Buddhism, the Internet and Digital Media: The Pixel in the Lotus explores Buddhist practice and teachings in an increasingly networked and digital era. Contributors consider the ways Buddhism plays a role and is present in digital media through a variety of methods including concrete case studies, ethnographic research, and content analysis, as well as interviews with practitioners and cyber-communities. In addition to considering Buddhism in the context of technologies such as virtual worlds, social media, and (...) mobile devices, authors ask how the Internet affects identity, authority and community, and what effect this might have on the development, proliferation, and perception of Buddhism in an online environment. Together, these essays make the case that studying contemporary online Buddhist practice can provide valuable insights into the shifting role religion plays in our constantly changing, mediated, hurried, and uncertain culture. (shrink)

This article is featured in a special issue dedicated to theme, "the human being in the digital era: awareness, critical thinking and political space in the age of the internet and artificial intelligence." In this article, I consider the way that social-media companies nudge us to spend more time on their platforms, and I argue that, in principle, these nudges are morally permissible: they are not manipulative and do not violate any obvious moral rules. The moral problem, (...) I argue, is not with nudging in principle but is instead with the fact that users are being nudged towards something bad for them. In practice, this often involves being nudged to spend an unhealthy amount of time using a social-media app or being nudged towards content that is bad for us, such as by promoting eating-disorder content to young girls. Since nudging is morally permissible, it is open to these companies to use the same technologies to nudge us towards the good. (shrink)

Background Social media and Internet technologies present several emerging and ill-explored issues for a modern healthcare workforce. One issue is patient-targeted Googling, which involves a healthcare professional using a social networking site or publicly available search engine to find patient information online. The study’s aim was to address a deficit in data and knowledge regarding PTG, and to investigate medical student use of SNSs due to a close association with PTG. Method The authors surveyed final year (...) medical students at the Otago Medical School, University of Otago in January 2016. A subset completed focus groups that were analysed using thematic analysis to identify key themes relating to students’ attitudes towards PTG, and reasons why they might engage in PTG. Results Fifty-four students completed the survey, which showed that PTG was uncommon. Attitudes were varied and context dependent. Most participants saw problems with PTG and favoured more explicit guidance on the issue. SNS usage was high ; participants were concerned by the content of their SNS profiles and who they were connecting with online. Participants showing high SNS use were 1.83 times more likely to have conducted PTG than lower use groups. Conclusions The diverse attitudes uncovered in this study indicated that teaching or guidelines could be useful to healthcare professionals considering PTG. Though ethically problematic, PTG may be important to patient care and safety. The decision to conduct PTG should be made with consideration of ethical principles and the intended use of the information. (shrink)

Background:Data representing people’s behaviour, attitudes, feelings and relationships are increasingly being harvested from social media platforms and re-used for research purposes. This can be ethically problematic, even where such data exist in the public domain. We set out to explore how the academic community is addressing these challenges by analysing a national corpus of research ethics guidelines and published studies in one interdisciplinary research area.Methods:Ethics guidelines published by Research Councils UK, its seven-member councils and guidelines cited within these (...) were reviewed. Guidelines referring to social media were classified according to published typologies of social media research uses and ethical considerations for social media mining. Using health research as an exemplar, PubMed was searched to identify studies using social media data, which were assessed according to their coverage of ethical considerations and guidelines.Results:Of the 13 guidelines published or recom... (shrink)

This article reflects on the relevance of Herbert Marcuse’s philosophy of technology in the age social media. Although Marcuse did not experience the rise of the Internet, the World Wide Web, and “social media” as major means of communication, his insights about technological rationality, technology, and the role of technology in the context of labor allow us today to reflect on the relevance of Marcuse’s philosophy of technology for a critical theory of digital and (...) class='Hi'>social media. (shrink)

Purpose In considering the ubiquity of information systems and the increasingly important role served in modern business and service delivery, social media if properly leveraged gives potential competitive advantage to a company in its respective industry. With Paramount Web Nigeria Ltd. as a case study, this paper aims to focus on the important aspects of adopting social media as an IS such as data privacy principles and the role of social media in the context (...) of a small internet service company. Design/methodology/approach Relevant research information was relied upon to highlight the various factors involved with adopting social media as an IS. Findings Data handling and privacy policies must also be considered and properly devised if the concerned company is to effectively adopt social media as an IS. Decision-making tools such as SWOT analysis and the quality triangle are vital during the planning stages of deploying an IS. Research limitations/implications Research papers on aspects of social media as an IS especially in West African academia has been lacking. The challenge is in contextual information related to similar topics. Practical implications Findings detailed in this paper will serve to provide a better understanding of the important factors to be considered when adapting a new IS to an existing business. Originality/value This paper serves to highlight the potential factors to be considered when dealing with business ISs with a strong focus on social media and internet related services. (shrink)

Purpose With the rapid improvement in digital infrastructure, the popularity of digital devices and smartphones in every pocket, the yearning to stay connected with others has increased manifold, especially in youngsters. This has raised multiple concerns primarily related to the problematic usage of the internet (PUI). The current research study aims to scrutinize the association between PUI, psychological and mental health (PMH), social media fatigue (SMF), fear of missing out (FOMO), desire to disconnect (DD) and its relation (...) with a novel phenomenon of joy of missing out (JOMO). Design/methodology/approach The present research study embraces the empirical research method through quantitative analysis. The proposed theoretical model was empirically tested using primary data, collected through a self-designed structured questionnaire. The study sample included individuals between 16 and 39 years of age as these are the most active demographics on social media. The model is empirically tested with the help of structural equation modeling applied using software IBM AMOS 20.0 and SPSS 22.0. Initially, first-order confirmatory factor analysis was conducted, to measure and test the fit indices of the proposed model. Secondly, path analysis using structural equation modeling was carried out for the model. Findings Empirical synthesis of this research shows that PUI significantly and positively impacts mental and psychological health, FOMO and SMF. Also, SMF significantly and positively affects the DD which significantly and positively affects the JOMO. However, as depicted by the results of this study, FOMO have no considerable impact on SMF. Originality/value A study that connects the PUI with PMH, SMF and FOMO is rare to find. Second, this study uses data collected from social media users of India in the age group of 16–39 years. This slice of the population is most active in internet, and internet-enabled platform and are scantly studied, especially in the Indian context. This makes the study more exciting and crucial. (shrink)

Resumo: Mente é, para Peirce, um sistema de crenças que age para alcançar um determinado propósito. Não apenas Peirce atribui mente a instituições e grupos sociais, mas o desenvolvimento da mente depende da extensão dela além das mentes humanas individuais. Portanto, comunidades ou instituições sociais incorporam hábitos sociais e agem como mentes, com propósitos próprios, fixando crenças de dois tipos: crenças de importância vital e crenças teóricas, que têm relação com o conhecimento e a verdade. Redes sociais, na internet, (...) podem ser vistas como uma complexa mente social composta por indivíduos e suas mídias digitais, as quais englobam gadgets, algoritmos e plataformas. Se as redes sociais na internet atuam de forma a atingir certas crenças, de que tipo elas são? São crenças de importância vital ou crenças teóricas que conduzem ao conhecimento e à verdade? Esses dois tipos de crenças são suficientes para entender os modos de ação das redes sociais na internet? (shrink)

Internet-enabled technologies are said to allow individuals to consume, create and distribute their own content without governmental control. They also provide opportunities for new forms of activism and mobilisation that can challenge repressive governments. Recent reports on citizens’ mobilisation in authoritarian states suggest that the Internet can generate new forms of opposition against totalitarian rules. The aim of this paper is to examine whether these new technologies can be regarded as vehicles of democracy or instruments of authoritarianism. Can (...) Internet-enabled technologies promote values of openness and freedom that gradually and significantly act as anti-totalitarian tools? (shrink)

Since the 1990s, the influence of the internet and social media in daily communication has skyrocketed. This has brought both remarkable opportunities and perceived perils. Recent years have seen increases in suicide and mental health concerns, political polarization, and online aggression. Can such phenomenon be connected causally to communication via social media? This article reviews the evidence for perceived deleterious effects of social media on several areas of human welfare, including political polarization, depression (...) and suicide, aggression, and cyberbullying. In addition to examining contemporary evidence from psychological studies, a historical analysis is included to examine whether we truly live in a uniquely difficult time or whether similar patterns of social behavior can be witnessed in other, pre-internet times. It is concluded that evidence may link social media to some negative social outcomes but in ways that are nuanced and complicated, often interacting with user motivations and personalities and situational variables. An increased focus on preregistered, standardized scientific methods and cautious interpretation of effect sizes can help clarify real versus phantom effects of social media. (shrink)

We live in a world which is more connected than ever before. We can now send messages to a friend or colleague with a touch of a button, can learn about other’s interests before we even meet them, and now leave a digital trail behind us—whether we intend to or not. One question which, in proportion to its importance, has been asked quite infrequently since the dawn of the Internet era involves exactly how meaningful all of these connections are. (...) To what extent can we love another if we only communicate via social technology? What value does visiting a friend have which e-mailing him or texting him does not? “Social Media, Love, and the Look of the Other” attempts to answer these questions by applying the framework of social communication established by Jean-Paul Sartre to the realm of social media. Sartre writes that in all communications with the other, we face the look of the other—or our own perception of how the other judges us. The direction in which the look points determines, to a large degree, the character of any interaction with others. How does social media affect the nature of this look? Particularly, this inquiry seeks to discover the nature of the object to which this look points—and what implications, in cases where the look is not directed at ourselves, this has on our ability to develop and share concern for others. (shrink)

Psychometrics firms such as Cambridge Analytica (CA) and troll factories such as the Internet Research Agency (IRA) have had a significant effect on democratic politics, through narrow targeting of political advertising (CA) and concerted disinformation campaigns on social media (IRA) (U.S. Department of Justice 2019; Select Committee on Intelligence, United States Senate 2019; DiResta et al. 2019). It is natural to think that such activities manipulate individuals and, hence, are wrong. Yet, as some recent cases illustrate, the (...) moral concerns with these activities cannot be reduced simply to the effects they have on individuals. Rather, we will argue, the wrongness of these activities relates to the threats they present to the legitimacy of political orders. This occurs primarily through a mechanism we call “emergent manipulation,” rather than through the sort of manipulation that involves specific individuals. (shrink)

As access to the internet continues to grow, so do concerns about its effects on individuals. This digital revolution is not without its religious implications, and it appears that opinions are divided on how religiosity is being affected. On the one hand, it is possible that the emergence of virtual Islam could lead to an increase in extremism. On the other hand, with more exposure to diverse perspectives, religious tolerance may be bolstered. This article examines the potential effects of (...) the internet and social media on religious thought, drawing upon insights from the contemporary philosophy of technology, specifically postphenomenology. In this framework, technology is seen as an active agent, influencing both the subject and the object. Additionally, this article seeks to explain the logic underlying the conflicting views in the literature. (shrink)

On the basis of internet forum and press media data, this article studies the expression of hostile attitudes towards multilingualism and multiculturalism in the context of debates about immigration. The forum data are drawn from the BBC’s Have Your Say website, which is a moderated forum that excludes polemical and abusive postings. Nevertheless, it still seems to provide its users ample opportunity for airing strongly anti-immigrant attitudes. The narratives in which these attitudes are being expressed are exemplary stories (...) of the posters’ supposed encounters with the use of foreign languages in the street, in the workplace or at school. This presence of foreign languages in the British public sphere is evaluated as being problematic and is “explained” as a result of mass immigration, which serves to reinforce the scenario of a culture mix that will destroy British “home” culture. Media coverage of immigration partly supports such vilification of multilingualism and multiculturalism, and the reports and comments often seem to be drawn from similar narrative-argumentative templates as those of the discussions on Have Your Say. In conclusion, we argue that counterspeech informed by Critical Discourse Analysis has to develop alternative narratives and figurative scenarios that question the bias against linguistic and cultural diversity. (shrink)

This article examines whether the attention to cultural products on the internet is more democratically structured than in traditional print media, and how these types of media attention affect commercial success. For the U.S. fiction book releases in February 2009, I analyze consumer ratings at the web store Amazon.com and the social networking site Goodreads.com. The results show that on the internet far more books receive attention, and that this indeed comes to the advantage of (...) female authors and authors of popular fiction. Moreover, online publicity positively affects commercial success. These outcomes suggest that online attention to cultural products dampens the effects of institutionally embedded evaluations, while word-of-mouth mechanisms are becoming increasingly prominent in terms of how cultural products are discussed. (shrink)

This paper suggests that virtue epistemology can help decide how to respond to conflicts between different epistemic goals for social media. It is a contribution to critical epistemology of social media insofar as it supplements system-level consideration with insights from individualist epistemology. In particular, whereas the proposal of critical social epistemology of social media by Joshua Habgood-Coote suggests that conflicts between epistemic goals of social media have to be solved by ethical (...) consideration, I suggest that virtue epistemology can also solve at least some of these conflicts fully within the epistemic realm. (shrink)

This study examines the link between social media networks and democratization process by focusing on the 2015 General Electionsin Nigeria. Relying on Manuel Castells’ network theory and empirical fieldsurvey, the paper investigates the prevalent conditions that have nurtured SMNsparticipation in Nigeria’s democratic space and the challenges and prospects ofsocial media as catalysts for deepening democracy in the country. The paperasserts that although social media remains veritable tools for democraticconsolidation worldwide, the salience and impact are still (...) at the nascentstage in Nigeria. Besides, institutional and legal impediments, economic andinfrastructural challenges have contrived to limit the envisaged positive impactof SMNs in the democratization process in Nigeria. The paper recommendsefforts to stimulate Internet penetration and social media affordance while theNigerian cyberspace should be more democratised. (shrink)

Clinical photography is an important tool for medical practice, training and research. While in the past clinical pictures were confined to the stringent controls of surgeries and hospitals technological advances have made possible to take pictures and share them through the internet with only a few clicks. Confronted with this possibility I explore if a case could be made for using clinical photography in tandem with social media. In order to do this I explore: if patient’s informed (...) consent is required for the publication of any clinical images that depicts her, irrespective of whether the patient can be identified from the image or not, if social media is an adequate place for clinical images to be displayed, and finally if there are special considerations that should be taken into account when publishing clinical images on social media. (shrink)

This article examines epistemic impacts of social media, merging Gibson’s affordance theory with the notion of selective permeability, which holds people encounter objective differences in a setting because of their distinct capacities, only here applying the idea to online spaces. I start by circumscribing my deployment of “affordances,” taking care not to totally divorce the term from Gibson’s intent, as often happens in information technologies research. I next detail ways that selective permeability characterizes online epistemic landscapes, focusing on (...) how factors (like culture) moderate normative standards for sharing information. This leads to a discussion about selective receptivity and blindness to information in the context of social media—a situation that amplifies political divides and renders antagonists mutually incomprehensible. This segues into my final topic: an exposition of how social media can make the offline world more selectively hostile to some. An additional proposition is that practical habits cultivated on networking apps can modulate what affordances are present in offline arenas, as opposed to just affecting which ones get noticed. Throughout, I suggest that selective permeability answers an increasingly recognized challenge: the difficulty of generalizing conclusions about one app to others and across cultures, ages, etc. Ultimately, my aim is not only to explicate how social media fragments common social knowledge but to defend selective permeability as an epistemic template for comprehending social media. (shrink)

Through a large number of data analysis, this paper analyzes the different influences of COVID-19 on the traditional art and the new media art in China. China’s industries of new media art have made a rapid development during the pandemic. The industrial growth of the new media art has enabled them to play an important role in safeguarding employments, and to assume greater social responsibility in fighting the epidemic. With the help of internet technology, new (...) media art can quickly adjust to the broadcast plan, timely send excellent artistic content to the audience who stay at home through the network, and help them vent their fear and soothe their wounded hearts in face of the pandemic. (shrink)

International observers and critics often attack China's Internet policy on the basis of liberal values. If China's Internet is designed and built on Confucian values that are distinct from, and sometimes incompatible to, liberal values, then the liberalist critique ought to be reconsidered. In this respect, Mary Bockover's “Confucian Values and the Internet: A Potential Conflict” appears to be the most direct attempt to address this issue. Yet, in light of developments since its publication in 2003, it (...) is time to re-examine this issue. In this paper, I revisit Bockover’s argument and show why it fails. Using social media as an example, I offer an alternative argument to show why the Internet remains largely incompatible with Confucian values. I end this paper by suggesting how to recontextualise the Confucian way of life and to redesign social media in accordance to Confucian values in the information society. (shrink)

The Internet and electronic communication technologies have taken the psychological field by storm. From the innovations of new web interventions for easier access to care to the increased ease of client scheduling and communication, these developments have greatly advanced mental health care. However, these advantages are also laced with ethical implications that warrant attention. Without judicious consideration, social media use by psychotherapists can lead to inadvertent self-disclosures to clients that risk damaging the therapeutic alliance, interfering with therapeutic (...) processes, and placing both the client and clinician at risk. A better understanding of the ethical implications of social media use is warranted so that guidelines for appropriate use can be developed and implemented. This article highlights the potential risks associated with social media use by psychotherapists and, in absence of formalized guidelines, offers recommendations for best practices. (shrink)

To explore social media use in New Zealand, a sample of 1001 adults aged 18 and over were surveyed in November 2021. Participants were asked about the frequency of their use of different social media platforms (text message included). This report describes how often each of the nine social media sites and apps covered in the survey are used individually on a daily basis. Differences based on key demographics, i.e., age and gender, are tested (...) for statistical significance, and findings summarised. (shrink)

Cybernetics, or self-governance of animal and machine, requires the ability to sense the world and to act on it in an appropriate manner. Likewise, self-governance of a human society requires groups of people to collectively sense and act on their environment. I argue that the evolution of political systems is characterized by a series of innovations that attempt to solve two ‘scalability’ problems: scaling up a group’s ability to make sense of an increasingly complex world, and to cooperate in increasingly (...) larger groups. I then explore some recent efforts toward using the Internet and social media to provide alternative means for addressing these scalability challenges, under the banners of crowdsourcing and computer-supported argumentation. I present some lessons from those efforts about the limits of technology, and the research directions more likely to bear fruit. (shrink)

In recent years, we have witnessed increased interest in alternatives to the dominant corporate social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter (now X), and TikTok. Tired of disinformation, harassment, privacy violations, and the general degradation of platforms, users and technologists have looked for non-corporate alternatives. Not-for-profit social media platforms emerging from free/libre and open-source software (FLOSS) communities based on non-centralized infrastructure have emerged as promising alternatives. For applied epistemology of the internet, these alternative social (...) media platforms present an opportunity to study different ways of producing knowledge together online. This paper evaluates the epistemic potential for such alternative, non-corporate social media. I present an epistemological framework for analyzing the epistemic promises and perils of alternative social media. Then I apply this framework to the case of Mastodon, a federated, open-source microblogging platform. Mastodon’s structure and culture of openness present opportunities to avoid many of the epistemic perils of biased and untrustworthy large corporate platforms. However, Mastodon’s risks include techno-elitism, white ignorance, and isolated, epistemically toxic communities. (shrink)

Research Ethics, Volume 18, Issue 1, Page 24-38, January 2022. Are social science, cross-border research projects, where recruitment and data collection are carried out remotely, required to follow similar ethical and data-sharing procedures as ‘on-the-ground’ studies that use traditional means of recruitment and participant engagement? This article reflects on our experience of dealing with this question when we had to switch to online data collection due to the restrictions posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, such as the inability to travel (...) or work in person with local communities and collaborators. Using social media platforms and online data collection when conducting research brings many advantages, such as being able to communicate remotely but directly with gatekeepers and collaborators, and in reaching potential participants on a global scale. However, neither the guidelines and advice for conducting ethically sound internet-based research, nor the academic literature focussed on building equitable research partnerships between the Global North and the Global South, offer much information regarding the ethical concerns, or address the grey areas, posed by this type of digital and distanced transnational research. In our experience, conducting research remotely made negotiations of access very challenging due to the politics of positionality between Global North and South researchers, lack of clarity on ethical processes and perceptions of gatekeepers who we could not meet in person. We hope the reflections on, and discussion of, our experience encourage deliberation on the present ethical challenges posed by online and social-media-disseminated data collection, particularly in cross-border circumstances. (shrink)

Currently, most studies are moving towards Big Data Analytics because they are important in research, and this is becoming increasingly important as Internet and Web 2.0 technologies become increasingly popular and how to handle this massive data. Moreover, this proliferation of the Internet and social media has revolutionized the search process. With this Big Data of data generated by users using social media or electronic platforms, the use of these details and daily activities is (...) integrated with tools designed for analysis. The topic of analyzing big social media will be discussed and an intensive explanation will be given to the topic of Big Data. This paper compares Big Data analysis techniques using several methods of analysis, the first technique using neural networks and the second technique using data clustering. The purpose of this study is to infer the ages that use social media and what are their interests in writing and in the end, who are the most widely used social media males or females. (shrink)

In this brief review I discuss various social media used by philosophers, such as Academia.edu, PhilPapers, blogs and email-lists. Strenghts and weaknesses of different medias are evaluated.

The current pandemic and the measures taken to address it, on a global scale, are unprecedented. Times of crisis call for creative solutions, and these are not reduced to the work of scientists or politicians. In everyday life, both in online and offline spaces, people use their creativity to make sense of the current situation, to cope with it, and to learn its lessons. Social media is a privileged space for mundane and participative creativity through the production and (...) sharing of coronavirus Internet memes. In this article, we examine the creativity of such memes from a dedicated Reddit community. We ask, in particular, what makes a coronavirus meme creative and what this creativity tells us about the pandemic and popular understandings of it. To answer these questions, we use a triangulation of quantitative and qualitative methods by having 480 memes coded by three social media users for surprise, meaningfulness, elaboration, humor, and creativity and qualitatively analyzing those memes that score highly on each dimension. An interesting finding concerns the importance of elaboration and humor for the evaluation of creativity in the case of memes, above the more traditional criteria of surprise (proxy for novelty) and meaningfulness (proxy for appropriateness), perhaps a feature unique for Internet spaces. The article ends with reflections on what these findings tell us about creativity on social media more generally and the creative processes involved in the generation and reception of coronavirus memes in particular. (shrink)

Purpose The high rate of internet penetration has led to the proliferation of social media use, even at the workplace, including academia. This research attempts to develop a topology and thereby determine the dominant use motive for faculty’s use of SM. Design/methodology/approach In this two-part study, a two-stage research design has been adopted for topology development based on the application of Uses and Gratifications Theory. In the second part, the Technology Acceptance Model is applied to discern the (...) dominant motive for SM use in academia. Findings The work is able to develop a seven-item topology, conforming to the basic three use motives, namely, hedonic, utilitarian and social. The work shows faculty attach more value to the instrumental utility of SM, while the hedonic function is also significant. Practical implications Discerning dominant motive implies that SM use at the workplace should not be banned, rather effective regulated use will instil the faculty to enhance work outcomes. The conceptualisation of topology for SM use in academia at the workplace can aid in designing an effective organisation policy, and design of an internal SM platform. Originality/value The study is unique towards topology development for academic faculty and has many important implications for management and academia, especially towards policy design for SM use at the workplace. (shrink)

ABSTRACT To date, the American Psychological Association Ethical Standards and Code of Conduct does not include direct guidance about how psychologists should navigate social media. Given the variety of roles psychologists can choose to engage on social media, it is imperative that guidelines are established. These guidelines should consider the multidimensionality that exists as psychologists may choose to present on social media through a personal presence, a business presence, and/or even an influencer/content creator presence. (...) Specific ethical considerations and recommendations are provided. (shrink)

Although many physicians have been using the internet for both clinical and social purposes for years, recently concerns have been raised regarding blurred boundaries of the profession as a whole. In both the news media and medical literature, physicians have noted there are unanswered questions in these areas, and that professional self-regulation is needed. This report discusses the ethical implications of physicians’ nonclinical use of the internet, including the use of social networking sites, blogs, and (...) other means to post content online. It does not address the clinical use of the internet, such as telemedicine, e-prescribing, online clinical consultations, health-related websites, use of electronic media for clinical collaboration, and e-mailing patients (some of which are already covered in the AMA’s Code of Medical Ethics). (shrink)

For most people, the internet is now the most dominant source of socially useful knowledge. Its widespread use has made knowledge more accessible, more widely distributed, and more commonly produced. -/- But the internet is also widely seen—and not just by philosophers—as raising a number of distinct epistemological problems. Some of those problems concern the metaphysics of knowledge—the extent to which knowledge via the internet is understood as outsourced, or even extended, knowledge. Others concern the type of (...) knowledge the internet can give us—whether, for example, the knowledge we gain by using our digital devices is a kind of testimonial knowledge. -/- In this chapter, we will focus on a third issue: how our uses of the internet to gain information affect our epistemic agency—or our capacity to take responsibility for our own epistemically relevant mental states and our wider contributions to our epistemic environment. In the early days of digital technology, the internet was generally seen as increasing our epistemic agency for the simple reason that it made information (and presumably knowledge) more accessible and widespread. But in recent years, such optimism has been tempered due to the rise of fake news, massive amounts of misinformation online, and the average consumer’s seeming credulity with regard to what they read on social media. The chapter will outline these objections and critically examine them, arguing that both our epistemic agency and our ability to responsibly exercise such agency can be undermined by some uses of the internet, even as those same uses increase agency in other ways. (shrink)

Social media, meaning digital technologies and platforms such as blogs, wikis, forums, content aggregators, sharing sites, and social networks like Facebook and Twitter, have profoundly changed the way that information can be shared online. Now, almost anyone with a broadband internet connection or a smart phone can share ideas, data, and opinions with just about anyone else on the planet. This change has serious implications for the way in which human subjects research can be conducted and, (...) concomitantly, for the ways in which such research may be regulated. This article explores some of these issues. (shrink)

It could be claimed that without any doubt the Internet has revolutionized the educational system to a great extent. Even though some are still interested in traditional ways of teaching and learning and also face-to-face classes, technological advances, in particular, social media have changed the English as a foreign language contexts in a way that they will not be compatible with any other methods that have long been utilized before. Despite the fact that some studies have been (...) conducted in different learning contexts, to the researcher’s best knowledge, attention has not been focused on the importance of social media inside and outside the classroom on EFL students’ indulgence. Therefore, the aim of this review is to synthesize the findings of the previous studies to highlight the role of social media in EFL students’ engagement throughout class and outside the class in both face-to-face and online classes. To reach this goal, this review first discusses the impact of social media on engagement, and then engagement and its classifications are dealt with. Next, the relationship between using social media and students’ engagement is discussed. And finally, some implications are proposed. (shrink)

This essay expounds on Raphael Cohen-Almagor’s recent book, Confronting the Internet’s Dark Side, Moral and Social Responsibility on the Free Highway, and advocates placing narrow limitations on hate speech posted to social media websites. The Internet is a limitless platform for information and data sharing. It is, in addition, however, a low-cost, high-speed dissemination mechanism that facilitates the spreading of hate speech including violent and virtual threats. Indictment and prosecution for social media posts (...) that transgress from opinion to inciteful hate speech are appropriate in limited circumstances. This article uses various real-world examples to explore when limitations on Internet-based hate speech are appropriate. In October 2015, twenty thousand Israelis joined a civil lawsuit filed against Facebook in the Supreme Court for the State of New York. Led by the civil rights organization, Shurat HaDin, the suit alleges Facebook allows Palestinian extremists to openly recruit and train terrorists to plan violent attacks calling for the murder of Israeli Jews through their Facebook pages. The suit raises important questions, amongst them: When should the government initiate similar suits to impose criminal sanctions for targeted hate speech posted to Facebook? What constitute effective restrictions on social media that also balance society’s need for robust dialogue and free communication, subject to limitations reflecting a need for order and respect among people? Our essay progresses in four stages. First, we examine philosophical origins of free speech and the historical foundations of free speech in the United States. Second, we provide an overview of American free speech jurisprudence. Third, we address particular jurisprudence that provides a framework for imposing limitations on free speech in the context of social media. American history and jurisprudence embrace free speech as a grounding principle of democracy, yet simultaneously subject speech to limitations. Finally, through a comparative exploration of real-world examples, we address the narrow instance when limitations on inciteful and targeted hate speech are appropriate. (shrink)

Assuming that social media is mainly composed of unsupervised and anonymous content, it is an important problem that the younger generation and students’ attitudes towards content related to various aspects of religious life such as belief, worship, community, morality and mind set. In this study, it has been examined the attitudes of active social media user theology faculty students towards social media sharing related with religious content. In addition, it has been analysed whether the (...) social media religious sharing attitudes of students differ according to gender, the term in which they are studying, the university where they are studying, daily internet usage time and daily social media usage time. Quantitative relational survey model was preferred in the research. The sample consists of 450 students studying in different 22 Theology Faculties located in various cities. In the research, data were collected by using survey technique and developed a social media religious sharing scale. According to the factor analysis results, it was seen that the scale items were divided under two factors named “religious content evaluation” and “religious content sharing”. The analysis of the data was performed with the SPSS package program. T test and variance analysis (ANOVA) was conducted to examine the differentiation between social media religious sharing attitude and independent variables. As a result, it was found that the sample had an investigate attitude towards religious content in social media and they generally behave investigating while evaluating the religious contents they encounter, and they are relatively less investigatory when they share religious contents. (shrink)

Digital peddling of fake news is influential to persuasive political participation, with veritable social media platforms. Social media, with their instantaneous and widespread usage, have been exploited by ‘anonymous’ political influencers who fabricate and inundate internet community with unverified and false information. Using van Leeuwen’s Discourse Legitimation approach and insights from Discourse Analysis, this study analyses 120 purposively sampled fake news posts on Whatsapp, Facebook and Twitter, shared during the 2019 general elections in Nigeria. WhatsApp (...) allows for the easy and fast sharing of fake news as it pulled the largest occurrence of legitimation strategies, followed by Facebook. Authorisation is the highest occurring legitimation strategy at 46.6% frequency; this is followed by Moralisation which has 27% and Rationalisation at 26.4%; while Mythopoesis did not feature at all in the sampled data, leaving it at 0%. In particular, expert and role model authority are most often deployed to validate fake news such as the demise and cloning of President Buhari, ruling party’s plan to rig and destabilise the 2019 election, massive corruption in the current administration and imminent ethnic violence. The study argues that these strategies are viable persuasive tools owing to their use of discourse markers like make-believe images, emotive language, appeal to emotions, rational conclusions, hateful comments, verbal indictment and coercive verbs. (shrink)

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a quantitative and qualitative synthesis of the diverse academic proposals and initiatives for preventing and eliminating hate speech on the internet. Design/methodology/approach The foundation for this study is a systematic review of papers devoted to the analysis of hate speech. It has been conducted using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol and applied to an initial corpus of 436 academic texts. Having implemented the suitability, screening (...) and inclusion criteria, this corpus was refined to a sample of 74 articles. Findings The main subject categories studied in this corpus of academic research are legal issues and social media. In the majority of the articles, the use of hate speech via social media is associated with five typologies: religion, cyber racism, political slurs, misogyny and attacks on the LGTBI community. The absence of ethical reflection is one of the major shortcomings of IT-focused research and analysis devoted to online hate speech. Practical implications To date various systematic reviews have been presented, and they focus on detecting or describing hate speech. These have used either the search appraisal synthesis analysis framework or the Cochrane network. The PRISMA protocol was applied for this study, and both Scopus and texts in German were included. To date no major, rigorous systematic review has been undertaken of proposals to combat hate speech. Originality/value The link between hate speech and poverty has not been studied in depth within the academic sphere. Tolerance and ethical compassion are not granted the attention they merit when it comes to analysing the phenomenon of hate speech. (shrink)

Social media companies commonly design their platforms in a way that renders them addictive. Some governments have declared internet addiction a major public health concern, and the World Health Organization has characterized excessive internet use as a growing problem. Our article shows why scholars, policy makers, and the managers of social media companies should treat social media addiction as a serious moral problem. While the benefits of social media are not (...) negligible, we argue that social media addiction raises unique ethical concerns not raised by other, more familiar addictive products, such as alcohol and cigarettes. In particular, we argue that addicting users to social media is impermissible because it unjustifiably harms users in a way that is both demeaning and objectionably exploitative. Importantly, the attention-economy business model of social media companies strongly incentivizes them to perpetrate this wrongdoing. (shrink)

Background: Using the power of Internet, crowdfunding platforms are currently changing the traditional landscape of fundraising. Social media-based IT platforms in particular are bringing the creators of crowdfunding projects closer than ever to potential investors. A large variety of factors function as determinants of individuals' intention to participate in crowdfunding and have an intertwined impact on funding as the ultimate project goal.Objectives: For a better understanding of investor behavior in social media-based crowdfunding projects, this paper (...) covers identifying, analyzing, and classifying general and specific factors of investor motivation, based on the literature in the field.The main focus is the relationship between the affordances provided by social media-based crowdfunding platforms and the psychological determinants of investor motivation in innovative start-up projects.Methods: Using IEEE Explore, Clarivate Web of Science, ScienceDirect, and Scopus, we conducted a systematic review of the existing research on the emerging role of crowdfunding as a disruptive technology in financing the start-up innovative projects. The paper explores the main determinants of investor motivation and aims to streamline the success factors in crowdfunding campaigns.Results: A total of 1,216 publications were identified after searching the aforementioned databases and, upon refining the results, 515 articles were considered for the final sample. After reading the titles and abstracts, the sample was reduced to 78 articles that were read in-depth and synthesized in accordance with the defined research questions. The selected articles were clustered into three main categories: general studies, determinants of investor behavior, and success factors.Conclusions: In the new global economy, crowdfunding platforms have become the nexus between the emerging creators of innovative products and services and the necessary funding sources. This connection is possible via a cumulative collection of contributions from multiple investors recruited from the audience of the selected platform, without time or space constraints. However, the determinants of the investment decision are very different in the case of social media-based crowdfunding platforms compared to determinants in the mainstream environment. This paper surveys these motivators and reveals how platform features can be used to persuade individuals to make a financial contribution toward the success of a project. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the potential societal function of Wikipedia beyond serving as an encyclopedia. That is, it assesses both theoretically and empirically whether talk pages – Wikipedia discussion sites that accompany the encyclopedic entries and provide spaces for debates among Wikipedia editors – may function as transnational public spheres. Despite the increasing number of studies on citizen engagement and participation in the age of social media, Wikipedia as an example of the participatory internet has received (...) little research attention in this regard. This study redresses this research gap in two steps. Drawing on Habermas’ concept of the public sphere and Fraser's and Eriksen's modifications thereof, Wikipedia's – specifically the TPs’ – modus operandi is explored to evaluate whether TPs may serve as spaces for transnational political opinion formation. This theoretical exploration is complemented with an empirical assessment of a TP dedicated to the EU. The case study addresses if/to what degree Wikipedia editors have appropriated the TP to function as a transnational public sphere. Findings indicate that Wikipedia TPs can – and do – serve as general transnational public spheres. (shrink)

Pornographic content is harmful to children's psychological and mental development. In Indonesia, many children are involved in activities and access pornographic content through social media. In some cases, children exposed to pornography will experience a decrease in IQ and mental disorders in terms of sexuality. This type of research is descriptive-qualitative identifying, explaining, and analysing a phenomenon based on variables and primary and secondary data. The purpose of this research is to find out the impact of pornographic content (...) on social media for children's psychology and how the Indonesian government's policy addresses the problem. The results of this study show that the psychological impact of child victims of pornography include: anxiety and stress disorders, sexual perception deviations, identity and body image disorders, decreased social interaction skills, difficulty concentrating on learning and poor self-image. The Indonesian government's policy to protect children from pornography is carried out through penal means using criminal law enforcement instruments, as well as non-penal means, namely cooperation between countries and global child protection organisations, blocking content, and educating understanding of using a healthy internet. (shrink)

With the emergence of participative social media, the ways in which stakeholders may interact with companies are changing. Social media and Web 2.0 technologies change gatekeeping mechanisms and the distribution of information. In consequence, organizations must realize that they are structurally embedded in online networks of interconnected and equitable actors. In this paper, we analyze how this change in today’s information and communication technologies may affect Corporate Social Responsibility action. We utilize social network analysis (...) to investigate the CSR blogs of three IT firms: Google, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel. The analysis reveals that their Internet-enabled social networks exhibit patterns of power law distribution and an uneven distribution of structural social capital among the actors involved, especially on the corporate side, which fails to fully engage with the network. We conclude by indicating the research implications of shifting social capital dynamics and by deriving implications for management and practice. (shrink)

Since anonymous agents can spread misinformation with impunity, many people advocate for greater accountability for internet speech. This paper provides a veritistic argument that accountability mechanisms can cause significant epistemic problems for internet encyclopedias and social media communities. I show that accountability mechanisms can undermine both the dissemination of true beliefs and the detection of error. Drawing on social psychology and behavioral economics, I suggest alternative mechanisms for increasing the trustworthiness of internet communication.