truth. Thus, misinterpretation develops due to poor judgment on the elucidation in the tweets of the posters, readers and vice-versa. Keywords - Sociolinguistics, speech act theory, Twitter, micro-blogging, SNS, qualitative, content analysis, Philippines. (shrink)

Since January 2020, Canadian Chief Medical Officers (CMOs) have rapidly evolved into public figures. However, the gendered makeup of this role seems to map onto CMO communication: 10 CMOs are women and 7 use Twitter to communicate, as opposed to 7 men, of whom only 3 have Twitter accounts. Adopting the theoretical lens of language ideology, this paper explores language and gender dimensions of Canadian Chief Medical Officer (CMO) health discourse by analyzing pandemic tweets from CMOs (January 2020-June 2021, (...) 21,389 tweets, 930,0883 words) using corpus-assisted discourse studies. Results suggest that male and female CMOs have not communicated to the same extent, nor have they used the same (range of) languages. Also, there are differences with regard to expressions of authority and compassion. While a paucity of male data poses methodological challenges, it also raises questions about the specific and disproportionate communication work accorded to and undertaken by women. The paper concludes by arguing that female CMOs’ adherence to stereotypically gendered ways of speaking is a strategy for navigating volatile online and offline environments, but that this raises questions about the longer-term impacts of authority in gendered discourse. (shrink)

Emotional stability is of great importance for undergraduates and has significant predictive power for mental health. Emotions are associated with individuals’ daily lives and routines. Undergraduates commonly post their opinions and feelings on social networks, providing a huge amount of data for studying their emotional states and rhythms. Based on the construction of the emotion dictionary of undergraduates’ Tencent tweets —a social network for users to share their life situations and express emotions and feelings to friends—we used big data (...) text analysis technology to analyze the emotion words in 45,996 Tencent tweets published by 894 undergraduates. Then, we used hierarchical linear modeling to further analyze the daily rhythms of undergraduate students’ emotions and how demographic variables are associated with the daily rhythmic changes. The results were as follows: Undergraduates tweeted about more positive emotions than negative emotions ; The emotions in undergraduates’ tweets changed considerably from 1 a.m. to 6 a.m., but were fairly stable during the day; There was a rising trend in the frequency of using emotion words in Tencent tweets during the day as each hour progressed, and there was a higher increase in positive emotion than negative emotion; and The word frequencies and daily rhythms of emotions varied depending on demographic variables. Gender was correlated with the frequencies of gratitude and the daily rhythms of anger. As the grade increased, the frequency of emotion words in most subcategories in TTs decreased and the fluctuation in daily rhythms became smaller. There was no significant difference in the frequency and daily rhythm of emotion words used in TTs based on having had a left-behind experience. The results of the present study provided emotion expression in social networks in Chinese collectivist culture. This study added new evidence to support the notion that positive and negative emotions are independent dimensions. (shrink)

This article is about the manifestations of similarities between two seemingly distinct groups of Nigerians: cybercriminals and politicians. Which linguistic strategies do Twitter users use to express their opinions on cybercriminals and politicians? The study undertakes a qualitative analysis of ‘engaged’ tweets of an elite law enforcement agency in West Africa. We analyzed and coded over 100,000 ‘engaged’ tweets based on a component of mechanisms of moral disengagement (i.e., advantageous comparison), a linguistic device. The results reveal how respondents (...) defend the actions of online fraudsters (“the deviant group”) by strategically comparing them to the wrongful acts of corrupt politicians (“the respectable group”). Similarly, the results show how respondents positioned this linguistic strategy to compare “the powerless group” (online fraudsters) and “the powerful group” (politicians) in society. Indeed, tweet responses suggest that the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) generally looks downwards for culprits (i.e., online fraudsters) while ignoring fraudulent politicians. We conclude that the process by which some actions are interpreted as a crime compared to others is a moral enterprise. (shrink)

This paper presents an original use of Twitter to interpret and rewrite the poems of Francesco Petrarca's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta implemented within the Oregon Petrarch Open Book OPOB). This activity was partially inspired by the idea of Twitterature developed by Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin; we believe with them that our digital time should develop new and more functional ways of addressing literary texts but at the same time we are convinced that the "burdensome duty of hours spent reading" cannot (...) be eliminated. On the contrary, the new ways of reading in the digital era as we envisage them are the result and consequence of broader and deeper reading activities. We conceived the project of writing 366 tweets, out of the 366 poems that make the last form of Petrarca’s Rvf, as the result of different philological activities, from reading the texts in the original language to consulting manuscripts, translations and intersemiotic renderings of the texts. Before writing the 140 characters that make one tweet we also elaborated paraphrases, summaries and keywords related to the individual poems. Students created the first version of the tweets during the 2011 UO seminar on Re-reading Petrarca’s Rvf in the Digtal Era. The second version was elaborated in the context of a seminar on the same topic during Winter 2014. This paper presents the two versions of the Twitter Edition of Petrarca's Rvf now available in the OPOB and focuses on the philology connected to the latest edition that provided an English translation of the original tweets written in Italian. The actual Italian and English 366 tweets are published in the Appendix to the article. (shrink)

THE TWEET OF THE UNIVERSE. GRAVITATIONAL WAVES BETWEEN THEORY, EFFORTS AND MISTAKES The recent discovery of gravitational waves fills a substantial gap in the theory of general relativity, since these waves were the only phenomenon predicted by Einstein’s theory that had not yet been directly observed. This was mainly due to the fact that the passage of waves is an elusive phenomenon, almost imperceptible, up to the point that even Einstein thought that it was almost impossible to detect it using (...) “traditional” tools. This paper will explore the efforts made over the years to detect the passage of these waves, the mistakes made, and the recent results obtained through the use of the twin optical interferometers LIGO and VIRGO. This extraordinary discovery shows one more time that the history of science is full of trials, errors and sudden steps forward maybe due to the use of new technology. (shrink)

Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Re-tweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best schools, and Grade Point Averages. We are vulnerable to value capture because of the competitive advantage that such crisp and clear expressions of value have (...) in our private reasoning and our public justification. There is, however, a price. In value capture, we take a central component of our autonomy — our ongoing deliberation over the exact articulation of our values — and we outsource it. And the metrics to which we outsource usually engineered for the interests of some external force, like a large-scale institution’s interest in cross-contextual comprehensibility and quick aggregability. That outsourcing cuts off one of the key benefits to personal deliberation. In value capture, we no longer adjust our values and their articulations in light of own rich experience of the world. Our values should often be carefully tailored to our particular selves or our small-scale communities, but in value capture, we buy our values off the rack. In some cases – like decreasing CO2 emissions – the costs of non-tailored values are outweighed by the benefit of precise collective coordination. In other cases, like in our aesthetic lives, they are not. This suggests that we should want different values suited to different scales. We should want value federalism. Some values are perhaps best pursued at the largest-scale level, others at smaller scales. The problem occurs when we exhibit an excess preference for the largest-scale values – when we consistently let the universal metrics swamp our quieter interests. (shrink)

In paradigmatic cases of subtweeting, one Twitter user critically or mockingly tweets about another person without mentioning their username or their name. In this chapter, we give an account of the strategic aims of subtweeting and the mechanics through which it achieves them. We thereby hope to shed light on the distinctive communicative and moral texture of subtweeting while filling in a gap in the philosophical literature on strategic speech in social media. We first specify what subtweets are and (...) identify the central features that give rise to their strategic mechanics. Next, we draw attention to problematic aspects of subtweeting and consider conditions under which subtweeting can be justified on moral and prudential grounds. The chapter concludes by discussing practical upshots and noting avenues for future work. (shrink)

Many philosophers hold that generics (i.e., unquantified generalizations) are pervasive in communication and that when they are about social groups, this may offend and polarize people because generics gloss over variations between individuals. Generics about social groups might be particularly common on Twitter (X). This remains unexplored, however. Using machine learning (ML) techniques, we therefore developed an automatic classifier for social generics, applied it to 1.1 million tweets about people, and analyzed the tweets. While it is often suggested (...) that generics are ubiquitous in everyday communication, we found that most tweets (78%) about people contained no generics. However, tweets with generics received more “likes” and retweets. Furthermore, while recent psychological research may lead to the prediction that tweets with generics about political groups are more common than tweets with generics about ethnic groups, we found the opposite. However, consistent with recent claims that political animosity is less constrained by social norms than animosity against gender and ethnic groups, negative tweets with generics about political groups were significantly more prevalent and retweeted than negative tweets about ethnic groups. Our study provides the first ML-based insights into the use and impact of social generics on Twitter. (shrink)

The principle of homophily says that people associate with other groups of people who are mostly like themselves. Many online communities are structured around groups of socially similar individuals. On Twitter, however, people are exposed to multiple, diverse points of view through the public timeline. The authors captured 30,000 tweets about the shooting of George Tiller, a late-term abortion doctor, and the subsequent conversations among pro-life and pro-choice advocates. They found that replies between like-minded individuals strengthen group identity, whereas (...) replies between different-minded individuals reinforce in-group and out-group affiliation. Their results show that people are exposed to broader viewpoints than they were before but are limited in their ability to engage in meaningful discussion. They conclude with implications for different kinds of social participation on Twitter more generally. (shrink)

Previous research has established that the success of strikes, and social movements more broadly, depends on their ability to garner support from the public. However, there is scant published research investigating the response of the public to strike action by healthcare workers. In this study, we address this gap through a study of public responses to UK nursing strikes in 2022–2023, using a data set drawn from Twitter of more than 2300 publicly available tweets. We focus on negative (...) class='Hi'>tweets, investigating which societal discourses social media users draw on to oppose strike action by nurses. Using a combination of corpus‐based approaches and discourse analysis, we identified five categories of opposition: (i) discourse discrediting nurses; (ii) discourse discrediting strikes by nurses; (iii) discourse on the National Health System; (iv) discourse about the fairness of strikers' demands and (v) discourse about potential harmful impact. Our findings show how social media users operationalise wider societal discourses about the nursing profession (e.g., associations with care, gender, vocation and sacrifice) as well as recent crises such as the Covid‐19 pandemic to justify their opposition. The results also provide valuable insights into misconceptions about nursing, strike action and patient harm, which can inform strategies for public communication. (shrink)

“My first long haul flight that didn’t fill up and an empty row for me. I have been blessed by the algorithm ”. The phrase ‘blessed by the algorithm’ expresses the feeling of having been fortunate in what appears on your feed on various social media platforms, or in the success or virality of your content as a creator, or in what gig economy jobs you are offered. However, we can also place it within wider public discourse employing theistic conceptions (...) of AI. Building on anthropological fieldwork into the ‘entanglements of AI and Religion’, this article will explore how ‘blessed by the algorithm’ tweets are indicative of the impact of theistic AI narratives: modes of thinking about AI in an implicitly religious way. This thinking also represents continuities that push back against the secularisation thesis and other grand narratives of disenchantment that claim secularity occurs because of technological and intellectual progress. This article will also explore new religious movements, where theistic conceptions of AI entangle technological aspirations with religious ones. (shrink)

History and current affairs show that words matter - and change - because they are woven into our social and political lives. Words are weapons wielded by the powerful; they are also powerful tools for social resistance and for reimagining and reconfiguring social relations. Illustrated with topical examples, from racial slurs and sexual insults to preferred gender pronouns, from ethnic/racial group labels to presidential tweets, this book examines the social contexts which imbue words with potency. Exploring the role of (...) language in three broad categories - establishing social identities, navigating social landscapes, and debating social and linguistic change - Sally McConnell-Ginet invites readers to examine critically their own ideas about language and its complicated connections to social conflict and transformation. Concrete and timely examples vividly illustrate the feedback loop between words and the world, shedding light on how and why words can matter. (shrink)

Social media data hold considerable potential for predicting health-related conditions. Recent studies suggest that machine-learning models may accurately predict depression and other mental health-related conditions based on Instagram photos and Tweets. In this article, it is argued that individuals should have a sui generis right not to be subjected to AI profiling based on publicly available data without their explicit informed consent. The article (1) develops three basic arguments for a right to protection of personal data trading on the (...) notions of social control and stigmatization, (2) argues that a number of features of AI profiling make individuals more exposed to social control and stigmatization than other types of data processing (the exceptionalism of AI profiling), (3) considers a series of other reasons for and against protecting individuals against AI profiling based on publicly available data, and finally (4) argues that the EU General Data Protection Regulation does not ensure that individuals have a right not to be AI profiled based on publicly available data. (shrink)

Conventional quantitative methods for the measurement of organizational legitimacy consider mainly three sources that make judgments about organizations visible: news media, accreditation bodies, and surveys. Over the last decade, however, social media have enabled ordinary citizens to bypass the gatekeeping function of these institutional evaluators and autonomously make individual judgments public. This inclusion of voices beyond functional and formally organized stakeholder groups potentially pluralizes the ongoing discussions about organizations. The individual judgments in blogs, tweets, and Facebook posts give indication (...) about the broader fit between an organization’s perceived behavior and heterogeneous social norms and therefore constitute an indicator of organizational legitimacy that can be accessed and measured. We propose the use of social media data and sentiment analysis to study the affect-based responses to organizational actions by citizens. We critically discuss and compare the method with existing quantitative methods for legitimacy measurement and apply them to a recent case in the banking industry. We discuss the value of the method for studying the process of legitimacy construction as the expression and negotiation of normative judgments about organizations by various evaluators. (shrink)

Exploring online criticisms of the ‘take the knee’ protest during ‘Euro 2020’, this article examines how alt- and far-right conspiracies were both constructed and communicated via the social media platform, Twitter. By providing a novel exploration of alt-right conspiracies during an international football tournament, a qualitative thematic analysis of 1,388 original tweets relating to Euro 2020 was undertaken. The findings reveal how, in criticisms levelled at both ‘wokeism’ and the Black Lives Matter movement, antiwhite criticisms of the ‘take the (...) knee’ protest were embroiled in alt-right conspiracies that exposed an assumed Cultural Marxist, ‘woke agenda’ in the tournament’s organization and mainstream media coverage. In conclusion, it is argued that conspiratorial discourses, associated with the alt-right, provided a framework through which the protest could be understood. This emphasises how the significance of conspiracy functions to promote the wider dissemination of alt-right ideology across popular cultural contexts, such as sport. (shrink)

In recent months months the hashtag #overlyhonestmethods has steadily been gaining popularity. Posts under this hashtag—presumably by scientists—detail aspects of daily scientific research that differ considerably from the idealized interpretation of scientific experimentation as standardized, objective and reproducible. Over and above its entertainment value, the popularity of this hashtag raises two important points for those who study both science and scientists. Firstly, the posts highlight that the generation of data through experimentation is often far less standardized than is commonly assumed. (...) Secondly, the popularity of the hashtag together with its relatively blasé reception by the scientific community reveal that the actions reported in the tweets are far from shocking and indeed may be considered just “part of scientific research”. Such observations give considerable pause for thought, and suggest that current conceptions of data might be limited by failing to recognize this “inherent variability” within the actions of generation—and thus within data themselves. Is it possible, we must ask, that epistemic virtues such as standardization, consistency, reportability and reproducibility need to be reevaluated? Such considerations are, of course, of particular importance to data sharing discussions and the Open Data movement. This paper suggests that the notion of a “moral professionalism” for data generation and sharing needs to be considered in more detail if the inherent variability of data are to be addressed in any meaningful manner. (shrink)

Medical and public health professionals recommend wearing face masks to combat the spread of the coronavirus disease of 2019. While the majority of people in the United States support wearing face masks as an effective tool to combat COVID-19, a smaller percentage declared the recommendation by public health agencies as a government imposition and an infringement on personal liberty. Social media play a significant role in amplifying public health issues, whereby a minority against the imposition can speak loudly, perhaps using (...) tactics of verbal aggression taking the form of toxic language. We investigated the role that toxicity plays in the online discourse around wearing face masks. Overall, we found tweets including anti-mask hashtags were significantly more likely to use toxic language, while tweets with pro-mask hashtags were somewhat less toxic with the exception of #WearADamnMask. We conclude that the tensions between these two positions raise doubt and uncertainty around the issue, which make it difficult for health communicators to break through the clutter in order to combat the infodemic. Public health agencies and other governmental institutions should monitor toxicity trends on social media in order to better ascertain prevailing sentiment toward their recommendations and then apply these data-driven insights to refine and adapt their risk communication messaging toward mask wearing, vaccine uptake, and other interventions. (shrink)

In real-time, Twitter strongly imprints world events, popular culture, and the day-to-day; Twitter records an ever growing compendium of language use and change; and Twitter has been shown to enable certain kinds of prediction. Vitally, and absent from many standard corpora such as books and news archives, Twitter also encodes popularity and spreading through retweets. Here, we describe Storywrangler, an ongoing, day-scale curation of over 100 billion tweets containing around 1 trillion 1-grams from 2008 to 2020. For each day, (...) we break tweets into 1-, 2-, and 3-grams across 150+ languages, record usage frequencies, and generate Zipf distributions. We make the data set available through an interactive time series viewer, and as downloadable time series and daily distributions. We showcase a few examples of the many possible avenues of study we aim to enable including how social amplification can be visualized through ‘contagiograms’. (shrink)

We investigate the role of social-media-triggered public pressure on corporate social responsibility that includes expectations of transparency and accountability on the firm’s part, and participative/evaluative inputs on the public’s part. Using the date when S&P 500 firms established corporate Twitter accounts, we investigate the impact of corporate social media exposure on CSR outcomes. Results from baseline regressions indicate that firms with Twitter accounts significantly outperform industry peers in CSR rating, after controlling for firm and industry characteristics. To test potential reverse (...) causality, we use a dynamic treatment effect model to explore within firm changes of CSR, and find that firms’ CSR rating improves in year one- and year two after establishing a Twitter account, while no difference emerged in similar comparisons with peers prior to the Twitter account establishment. Additionally, Granger causality tests results show that corporate Twitter presence improves CSR performance; it is also shown that CSR outcomes do not motivate corporations to establish a social media presence on Twitter. Finally, firms with more experience on Twitter, and those with more followers, tweets or Twitter accounts are associated with improved CSR outcomes. We draw on two theories and qualitative interviews with senior CSR executives to explain why social media influences CSR firm behaviors. (shrink)