| 1. |
- Farkas, Johan, et al.
(författare)
-
Racism on Social Media : A Critical Review of Methodological Challenges
- 2019
-
Ingår i: CDSMR Abstracts. - : Umeå university. ; , s. 1-1
-
Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Social media platforms have altered how social interactions take place online. This new era of user practices, micro-communication cultures, bots, and an increasing algorithmic shaping of sociability, opens up new research endeavours to understand how racism articulates on social media platforms. Research points to the need of studying racism and other forms of systemic oppression as the result of user practices and technological mediation. In the realm of social media, key technological features - such as anonymity, interactivity, connectivity and datafcation - are tactically exploited to create new modalities of ‘platformed racism’. However, access to data is gradually becoming scarce, as platforms increasingly close of their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), while new opaque platforms, such as WhatsApp and WeChat, pose challenges for empirical research. This article presents a literature review of 113 scholarly articles on racism and social media published between 2014 and 2018, collected through Google Scholar and Web of Science (of an initial sample of 270 articles). The article frst examines the geographical scope and overall methodologies described in the literature. Secondly, the article presents an in-depth analysis of the methodological and ethical challenges of studying racism on social media. Based on this analysis, the article critically discusses the overall limitations of the feld, possibilities of overcoming these as well as future problems posed by increasing opacity and social media companies’ questionable arrangements to collaborate and support research.
|
|
| 2. |
- Farkas, Johan, et al.
(författare)
-
The Implications of Social Media Disinformation in Reproducing Systemic Forms of Oppression Like Racism
- 2018
-
Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Social media platforms have altered how social interactions take place online. This new era of user practices, micro-communication cultures, bots, and an increasing algorithmic shaping of sociability, opens up new research endeavours to understand how systemic racism articulates on social media platforms. Research points to the need of studying race, racism and other forms of systemic oppression as the result of user practices and technological mediation (Brook, 2009; Daniels, 2013; Massanari, 2015; McIlwain, 2016; Nakamura & Chow-White, 2012; Noble & Tynes, 2016; Sharma, 2013). However, access to data is becoming gradually scarce. This article unravels the methodological challenges involved in studying platform-articulated racism in a context of platform shutdowns of their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and in a moment when opaque apps like WhatsApp and WeChat are used as social platforms. Platforms, even though they are private entities, resemble public institutions in that they play a fundamental role in organising public discourse and people’s lives. Although platforms often allege that users have the possibility to opt out, the way social media is entangled in our everyday lives makes the prospect to leave the service only an option for a privileged few. Thus, platforms enactment and reproduction of racism is a matter of public concern rather than a market problem to be solved. Racism, therefore, is built into spaces (social media platforms) that go beyond our more traditional institutions (for example, the state, the school, the media). We argue that the obstacles facing empirical work on social media contribute to the reproduction and enactment of systemic racism. This article departs from an analysis of empirical studies of platform-articulated racism from 2013 to 2018 that have used social media data. Findings shows that this research face a range of interconnected and complex challenges. This includes: epistemological challenges (due to techniques of concealing, covert propaganda, cloaking, lack of authorship, etc.), lack of contextual knowledge (i.e. how can we understand what we observe on one social media platform without a larger context), lack of access to data (API limitations and opaque apps), and ethical challenges. Building on the presented findings, the article discusses overall limitations of the field, possibilities of overcoming these as well as future problems posed by increasing opacity and social media companies’ questionable arrangements to collaborate and support research.
|
|
| 3. |
- Matamoros-Fernández, Ariadna, et al.
(författare)
-
Racism, Hate Speech, and Social Media : A Systematic Review and Critique
- 2021
-
Ingår i: Television and New Media. - : Sage Publications. - 1527-4764 .- 1552-8316. ; 22:2, s. 205-224
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Departing from Jessie Daniels’s 2013 review of scholarship on race and racism online, this article maps and discusses recent developments in the study of racism and hate speech in the subfield of social media research. Systematically examining 104 articles, we address three research questions: Which geographical contexts, platforms, and methods do researchers engage with in studies of racism and hate speech on social media? To what extent does scholarship draw on critical race perspectives to interrogate how systemic racism is (re)produced on social media? What are the primary methodological and ethical challenges of the field? The article finds a lack of geographical and platform diversity, an absence of researchers’ reflexive dialogue with their object of study, and little engagement with critical race perspectives to unpack racism on social media. There is a need for more thorough interrogations of how user practices and platform politics co-shape contemporary racisms.
|
|
| 4. |
- Rieder, Bernhard, et al.
(författare)
-
Making a Living in the Creator Economy : A Large-Scale Study of Linking on YouTube
- 2023
-
Ingår i: Social Media + Society. - : Sage Publications. - 2056-3051. ; 9:2
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article explores monetization and networking strategies within the consolidating creator economy. Through a large-scale study of linking practices on YouTube, we investigate how creators seek to build their online presence across multiple platforms and widen their income streams. In particular, we build on a near-complete sample of 153,000 "elite" YouTube channels with at least 100,000 subscribers, retrieved at the end of 2019, and investigate the URLs found in 137 million video descriptions to analyze traces of these strategies. We first situate our study within relevant literature around the creator economy, the role of platforms, and issues such as social capital building and economic precarity. We then outline our data and analytical approach, followed by a presentation of our findings. The article finishes with a discussion on how monetization and networking strategies via placing URLs in video descriptions have become more important over time, but also differ substantially between channel sizes, content categories, and geographic locations. Our empirical analysis shows that YouTube, as a highly unequal platformed media system, thrives on the economic pressures it exerts on its creators.
|
|
