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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Alt-Right's Use Of President Donald Trump's Twitter Account As A Propaganda Device, Erin Nicole Jorden Sep 2019

The Alt-Right's Use Of President Donald Trump's Twitter Account As A Propaganda Device, Erin Nicole Jorden

Erin Jorden

The long campaign to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act situated President Donald J. Trump in a context where attacks on President Barack Obama’s signature legislation symbolized a broader repudiation of his legacy. Even more than mainstream Republican partisans, the altright blogosphere celebrated the demise of the law to symbolically cleanse the nation of Obama’s influence. Trump attempted to honor his pledge to end Obamacare in his first year of office with his support of the American Health Care Act (March 2017), Better Care Reconciliation Act (July 2017), and the Graham-Cassidy Bill (September 2017). Members of the alt-right reframed …


Feed: State Transparency Amidst Informational Surplus, Mark Fenster Dec 2018

Feed: State Transparency Amidst Informational Surplus, Mark Fenster

Mark Fenster

An email arrives, promising inside information about the perfidious forces that secretly rule the nation. A Twitter feed from a prominent insider at an establishment think-tank announces the latest disclosure about the president’s secret role in the Russian conspiracy to manipulate the election that elevated him with the blast of toy cannon. Meanwhile, the President’s tweets serve to annoy, distract, humor, or comfort those who see them, and they above all announce some truth about his presidency. 

Debates about government transparency presume that the state controls an informational spigot, which can be made to allow information to flow or to …


The Space For Social Media In Structured Online Learning, Gilly Salmon, Bella Ross, Ekaterina Pechenkina, Anne-Marie Chase Dec 2015

The Space For Social Media In Structured Online Learning, Gilly Salmon, Bella Ross, Ekaterina Pechenkina, Anne-Marie Chase

Dr Anne-Marie Chase

In this paper, we explore the benefits of using social media in an online educational setting, with a particular focus on the use of Facebook and Twitter by participants in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) developed to enable educators to learn about the Carpe Diem learning design process. We define social media as digital social tools and environments located outside of the provision of a formal university-provided Learning Management System. We use data collected via interviews and surveys with the MOOC participants as well as social media postings made by the participants throughout the MOOC to offer insights into …


Bird’S Eye View: Using Twitter In #Clubroesch, Katy Kelly, Hector Escobar Sep 2015

Bird’S Eye View: Using Twitter In #Clubroesch, Katy Kelly, Hector Escobar

Hector Escobar

For many libraries, social media is usually another platform to share information about library resources and events. For some, the term has become overused so much that the social aspect has fallen by the wayside. Facebook page updates or tweets are only part of what you can bring to and achieve from social media. In this article we discuss how students communicate with our academic library on Twitter, and how we used conversations to improve library spaces, technology, and services. We will explain the process of tracking and responding to student tweets, as well as the pros and cons of …


Use Of Social Media To Promote Continuous Learning: A Phased Strategy For Graduate Medical Education Fellowship Implementation, Jaswant Singh Basraon, Deborah Simpson, Anjan Gupta Aug 2015

Use Of Social Media To Promote Continuous Learning: A Phased Strategy For Graduate Medical Education Fellowship Implementation, Jaswant Singh Basraon, Deborah Simpson, Anjan Gupta

Deborah Simpson, PhD

Purpose

Clinical developments continue to grow at an accelerated rate, challenging the existing paradigm of information access, dissemination and learning by trainees. The aim of this study was to deliver relevant, concise and newly emerging information on cardiovascular disease using Twitter, and assess its impact.

Methods

A Twitter account for our institution’s cardiovascular disease fellowship program was established. All fellows and faculty were encouraged to follow tweets for clinical developments. To assess Twitter use, participation rates and the number of tweets by topics and followers were tracked longitudinally. Impact on fellows was assessed through a brief evaluation survey and an …


Colleges’ And Universities’ Use Of Twitter: A Content Analysis, Darren Linvill, Sara Mcgee, Laura Hicks Aug 2015

Colleges’ And Universities’ Use Of Twitter: A Content Analysis, Darren Linvill, Sara Mcgee, Laura Hicks

Darren L Linvill

This study explored how colleges and universities are employing Twitter, a popular micro-blogging tool. Using Kent and Taylor's principles of dialogic communication, a content analysis was performed on individual tweets (n = 1130) from 113 colleges and universities. Tweets were coded for whether or not they met each principle of dialogical communication and why. It was found that institutions are not employing Twitter in a dialogic way and they are, instead, employing it primarily as an institutional news feed to a general audience. The implications of this finding are discussed.


Microblogging For Engaged Teaching And Learning, Thomas Menkhoff, Kok Siew Benjamin Gan, Charles Jason Woodard, Yue Wah Chay Apr 2015

Microblogging For Engaged Teaching And Learning, Thomas Menkhoff, Kok Siew Benjamin Gan, Charles Jason Woodard, Yue Wah Chay

C. Jason Woodard

In this paper, we report how we put a newly developed Twitter application to work in the context of a Knowledge Management course taught at the Singapore Management University (SMU) allowing students to post and view relevant tweets in an organized manner for the benefit of collaborative class discussions and learning. Innovative elements of the ongoing project include the explorative usage of social media such as Twitter in the higher education context, student participation in providing initial evidence and qualitative feedback that tweeting is pedagogically meaningful and a newly built-in feature which can resolve tweeting challenges which occurred in class …


Twitter Influence And Cumulative Perceptions Of Extremist Support: A Case Study Of Geert Wilders, Gabrielle Blanquart, David Cook Feb 2015

Twitter Influence And Cumulative Perceptions Of Extremist Support: A Case Study Of Geert Wilders, Gabrielle Blanquart, David Cook

David M Cook

The advent of Social media has changed the manner in which perceptions about power and information can be influenced. Twitter is used as a fast‐paced vehicle to deliver short, succinct pieces of information, creating the perception of acceptance, popularity and authority. In the case of extremist groups, Twitter is one of several avenues to create the perception of endorsement of values that would otherwise gain less prominence through mainstream media. This study examines the use of Twitter in augmenting the status and reputation of anti‐Islam and anti‐immigration policy through the controlled release of social media information bursts. The paper demonstrates …


Networks Of Digital Humanities Scholars: The Informational And Social Uses And Gratifications Of Twitter, Anabel Quan-Haase, Kim Martin, Lori Mccay-Peet Dec 2014

Networks Of Digital Humanities Scholars: The Informational And Social Uses And Gratifications Of Twitter, Anabel Quan-Haase, Kim Martin, Lori Mccay-Peet

Lori McCay-Peet Dr.

Big data research is currently split on whether and to what extent Twitter can be characterised as an informational or social network. We contribute to this line of inquiry through an investigation of digital humanities scholars’ uses and gratifications of Twitter. We conducted a thematic analysis of 25 semistructured interview transcripts to learn about these scholars’ professional use of Twitter. Our findings show that Twitter is considered a critical tool for informal communication within DH invisible colleges, functioning at varying levels as both an informational network (learning to ‘Twitter’ and maintaining awareness) and a social network (imagining audiences and engaging …


Social Media, Higher Education, And Community Colleges: A Research Synthesis And Implications For The Study Of Two-Year Institutions, Charles H.F. Davis Iii, Regina Deil-Amen, Cecilia Rios-Aguilar, Manuel González Canché Dec 2014

Social Media, Higher Education, And Community Colleges: A Research Synthesis And Implications For The Study Of Two-Year Institutions, Charles H.F. Davis Iii, Regina Deil-Amen, Cecilia Rios-Aguilar, Manuel González Canché

Charles H.F. Davis III

The boundaries between on-line and “real-world” communities are rapidly deteriorating, particularly for the generation of young people whose lives are pervaded by social media. For this generation, social media exchanges are a primary means of communication, social engagement, information seek- ing, and possibly, a central component of their identity and community-building. Given these realities, postsecondary educators should begin to seriously explore the potential to intentionally and strategi- cally harness the power of these revolutionary transformations in technology use to better serve the needs of students to enhance their success. Therefore, this review of books, academic journals, higher education news, research …


If You Are Quick Enough, I Will Think About It: Information Speed And Trust In Public Health Organizations, Kenneth Lachlan, Patric R. Spence, Chad Edwards, Katie M. Reno, Autumn Edwards Dec 2013

If You Are Quick Enough, I Will Think About It: Information Speed And Trust In Public Health Organizations, Kenneth Lachlan, Patric R. Spence, Chad Edwards, Katie M. Reno, Autumn Edwards

Chad Edwards

Social media continues to gain prominence as an information resource. However, little is known about how people perceive trust and credibility in social media messages, particularly in terms of abstract dispositions toward organizations. The current experiment examines the role of speed of updates on a twitter feed with perceptions of trust. The experiment is also used to address the convergent validity of the RAND Public Health Disaster Trust Scale. The results do not provide evidence of a direct relationship between speed of twitter feed updates and trust, but do support a mediation model in which cognitive elaboration mediates the relationship. …


Social Media As Information Source: Recency Of Updates And Credibility Of Information, David Westerman, Patric R. Spence, Brandon Van Der Heide Dec 2013

Social Media As Information Source: Recency Of Updates And Credibility Of Information, David Westerman, Patric R. Spence, Brandon Van Der Heide

Patric R. Spence

Social media are increasingly being used as an information source, including information related to risks and crises. The current study examines how pieces of information available in social media impact perceptions of source credibility. Specifically, participants in the study were asked to view 1 of 3 mock Twitter.com pages that varied the recency with which tweets were posted and then to report on their perceived source credibility of the page owner. Data indicate that recency of tweets impacts source credibility; however, this relationship is mediated by cognitive elaboration. These data suggest many implications for theory and application, both in computer-mediated …


Twitter Deception And Influence: Issues Of Identity, Slacktivism, And Puppetry, David M. Cook, Benjamin Waugh, Maldini Abdipanah, Omid Hashemi, Shaquille Abdul Rahman Dec 2013

Twitter Deception And Influence: Issues Of Identity, Slacktivism, And Puppetry, David M. Cook, Benjamin Waugh, Maldini Abdipanah, Omid Hashemi, Shaquille Abdul Rahman

Dr. David M Cook

There is a lack of clarity within the social media domain about the number of discrete participants. Influence and measurement within new media is skewed towards the biggest numbers, resulting in fake tweets, sock puppets and a range of force multipliers such as botnets, application programming interfaces (APIs), and cyborgs. Social media metrics are sufficiently manipulated away from authentic discrete usage so that the trustworthiness of identity, narrative and authority are in a constant state of uncertainty. Elections, social causes, political agendas and new modes of online governance can now be influenced by a range of virtual entities that can …


Identity Multipliers And The Mistaken Twittering Of 'Birds Of A Feather', David M. Cook Dec 2013

Identity Multipliers And The Mistaken Twittering Of 'Birds Of A Feather', David M. Cook

Dr. David M Cook

New Media usage has expanded in unexpected directions. This qualitative study pulls together two new media phenomena that demonstrate widespread engineered influence through Twitter dispersion. The first aspect is the practice of sock-puppetry deception that occurs when social media identities are used without proof of identity. The relative ease in creating a single invented online identity is overshadowed by the more recent practise of harnessing thousands of created identities to accentuate the standing of a single identity. The second aspect is the use of metadata to fetch and find increased nodes of commonality. This promulgates the perception of connectivity and …


Networking Young Citizens : Learning To Be Citizens In And With The Social Web, Suzanne Mellor, Terri Seddon Oct 2013

Networking Young Citizens : Learning To Be Citizens In And With The Social Web, Suzanne Mellor, Terri Seddon

Suzanne Mellor

Many claims are made, both in the popular press and the professional education literature, about the significance of the social web in enabling civic participation. However empirical evidence supporting these claims is sparse and contested rather than strongly-indicative. The Monash University pilot research project, Networking Young Citizens, relates to the discussion about the ways in which the social web might support the civic participation, especially of young people, by examining the ways in which Web 2.0 was integrated into teaching and learning in the school, and any other processes of civic socialisation that were consciously adopted in three schools.

This …


Social Media And Disasters: Social Media Has Changed The Disaster Landscape, John Fisher Dec 2012

Social Media And Disasters: Social Media Has Changed The Disaster Landscape, John Fisher

Dr. John R. Fisher

The use of social media has changed the way the public is informed about disasters and how to recover from them. While the traditional media continue to play a key role, social media has given citizens a means to inform and protect each other as well as to alter public policy and the official approach to dealing with emergencies. The Haiti earthquake was a watershed moment that changed how social media is used in disasters. While social media was independently evolving in the years leading up to 2010, the use of social media in the Haiti disaster made public officials …


Observatory Of Trends In Software Related Microblogs, Achananuparp Palakorn, Nelman Lubis Ibrahim, Yuan Tian, David Lo, Ee Peng Lim Dec 2012

Observatory Of Trends In Software Related Microblogs, Achananuparp Palakorn, Nelman Lubis Ibrahim, Yuan Tian, David Lo, Ee Peng Lim

David LO

Microblogging has recently become a popular means to disseminate information among millions of people. Interestingly, software developers also use microblog to communicate with one another. Different from traditional media, microblog users tend to focus on recency and informality of content. Many tweet contents are relatively more personal and Opinionated, compared to that of traditional news report. Thus, by analyzing microblogs, one could get the up-to-date information about what people are interested in or feel toward a particular topic. In this paper, we describe our microblog observatory that aggregates more than 70,000 Twitter feeds, captures software-related tweets, and computes trends from …


A Decisive Social Media: Domination Of Social Media In Deciding News Content-A Case Study Of American Media And Trayvon Martin Tragedy, Ratnesh Dwivedi Mr May 2012

A Decisive Social Media: Domination Of Social Media In Deciding News Content-A Case Study Of American Media And Trayvon Martin Tragedy, Ratnesh Dwivedi Mr

Ratnesh Dwivedi

More than a quarter of Americans (27%) now get news on mobile devices, and for the vast majority, this is increasing news consumption, the report finds. More than 80% of smartphone and tablet news consumers still get news on laptop or desktop computers. On mobile devices, news consumers also are more likely to go directly to a news site or use an app, rather than to rely on search — strengthening the bond with traditional news brands. Almost immediately after the February 26 shooting of Trayvon Martin, the conversation about the case began simmering on Twitter. But it was nearly …


The Role Of Social Media In Community Colleges, Cecilia Rios-Aguilar, Manuel Sacramento González Canché,, Regina Deil-Amen, Charles H.F. Davis Iii Feb 2012

The Role Of Social Media In Community Colleges, Cecilia Rios-Aguilar, Manuel Sacramento González Canché,, Regina Deil-Amen, Charles H.F. Davis Iii

Charles H.F. Davis III

Over the past decade, there has been a growing public fascination with the phenomenon of connectedness. One of the most important ways in which society is now connected is through social media –such as social networking sites. While both students and higher education institutions seem to be utilizing social media more and more, there still are enormous challenges in trying to understand the new dynamics generated by social media in higher education, particularly for the context of community colleges.

This research report has several purposes. The first is to document and to describe the various ways in which social media …


Social Media In Higher Education: A Literature Review And Research Directions., Charles H.F. Davis Iii, Regina Deil-Amen, Cecilia Rios-Aguilar, Manuel Sacramento Gonzalez Canche Dec 2011

Social Media In Higher Education: A Literature Review And Research Directions., Charles H.F. Davis Iii, Regina Deil-Amen, Cecilia Rios-Aguilar, Manuel Sacramento Gonzalez Canche

Charles H.F. Davis III

Social media [technology] has become a growing phenomenon with many and varied definitions in public and academic use. For our purposes, the term social media technology (SMT) refers to web-based and mobile applications that allow individuals and organizations to create, engage, and share new user-generated or existing content, in digital environments through multi-way communication. Despite the widespread use of SMT, little is known about the benefits of its use in postsecondary contexts and for specific purposes (e.g., marketing, recruitment, learning, and/or student engagement). It is critical to begin to examine if and how higher education institutions are incorporating the use …


The Penetration Of Social Media In Governance,Political Reforms And Building Public Perception, Ratnesh Dwivedi Mr May 2011

The Penetration Of Social Media In Governance,Political Reforms And Building Public Perception, Ratnesh Dwivedi Mr

Ratnesh Dwivedi

Social media are media for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable communication techniques. Social media is the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into interactive dialogue. While we know that social media can play an important role in publicizing political activities such as protests, do we have evidence that such actions have led to substantive political change? Is it possible to develop a set of indicators to more effectively gauge the impact of new technologies and media on questions of political change? That social media can help coordinate large and discrete activities, such as protests and …


Social Media Policies For Professional Communicators, Daxton R. Stewart Dec 2010

Social Media Policies For Professional Communicators, Daxton R. Stewart

Daxton "Chip" Stewart

As social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have become increasingly prevalent ways for people to share and connect, professional communicators have increasingly incorporated these tools into their daily practice. However, journalism, advertising and public relations practitioners have little formal guidance to help them navigate the benefits and risks of using these tools professionally. The codes of ethics of their professional fields have not been updated, and to date, social media policies have not been examined from an academic perspective. This study reviews 26 social media policies of journalism and strategic communication companies to find common themes and …


The War On Twitter, Michael I. Niman Ph.D. Oct 2009

The War On Twitter, Michael I. Niman Ph.D.

Michael I Niman Ph.D.

Michael I. Niman tells how the Feds busted a Twitter tweeter and impounded Curious George and Buffy videos in a terror probe.