Rumours, mis- and disinformation in divided societies: Twitter and the Ardoyne parade dispute

Dr. Paul Reilly is Senior Lecturer in Social Media & Digital Society at the University of Sheffield. His research focuses on the use of social media by citizens to share acts of sousveillance, as well as how digital media can be utilised to promote better community relations in divided societies such as Northern Ireland. His work  has been published in a number of journals including First Monday, Information, Communication & Society, New Media & Society, Policy and Internet and Urban Studies. He is currently completing his second monograph on Social media and contentious politics in Northern Ireland (contracted with Manchester University Press). @PaulJReilly

 

The rerouting of a contentious Orange Order parade away from the Ardoyne shops in North Belfast would lead to four consecutive nights of “animalistic” violence by loyalist protesters in July 2013. Despite the seeming inevitability of further violence, both the Orangemen and the Ardoyne residents were widely praised for the parade passing off without incident in July 2014. However, the 2015 parade would again be marred by violence, as loyalists faced off against PSNI officers who prevented the march from returning home via its traditional route. Having praised the behaviour of the Orange Order and residents a year earlier, Secretary of State Teresa Villiers described the attacks on police as disgraceful and accused the rioters of ‘damaging’ Northern Ireland.

 

This raised questions about what role, if any, social media played in helping escalate or de-escalate the tensions surrounding the contentious parade in 2014 and 2015. Previous research had suggested that the sharing of misinformation and disinformation (term used to describe the inadvertent and deliberate sharing of false information) had contributed to intercommunal violence in contested urban interface areas. Therefore, this study examined how users responded to rumours and disinformation that were circulated on Twitter. These issues were explored through a critical thematic analysis of tweets posted during two periods: 11^th - 14^th July 2014, and 12^th - 15th 2015. A total of 7388 tweets tagged #Ardoyne were identified, 1,842 in 2014 and 5,546 in 2015. These tweets peaked at 7pm on the day of the Twelfth demonstrations in both years (see Figure 1). One explanation for this finding was that this spike in Twitter activity was the result of viewers of flagship television news programmes turning to social media to follow what was happening during the return leg of the parade. 

Figure 1: Tweets mentioning Ardoyne, 12^th July 2014 and 13^th July 2015

 

Tweeters move quickly to debunk rumours and disinformation
 
Rumours and disinformation appeared to have a very short life span in both corpora. This was particularly evident in the 2014 corpus, where there was some evidence to suggest that both loyalists and republicans were checking the veracity of claims made by each other on the microblogging site. Loyalists were accused of digitally altering pictures in order to portray the nationalist residents in a negative light. A picture of one of the protesters that had gathered outside the Ardoyne shops began to circulate on Twitter shortly after 7.30pm on 12^th July. The placard they held aloft contained a mock-up road sign indicating that the Orange Order was not welcome in the area. One tweeter suggested that this was evidence of the intolerance of republicans and highlighted the ‘unlawful’ nature of the protests against the march. Twitter users immediately appeared sceptical of the authenticity of this image. Visual evidence suggesting that this was a photoshopped image was shared on Twitter within a few minutes. The original image showed the protester at a peaceful Christian protest at the shop fronts with his placard proclaiming “Love Thy Neighbour”, rather than the anti-Orange Order slogan that had featured in the doctored image. This was corroborated by an image of the same scene, taken and shared on Twitter by BBC NI journalist Kevin Sharkey a few hours earlier. Many tweeters accused the loyalist responsible for sharing the photoshopped image of spreading lies about what was happening on the ground at Ardoyne.

 

 

Tweet from BBC NI reporter Kevin Sharkey used to discredit photoshopped image, July 2014.

A similar theme emerged in relation to the Ardoyne parade and counter-demonstrations in July 2015. Images taken from many different vantage points were used to support claims and counter-claims about the incident in which an Orangeman drove his vehicle into a crowd of nationalist residents, seriously injuring a 16 year old girl. West Belfast UPRG was one of several accounts to share reports that the republicans had attacked a car, with no reference to the attempted murder of the residents in attendance (see Figure 2). It should be noted that one of these tweeters had been responsible for the photoshopped image of the ‘Love Thy Neighbour’ placard the previous year. Elsewhere, there was much speculation about whether the victim had been in or was trapped under the vehicle. The coverage of the incident by the Belfast Telegraph was questioned for its headline referring to a ‘crash’ rather than an incident of attempted murder of the injured teenager.  Within a few minutes of the incident, first reported by reporters such as the BBC’s Chris Buckler at 7.43pm, the PSNI confirmed that the girl had been injured and that the driver had been arrested at the scene. It would be a further two hours before local MLAs such as Gerry Kelly and the PSNI Chief Constable George Hamilton would confirm that her injuries were not life threatening.

Figure 2: Loyalist counter-narrative about teenage girl hit by car in Ardoyne, 13 July 2015.

 

There was one incident in particular that illustrated how citizens were using Twitter to prevent the spread of rumours and misinformation that might incite violence during the contentious North Belfast parade. One user tweeted a rumour that he had heard from an acquaintance, suggesting that a deal had been put in place that would see the return leg of the parade proceed via its traditional route past the Ardoyne shops. This tweet, shared a few days before the Twelfth, was only shared three times but clearly had the potential to raise tensions in Ardoyne. The same user would acknowledge that this information was untrue and apologise for spreading false information in a tweet posted on the morning of the 13^th July 2015. Clearly it is difficult to tell how many tweeters may have seen the original tweet, or how they responded to this false information.

 

Twitter as tool to empower citizens to counter mis- and disinformation?

 

Twitter did not appear to provide the shared space that is required for reconciling the differences between loyalists and the nationalist residents’ groups in Ardoyne. The same group of highly engaged users dominated both of these Twitter streams, with tweets from the news media the most retweeted and the most likely to reach users across the sectarian divide. There were no signs of the rational debate and deliberation that would appear to be needed in order to resolve the Ardoyne parade dispute. However, Twitter might not be the most appropriate platform to facilitate intergroup contact and discussions about polarising issues such as parades and related protests. The complexities of such issues are unlikely to be explored through the exchange of messages that are restricted to just 140 characters. A related concern would be the representativeness of the Twitter users who engage in such online debates. Recent research has suggested that social media perpetuates the “spiral of silence,” whereby people only speak in public about certain policy issues if they believe that their views are shared by others. Nevertheless, Twitter’s most significant contribution to peacebuilding in Northern Ireland might lie in its empowerment of citizens to correct rumours and disinformation. The relatively short lifespan of these rumours, not to mention the lack of mainstream media coverage they received, illustrated how effectively tweeters corrected disinformation during this period. It is reasonable to presume that this activity helped calm some tensions between these antagonistic groups, particularly in light of the negative impact upon community relations that rumours spread on social media had during the 2013 union flag protests. However, the violence seen in 2015 clearly demonstrates how the use of Twitter to correct rumours, mis- and disinformation may be insufficient to prevent the outbreak of violence in interface areas.

Tapping Into Advertising Data for Studying International Migration

Ingmar Weber is the Research Director of the Social Computing Group at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI). As an undergraduate Ingmar studied mathematics at Cambridge University, before pursuing a PhD at the Max-Planck Institute for Computer Science. He subsequently held positions at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and Yahoo Research Barcelona. In his interdisciplinary research, he applies computational methods to large amounts of online data from social media and other sources to study human behaviour at scale. Particular topics of interest include quantifying international migration using digital methods and other data for development projects. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles and his work is frequently featured in popular press  Since 2016 he has been selected as an ACM Distinguished Speaker.

International migration is one of the key drivers of demographic change. However, official statistics on “stocks of migrants”, i.e. how many people with origin country X are residing in country Y, are often unreliable. Reasons for this include the free movement of EU nationals within the EU, as well as generally inadequate census and civil registration systems for many developing countries.

Work done by Emilio Zagheni, Krishna Gummadi and myself tries to address some of the shortcomings of traditional methods to create migration statistics by tapping into a new kind of data: audience estimates provided by Facebook.

Facebook and other internet giants collect a rich data set on their users to be able to serve more targeted and more relevant advertising to their users. The data collected includes user self-declared attributes such as age or gender, it includes meta data such as the device or internet connection type used to access the service, it includes third party information such as credit card or voter registration data, and it includes attributes such as topical interests inferred from behavior such as "liking" posts on Facebook or visiting websites with social plugins. See https://www.cision.com/us/2017/07/how-to-improve-social-media-targeting/ for a good list of available targeting options on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Snapchat.

 

The detailed users profiles are generally not available to researchers outside the companies. However, aggregate and anonymized data is shared with potential advertisers in the form of audience estimates. Basically, Facebook and other social networks provide advertisers with information on "how many users match criteria X". For example, to help with planning an advertising campaign, an advertiser could inquire "how many monthly active Facebook users are married, male German expats aged 30-50 living in Qatar"? Answer: 120 (as of Dec 20, 2017).

This type of real-time digital census over Facebook's could potentially be of value to augment existing population estimates, in particular for countries where official statistics are unreliable or outdated. However, due to selection biases and an estimated 13% of duplicate or fake accounts it is clear that using this data set as a simplistic enumeration tool for the whole population will not give accurate results. See https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/07/facebook-claims-it-can-reach-more-people-than-actually-exist-in-uk-us-and-other-countries for more indications of shortcomings of the data.

In our own research, we do not use the raw advertising audience estimates as the final answer. Rather we treat it as one of potentially many input signals for an estimation task of the kind "how many Germans are living in Qatar today"? As long as the biases in the underlying data are either (i) uniform, e.g. 13% of duplicate or fake Facebook accounts for all countries, or (ii) systematic, e.g. Western Europeans are always less likely to be on Facebook compared to Arab nationals, an appropriately fitted model can account for and correct such biases.

In our paper “Leveraging Facebook'sAdvertising Platform to Monitor Stocks of Migrants”, Emilio, Krishna Gummadi and I show the feasibility of this approach to derive stocks of migrants across different US states and around the world. Concretely, we show that it is indeed possible to build models to make out-of-sample predictions on how many people from a certain origin country are residing in a particular US state. Similarly, it is possible to predict the percentage of expats out of the whole population for countries around the globe.

Potentially, the Facebook audience estimates could also give estimates for stocks of migrants at the sub-national and even the sub-city level. To illustrate this, Matheus Araujo, Michael Aupetit, Yelena Mejova and myself created a data visualization for the Facebook data for Doha: http://fb-doha.qcri.org.

As an example, this shows a density map of Nepali expats across Doha, with the highest density in the Industrial Area. The tool also shows that Nepali expats in Doha are predominantly male (93%) and are Android users (94%). Contrast this to the same map for Western expats with the highest densities in West Bay and the Pearl. Western expats are more gender balanced (44% female) and more likely to own iPhones (56%).  A similar visualization for New York City can be explored at http://fb-nyc.qcri.org [Usage info for the two data visualizations: Select several filters on the left to drill down to smaller populations by nationality, gender or other criteria. Click a selection again to de-select and revert to the whole category such as all nationalities or all genders.]

Given Facebook’s global reach of 2.1B monthly active users we believe there is a lot of potential in using this data source to support global development efforts, in particular given its easy accessibility through official APIs. At the same time, no single data source is a cure-all and many have complementary strengths. Satellite data has truly global reach and can give estimates of population densities but satellite data will never reveal the nationality or gender of earthlings. Call detail records (CDR, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_detail_record) are great for studying dynamic changes in population density, but there are limitations for monitoring international migration as people often change their SIM cards once they move.

I’m truly optimistic that as Digital Demography advances and matures as a field and as researchers start to work collaboratively, combining different data sources, we will see more and more scientific work with real impact on the creation of migration statistics. If you’re interested in how to use new data sources and methodologies to help fill data gaps around the globe, please get in touch by email at: iweber -atsignal - hbku.edu.qa.

 

Relevant slide decks:

Using internet advertising data for studying international migration (https://www.slideshare.net/IngmarWeber/using-internet-advertising-data-for-studying-international-migration)

Digital Demography - WWW'17 Tutorial - Part II (https://www.slideshare.net/IngmarWeber/digital-demography-www17-tutorial-part-ii)

Wrapper libraries to obtain Facebook advertising audience estimates:

Wrapper library in R (https://github.com/CSDE-UW/IUSSP-digital-demog-2017) by Connor Gilroy (https://soc.washington.edu/people/connor-gilroy)

Wrapper library in Python (https://github.com/maraujo/pySocialWatcher) by Matheus Araujo (https://sites.google.com/view/matheusaraujo/)

All of my publications are available at https://ingmarweber.de/publications/. Feel free to follow me at https://twitter.com/ingmarweber.

Gender stereotyping used in the media for the recruitment of women to the British Army

This blog is written by Paige Salvage, a student at Cardiff University. She has been studying relevant sociological theories and methods for how we can understand the digital society and how the Internet shapes our everyday lives.

 

The recent development of government legislation allowing female soldiers into infantry positions has resulted in extensive sociological interest in the changing role of women in the Army. Stiehm (1988) suggested that women in the Army have fixed stereotypes, “whores or lesbians” suggesting that serving female soldiers have both sexual and sexuality foci. Assuming this is true, Goffman’s (1976:9) suggests that “gender displays […] reflect fundamental features of the social structure” in the Army. This study considered how images that have been used across social media, in particular the British Army’s Instagram page (@britisharmy), depict women who are already serving. In order to interpret the findings it was important to understand how women are stereotyped into roles society deem as typically ‘female’.

It is important to note that Stiehm’s (1988) stereotypical labelling of women in the Army is not only subjective but also unethical. However, Goffman’s (1976) work on gender displays balanced any possible disparity as he suggested that gender is a flexible and fluid notion. With Braun and Clarke’s (2006) guide to thematic analysis, this study aimed to probe the following two inductive themes:

1.       Masculine - those who are taking on a more masculine role or are taking part in a military activity that is stereotypically male      

2.       Feminine - those who take part in more stereotypically female activities

 

Data collection was limited to the British Army’s Instagram page (@britisharmy) after 8^th July 2016 when women were officially allowed access to infantry roles. This period was considered significant as it was expected that more images of women in combat or infantry scenarios would be shared as a promotion of women into these roles.

Findings

Masculine

 

Analysis of images in Instagram (@britisharmy) suggested that images of women are more likely to be depicted in masculine roles (Figure 1). This suggests that the British Army are attempting to break the down the assumptions that women in the military are the weaker sex. By providing the public with images of women taking part in arduous and dangerous activities, the British Army are promoting masculine roles for women.

However, this does not address the common stereotypes that depict women in the Army. Women who hold a more masculine physique in these images may be considered “lesbian”, as Stiehm (1988) noted that this label was linked more towards physical attributes rather than the sexuality of the individual. As some show masculine traits, these women become ‘othered’ by assuming a more male stereotype.

 

Feminine

There are significantly less images in instagram depicting women in the army as feminine (Figure 2), suggesting that the British Army are biased towards using images to portray women in active combat roles. This is contrary to the acknowledged social role of women as homemakers and carers. Indeed, feminine images of women on @britisharmy tend to depict women in healthcare or domestic (eg chefs) roles, suggest that the British Army concur with the idea that women need less physically demanding  roles.

From this study, we can start to understand how masculine pictures of women are used as promotional aids to increase recruitment numbers, particularly into infantry roles. It appears that, following the 2016 policy change to allow females into infantry regiments, the British Army are now targeting women in their recruitment campaigns. However, it could not be concluded that female stereotypes were purposefully used to recruit certain types of women for these infantry roles.

 

Westminster Student Blog Series

We have been posting a series of short vlogs, produced by University of Westminster Postgraduate students. They are all based on their research of social media. As this is the final vlog, we would like to thank all the Westminster students for their entries.

Public Sphere in the case of the Women's March on London

Author: Tian

A student of the Frankfurt School of Social Research, Jürgen Habermas wrote The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) to explore the status of public opinion in the practice of representative government in Western Europe.

The feminist critique points out that the ‘public sphere’ has proposed a sphere of educated, rich men, juxtaposed to the private sphere that has been seen as the domain of women, which also excluded gays, lesbians, and ethnicities (Fraser, 1990). The criticism has also suggested that a democratic and multicultural society should based on the plural public arenas (Fuchs, 2014). Habermas agrees that his early account in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, published in 1962, has neglected proletarian, feminist and other public spheres (Fuchs, 2014).

The recent example would be the success of Women’s March. The US election proved a catalyst for a grassroots movement of women to assert the positive values that the politics of fear denies. The Women’s March was held in order to represent the rights of women and solidarity with participants from the threatened minorities such as Muslim and Mexican citizens and the LGBTQ community. There were hundreds of marches have taken place in the major cities around the world.

The video would criticize the concept of ‘pubic sphere’ from both feminist perspective and the emerging of social media. Discuss how the rise of social networking sites has resulted in public discussions on digital platform.

Reference:

Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy. Social Text, (25/26), p.56.

Fuchs, C., (2014). Social media. A critical introduction. London: Sage.

Social media research, ‘personal ethics’, and the Ethics Ecosystem

Gabrielle Samuel: Research Fellow Lancaster University / Research Associate, King’s College London.  Research interests: research ethics, ethical and social issues surrounding innovative biotechnologies; social media ethics; qualitative research.

Gemma Derrick: Lecturer, Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University. Research interests: Research evaluation, Qualitative research, Group/committee decision-making. 

Ethics review may seem overly bureaucratic to some, but in this blog we argue that a more researcher-committee collaborative process, rather than a gatekeeper ‘tick-box’ role, may help with navigating the ‘ethics ecosystem’ when using new research tools such as social media (SM) data.

The ethics ecosystem exists as an inter-related membership of academic bodies that, when fully functional, acts to reinforce a high-level of ethical behaviour from researchers, and to guard against academic misconduct.  Specifically, this ethics ecosystem can be described as all the individuals (researchers), organisations (research institutions/research ethics committees (RECs)) and external bodies (publishing houses, funding bodies, professional associations) which promote ethically responsible research behaviour in the academy. Ordinarily, the academy’s ethics ecosystem works well due to a shared understanding of what ethically responsible research behaviour is. However, this system breaks down when new ideas, methods or approaches are introduced to its members, and each player interprets and enforces theses ideals of ethical behaviour differently.  This forces each member to re-examine concepts previously thought to be set in ethical stone.  Such is the case of SM research.

Currently this system is failing SM research

Our research has spoken to members at all levels of the ethics ecosystem; researchers using SM data, research ethics committee members, universities, funding bodies, publishing houses and journal Editors, and we found that members possessed inconsistent understandings of ethics applicable to the use of SM in research.  There were different interpretations of the established ethical notions of consent (should we ask for it? shouldn’t we? when and how should we?) and privacy (how, or even should, SM users’ data be protected, and to what degree?); some members viewed SM data as ‘fair game’, while others were more cautious; and only some shouldered responsibility to protect SM users’ perceived privacy. What was lacking was an overarching understanding reinforced by a larger governance body as a mechanism to fuel a wider, community-led understanding about ethical conduct (and misconduct) towards SM research.

At the research level of the ecosystem, researchers’ were monitoring their own decisions about how best to act ethically. However, when left to their own devices this over-reliance on subjective monitoring of behaviour risks the development of a form of “personal ethics”, which would be different for each researcher within this ecosystem;

Interviewer: Are there any guidelines that you follow in your own research?

Researcher: It’s my guidelines. Everybody has their own definition of ethics…. 

This became dangerous when the acceptability of these decisions were related to how strongly researchers justify them, rather than being dependent on conduct checks and balances available by a wider, community-led ethical understanding of SM research;

You’ve got to develop the sense of what's right…then put that across and make your case’

The differing interpretations of personal ethics dovetailed at the institutional level of the ecosystem, when researchers had to, or chose to submit their research proposal to a REC for consideration. Committee members, as actors in this level of the ecosystem, spoke about their lack of experience in reviewing this type of research simply because so few proposals are submitted (due to the differing researcher interpretations of whether ethical review was required). As such REC judgements of ethical conduct relied heavily on researchers’ justifications of ethical decision-making within the application;

We…sometimes make different decisions even for projects that look pretty similar. It’s how they build up their case doing that particular project 

The same held true for other members of the ethics ecosystem, such as the Journal editors and, by extension, peer-reviewers.

To summarise, what does this wide disagreement around SM research mean for the ethics ecosystem? After all, there is nothing wrong with ethical norms being driven by researchers’ different subjective justifications of their personal ethics a.k.a ethical pluralism. However, for SM research, and similar new research tools, reliance on researchers’ justifications of ethical behaviour can be dangerous as it risks leaving important ethical decisions in limbo, and allows for ethically problematic research to fall between the cracks.

What is needed is more governance within the ethics ecosystem.  Only then can enough checks and balances exist to ensure best practice, promote a shared understanding of SM research ethics, and provide necessary audits to protect against scientific misconduct.

One step towards this is to require researchers to submit for ethics review to provide an extra layer of scrutiny. More importantly, it provides REC members with the tacit knowledge necessary to act as this larger arbitrator of ethical conduct for SM research.

Westminster Student Blog Series

We will be posting a series of short vlogs, produced by University of Westminster Postgraduate students. They are all based on their research of social media. We will be posting one a week for the next few weeks, so keep your eyes peeled!

The Internet as Playground and Factory

Author: Remigijus Marciulis

In recent years, the labour theory of value has been a field of intense interest and debates, particularly the use of Marxist concepts in the digital context. There are straight facts showing that giant online companies like Facebook and Google have accumulated enormous amounts of capital by selling their users’ data to advertisers. The phenomena of a ‘Social Factory’ is discussed by different scholars. The value we create go beyond actual factory walls, including the online sphere. “The sociality is industrialised and industry is socialised” (Jarrett, 2016: 28). Trebor Scholz refers the Internet as a ‘playground’ and ‘factory’. His argument is based on the fact that being online is a part of having fun. Is it really uploading a video on YouTube counts as a digital exploitation? On the other hand, Christian Fuchs says that there is a straight connection between the time spent on the Internet and the capitalist exploitation, free labour and surplus-value. Kylie Jarrett tackles the subject from a metaphoric angle of the Digital Housewife. She applies concepts of Marx and feminist approaches by investigating the digital world. According to her, a digital or immaterial labour is profoundly exploited by capitalism.
The interview with Dr Alessandro Gandini explores subjects of digital labour and ‘playbour’, the use and appropriateness of Marxist concepts. To sum up, the subject of digital labour and exploitation is complex and diverse. It requires a more profound study that distinguishes the “real” digital work and time spent online for leisure. Scholars agree that the communicative action and activism are the main key instruments fighting against digital capitalist inequalities.

Call for speakers: Answering social science questions with social media data

Thursday 8^th March 2018, The Wellcome Collection, London, NW1 2BE

After several successful events, we’re pleased to say that the NSMNSS network (http://nsmnss.blogspot.co.uk/) and Social Research Association (www.the-sra.org.uk) are again teaming up to deliver a one-day conference on ‘Answering social science questions with social media data’.

As social media research matures as a discipline, and methodological and ethical concerns are being addressed, focus is increasingly shifting on to the role that it can and should play in the social sciences – what are the questions it can help us to answer?

We are looking for speakers who have completed a piece of social research using social media data to present their findings and discuss how this has made a difference:

• ·    How has it impacted policy, best practice, or understanding?
• ·    How has it answered a question that would have been unfeasible using conventional research methods alone?

This research could be in any substantive area, from health or crime to politics or travel, as long as it is ‘social’ research. It can also include any type of analysis – quantitative or qualitative analysis, big data or small – as long as it involves some form of data collection via a social media platform. We want to encourage a range of different methods and topics to help demonstrate the diversity of the methodology and the role it can play.

Are you interested in presenting?

If you have completed a piece of research using social media research methods, or have any suggestions of who we should contact, then please complete the submissions template and send to nsmnss@natcen.ac.uk by Monday 27^th November. Let us know the name and topic of the research study, which social media platform was used, a brief description of methodology, and the findings and impact of this study.

This event is being set up by the SRA and NSMNSS network. We want to keep the event accessible and ticket prices reasonable, but need to cover the costs of the venue hire/refreshments, so we cannot pay presenters – however there will be 1 free place per presentation, and we will be able to cover reasonable ‘within UK’ public transport travel expenses.

The #NSMNSS & SRA teams

Westminster Student Blog Series

We will be posting a series of short vlogs, produced by University of Westminster Postgraduate students. They are all based on their research of social media. We will be posting one a week for the next few weeks, so keep your eyes peeled!

Digital Review: Public Sphere and the Exclusion of Women

Author: Karolina Kramplova

The creation of new forms of digital social media during the first decade of the 21st century has completely changed the way in which many people communicate and share information. When we think about social media as a space where the public can discuss current affairs and politics, it is interesting to consider it with the theory of public sphere. Ever since Habermas established this concept, it was criticised by scholars like Nancy Fraser. She argues that the theory was established based on a number of exclusions and discriminations. I focused on the exclusion of women from the political life. Andy Ruddock, an author of the book, Youth and Media, also talks about the lack of representation of women in subculture studies and how social media is not about democratisation and public debate but rather about people picking what they like. An activist, Hannah Knight, acknowledges the discrimination women face until this day. However, when it comes to public sphere and social media, even though Knight argues there is a space for public debates, she says people are not listening to everyone. Social media empowers movements such as the Women’s March, but does it contribute towards democratisation, or do we just want to believe it does? Therefore, both the scholar, Ruddock and the activist Knight, have persuaded me that the concept of public sphere is no longer relevant when it comes to social media.

Westminster Student Blog Series

We will be posting a series of short vlogs, produced by University of Westminster Postgraduate students. They are all based on their research of social media. We will be posting one a week for the next few weeks, so keep your eyes peeled!

Journalism, the Filter Bubble and the Public Sphere

Author: Mick Kelly

"The influence of social media platforms and technology companies is having a greater effect on American journalism than even the shift from print to digital.”
(Bell and Owen, 2017)

This is the conclusion of a study released in March 2017 by researchers from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism who investigated a journalism industry reacting to controversies about fake news and algorithmic filter bubbles that occurred at the time of the US presidential election. The report noted the following key points:

• Technology companies have become media publishers
• Low-quality content that is sharable and of scale is viewed as more valuable by social media platforms than high-quality, time-intensive journalism
• Platforms choose algorithms over human editors to filter content, but the ‘nuances of journalism require editorial judgment, so platforms will need to reconsider their approach’.

The report states that news might currently reach a bigger audience than ever before via social media platforms such as Facebook, but readers have no way of knowing how data influences the stories they read or how ‘their online behaviour is being manipulated’. (Bell and Owen, 2017)

This video assignment reveals that the debate has existed since 2011 when Eli Pariser wrote The Filter Bubble, which explained how data profiling led to personalisation and the algorithmic filtering of news stories. The theme of this video is the impact of this robotic process on journalism within the public sphere, and includes an interview with Jim Grice, who is Head of News and Current Affairs at London Live.

REFERENCE
Bell, E. and Owen, T. (2017) The Platform Press: How Silicon Valley reengineered journalism. The Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Available from:
https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/platform-press-how-silicon-valley-reengineered-journalism.php [Accessed 30 March 2017]

Westminster Student Blog Series

We will be posting a series of short vlogs, produced by University of Westminster Postgraduate students. They are all based on their research of social media. We will be posting one a week for the next few weeks, so keep your eyes peeled!


The Act of Sharing on Social Media

Author: Erxiao Wang

Social media has been the growing theme of the Information Age we live in. It is of considerable importance to understand, utilise, and engage wisely with social media platforms within our contemporary networked digital environment. This video is a theoretically inspired social media artefact; it introduces some of the key arguments in University of Westminster Professor Graham Meikle's book “Social Media: Communication, Sharing and Visibility”. This book includes theories such as the idea of media convergence, the business model of online sharing, the mediated online visibility and also the exploitable data that is subject to online surveillance. Moreover, Professor Meikle has also analysed the commercial Internet of Web 2.0 that enabled the user generated content and witnessed the coming together of the public and personal communication, and the always-on mobile connectivity has enabled greater mobility that allows social change. In order to make use of these key theories in our everyday practice and conversations of social media, I had a chat with a good friend of mine Junchi Deng, who is an accordion player who attends the Royal Academy of Music here in London and also posts and vlogs regularly. We talked about the act of sharing on social media, and the idea of promoting oneself on social networking sites, especially for a musician like himself. Our discussion centres around everyday use of social media, and our individual observations towards the incorporation and review of these platforms.

Terrorism and Social Media Conference Part Two

This is the second part of a two-part series on the #TASM conference. You can read the first part here.

The 27th and 28th June saw the congregation of some of the world’s leading experts in counter-terrorism and 145 delegates from 15 countries embark on Swansea University’s Bay Campus for the Cyberterrorism Project’s Terrorism and Social Media conference (#TASMConf). Over the two days, 59 speakers presented their research into terrorists’ use of social media and responses to this phenomenon. The keynote speakers consisted of Sir John Scarlett (former head of MI6), Max Hill QC (the UK’s Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation), Dr Erin Marie Saltman (Facebook’s Policy Manager for counter-terrorism and counter-extremism in Europe, the Middle East and Africa), Professor Philip Bobbitt, Professor Maura Conway and Professor Bruce Hoffman. The conference oversaw a diverse range of disciplines including law, criminology, psychology, security studies, linguistics, and many more. Amy-Louise Watkin and Joe Whittaker take us through what was discussed (blog originally posted here).

Both Dr Weeda Mehran, and Amy-Louise Watkin and Sean Looney presented on children in terrorist organisations and their portrayal through videos and images. Dr Mehran analysed eight videos and found that children help to create a spectacle as they generate memorability, novelty, visibility and competitiveness, and display high levels of confidence while undertaking executions. On the other hand, Watkin and Looney found in their analysis of images in online jihadist magazines that there are notable differences between IS and AQ in their use of children with IS focusing on displaying brutality through images of child soldiers and AQ trying to create shame and guilt at their Western followers through images of children as victims of Western-back warfare. They concluded that these differences need to be taken into account when creating counter-messages and foreign policy.

Joe Whittaker presented his research on online radicalisation. He began with a literature review of the field, concluding that the academic consensus was that the Internet is a facilitator, rather than a driver, of radicalisation. He then offered five reasons as to why there was good reason to doubt this consensus: the lack of empirical data, how old the data is compared to the growth of the Internet, the few dissenting voices in the field, the changing online threat since 2014, and the wealth of information that can be learned from other academic fields (such as Internet studies and psychology). He then offered three case studies of individuals radicalised in the previous three years to learn whether the academic consensus still holds; finding that although it does in two cases, there may be good reason to believe that social media could drastically change the nature of some individuals’ radicalisation.

On the topic of corporate social responsibility in counter-terrorism, Chelsea Daymon and Sergei Boeke discussed different aspects of private entities engaging in policing extremist content on the Internet. Daymon drew upon the different projects and initiatives conducted by industry leaders, such as Google’s Jigsaw projects and the shared database between Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. She, however, warned against the excessive use of predictive technology for countering violent extremism, suggesting that it could raise practical and ethical problems in the future. Drawing from Lawrence Lessig’s models, Boeke outlined four distinct categories of regulation that can be applied to the Internet: legal, architectural, market-based, and altering social norms before offering different suggestions for how this can be used in the context of countering terrorism.

The final panel related to creating counter-narratives, which included Dr Paul Fitzpatrick, who discussed different models of radicalisation, and how it related to his work as Prevent Coordinator at Cardiff Metropolitan University. He began by critiquing a number of prevalent models including Moghaddam’s staircase, as well as all multi-stage, sequential models, observing that, having seen over one hundred cases first-hand, no-one had followed the stages in a linear fashion. He also highlighted the particular vulnerabilities of students coming to university, who have their traditional modes of thinking deliberately broken down, and are susceptible to many forms of extreme thinking. Sarah Carthy, who presented a meta-analysis of counter-narratives, followed Dr Fitzpatrick. She observed that specific narratives are particularly powerful because they are simple, present a singular version of a story, and are rational (but not necessarily reasonable). Importantly, Carthy noted that despite many assuming that counter-narratives can do little harm – the worst thing that can happen is that they are ignored – some were shown to have a detrimental effect on the target audience, raising important ethical considerations. The final member of the counter-narrative panel was Dr Haroro Ingram, who presented his strategic framework for countering terrorist propaganda. Ingram’s framework, which draws on findings from the field of behavioural economics, aims to disrupt the “linkages” between extremist groups’ “system of meaning”. Dr Ingram observes that the majority of IS propaganda leverages automatic, heuristic-based thinking, and encouraging more deliberative thinking when constructing a counter-narrative could yield positive results.

The last day of the conference saw keynote Max Hill QC argue that there is a strong place for counter-narratives to be put into place to discredit extremist narratives, and spoke of his experiences visiting British Muslims who have been affected by the recent UK terrorist attacks. He told of the powerful counter-narratives that these British Muslims hold and argued their importance in countering extremist propaganda both online and offline. Hill also argued against the criminalising of tech companies who ‘don’t do enough’, asking the question of how we measure ‘enough’? His presentation was shortly followed by Dr Erin Marie Saltman who discussed Facebook’s advancing efforts in countering terrorism and extremism. She argued that both automated techniques and human intervention are required to tackle this and minimise errors on the site that sees visits from 1.28 billion people daily. Saltman gave an overview of Facebook’s Violent Extremism Policies and spoke of the progress the organisation has made regarding identifying the ability of actors to make new accounts. Overall, Saltman made it crystal clear that Facebook are strongly dedicated to eradicating all forms of terrorism and violent extremism from their platform.

With the wealth of knowledge that was shared from the academics, practitioners and private sector companies that attended TASM, and the standard of research proposals that followed from the post-TASM research sandpit, it is clear that TASM was a success. The research presented made it very clear that online terrorism is a threat that affects society as a whole and the solutions will need to come from multiple directions, multiple disciplines, and multiple collaborations. 

You can find Max Hill QC’s TASM speech in full here and follow us on Twitter @CTP_Swansea to find out when we will be releasing videos of TASM presentations.