Digital Commons Network^™

Ethics, Privacy And Data Collection: A Complex Intersection, Matthew S. Brown

Honors Theses

The technology around us enables incredible abilities such as high-resolution video calls and the ability to stay connected with everyone we care about through social media. This technology also comes with a hidden cost in the form of data collection.

This work explores what privacy means and how users understand what data social media companies collect and monetize. This thesis also proposes a more ethical business model that addresses privacy concerns from an individual perspective.

Inflated Private Offering: Regulating Corporate Insiders And Market Moving Disclosures On Social Media, Marisa Papenfuss

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Note will explore Regulation FD’s development, from its enactment in 2000 to its status in the age of social media. It will ultimately propose a safe harbor provision that clearly delineates when issuers and corporate insiders are not subject to the regulation’s requirements. Part I provides an overview of Regulation FD’s provisions and enforcement as well as the SEC’s subsequent guidance, which attempts to elucidate the regulation’s application to new technologies. Part II analyzes the specific problems that arise when Regulation FD is applied to information distributed through social media and assesses scholars’ proposed solutions to these problems. Lastly, …

Using Social Media As A Platform For Increasing Knowledge Of Lung Cancer Screening In High-Risk Patients, Aimee Strong, Michelle Renaud

Ellmer School of Nursing Faculty Publications

Background: Uptake in lung cancer screening for high-risk patients remains low. Eligible patients may not know that this preventive service is available and covered by insurance.

Objectives: The objective of this study was to explore using social media to educate patients about lung cancer screening and assess motivation to discuss lung cancer screening with health-care providers after viewing the educational program. Methods: Subjects ages 55 to 77 who were current smokers or former smokers who quit in the past 15 years with a more than 30-pack-year smoking history were recruited via a Facebook advertisement. Subjects completed a demographic survey and …

Does Authenticity Really Matter? Exploring The Middle-Aged And Elderly Users’ Motivations To Share Information On Social Media, Chieh Liu, Ting-Yu Wu, Wayland Chang

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

With information and communication technologies’ rapid development, gradually increased have been both the number of social media users and people receiving information via various social media platforms. There was plenty of misinformation that runs alongside may have harmful effects on individuals' well-being. More importantly, the middle-aged and elderly people might serve as unintentional accomplices in spreading misinformation. To deal with these issues, more understandings should be garnered about the nature of both middle-aged and elderly users’ information sharing behavior via social media. This study examined users’ motivations through a survey questionnaire, and a total of 268 valid responses were obtained. …

Cyberbullying Prevention In Schools, Robin Neorr

Masters Essays

Cyberbullying is a growing problem among teenagers. Students are always connected via text messages and social media websites. The years of a student being bullied at school and then going home to a safe space where their bully was no longer able to torment them are over. Constant connectivity allows for 24-7 access for the bully to torment their victim. Combine this with an increasing number of social media outlets and the tormentors’ belief that they can remain anonymous online; it is clear there is a need for students to learn ethical communication methods in school.

This essay will examine …

The Dark Tetrad, Social Dominance Orientation, And Online Political Discussion, Cory D. Taylor

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Previous literature into online trolling behavior has focused upon the role of the Dark Tetrad and political measures separately. This study extended the existing body of research by examining the relationship between the Dark Tetrad personality traits, social dominance orientation (SDO) and online political trolling in the United States of America. The data was collected using an online questionnaire from American users of Facebook and Reddit in the summer of 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter movement, and in the runup to a hotly contested national election. Positive correlations were found between all of the Dark Tetrad traits, …

The Effect Of Incentive Hierarchy System Of Social Media In The Delivery Of Quality Information, Peng Xie, Peng Xie

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

This paper investigates the effect of social media incentive hierarchy system on the quality of the shared information and the spillover effect using data from 67 cryptocurrency markets along with the corresponding social media discussions. We show empirical evidence that high-rank social media users displaying high-level badges earned from the social media tend to provide low-quality information due to reduced incentives after obtaining the badge and increased tendency to engage in less informative socialization activities. In contrast, low-rank social media users with low-level badges tend to provide high-quality information. However, messages shared by high-rank social media users spill over to …

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Human–Wildlife Interactions

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Speech, Innovation, And Competition, Greg Day

Scholarly Works

Critics contend that concentrated power in digital markets has generated threats to free speech. For a variety of reasons, market power is naturally thought to concentrate in digital markets. The consequence is that “big tech” is said to face little competition; Facebook controls 72 percent of the social media market while the parent of YouTube (72 percent of the video market) is Google (92 percent of the search market). This landscape has potentially vested private companies with unprecedented power over the flow of information. If Facebook, for example, decides to ban certain types of speech or ideas, it would potentially …

Missing In “State Action”: Toward A Pluralist Conception Of The First Amendment, Moran Yemini

Lewis & Clark Law Review

Online speech intermediaries, particularly social platforms, have an enormous impact on internet users’ freedom of expression. They determine the speech rules for most of the content generated and information exchanged today and routinely interfere with users’ speech while enjoying practically unchecked power to block, filter, censor, manipulate, and surveil. Accordingly, our current system of free expression lacks one of the main requirements of a just system—the notion that no form of power is immune from the question of legitimacy. Scholarly responses to this situation tend to assign decreased weight to constitutional norms as means to impose duties on online intermediaries …

Understanding Byod Implementation Experiences Of School Teachers And Administrators: A Phenomenological Perspective, Sophia Lafayette-Lause

Theses and Dissertations

The use of technology to enhance instruction and learning is a daily expectation in public school classrooms throughout the State of Michigan and the United States. Schools are implementing bring your own device/bring your own technology (BYOD/BYOT) programs to meet the demand of providing students access to technology. As a result, students are bringing personal communication devices (cell phones, smartphones, tablets) to school in ever-increasing numbers. Students are using these devices in the classroom for a variety of purposes including the use of social media applications. However, school district policies have not been thoroughly updated to address the implementation of …

The Emotions Of Science: Using Social Media To Gauge Public Emotions Toward Research Topics, Cole C. Freeman

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Online and in the real world, communities are bonded together by emotional consensus around core issues. Emotional responses to scientific findings often play a pivotal role in these core issues. When there is too much diversity of opinion on topics of science, emotions flare up and give rise to conflict. This conflict threatens positive outcomes for research. Emotions have the power to shape how people process new information. They can color the public's understanding of science, motivate policy positions, even change lives. And yet little work has been done to evaluate the public's emotional response to science using quantitative methods. …

Social Media's Impact On College Student Activism: Senior Student Affairs Professional's Perspectives, Louis Soltysiak

Masters Theses

Activism has been an ever present on college campuses throughout history. The student activist has been a part of some of the biggest movements in American history, such as, the Anti-Vietnam War movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Kent State Massacre, and the #MeToo movement. This study seeks to understand student activism on college campuses and how activism has changed in our new digital era. The internet’s social media platforms have created new meeting places and areas for idea sharing for college activists. These social media platforms mean that students can remotely plan, organize, and execute their protests, demonstrations, or …

Development Of Machine Learning Models To Predict The Online Impact Of Research, Mohammed Murtuza Shahzad Syed

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Scientific research is being increasingly shared online in a way such that there is a need to develop methodologies to measure the impact of specific papers in ways that go beyond traditional indicators of scholarly citations and beyond the scholarly community. In this thesis, new machine learning models are developed to measure and predict the impact ofresearch in the online context. The extent to which research papers are mentioned on social media platforms, i.e., their online sustainability, indicates the public's interest in and perhaps even the level of understanding of scientific topics. A research paper having a long lifespan, i.e., …

Espad 2019 Ireland: Results From The European Schools Project On Alcohol And Other Drugs In Ireland, Salome Sunday, Sheila Keogan, Joan Hanafin, Luke Clancy

Books / book chapters

The ESPAD Ireland 2019 Report is the seventh Irish data-collection wave of the European Schools Project for Alcohol and Other Drugs (ESPAD) carried out in Ireland.Data included in the sample reported here and submitted to ESPAD Europe consists of survey results from 1967 students born in 2003, who were 15-16 years old at the time of the survey which was performed in a sample of Irish schools from March to June 2019. These serial data sets enable us to monitor trends in alcohol, tobacco, gaming, internet usage as well as a number of other behaviors including illicit drug usage such …

An Analysis Of Millennials And Their Interactions With Financial Institutions, Fallon Endsley, Lucy Matthews, Cheryl Ward

Atlantic Marketing Journal

As the largest generational cohort since the Baby Boomers of the mid-20^th century, Millennials hold significant power over the future. This is especially true in business; therefore, consideration of the environment and the target market should be lucrative. Millennials seem to fit this role more every year. This project investigates the Millennial age cohort and creates a social media portfolio to create a short social media campaign for Ascend Federal Credit Union to market their financial services and education to people ages 23 – 37. This project seeks to better understand how to utilize social media in a business …

Misinformation Mayhem: Social Media Platforms’ Efforts To Combat Medical And Political Misinformation, Dawn C. Nunziato

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Social media platforms today are playing an ever-expanding role in shaping the contours of today’s information ecosystem. The events of recent months have driven home this development, as the platforms have shouldered the burden and attempted to rise to the challenge of ensuring that the public is informed – and not misinformed – about matters affecting our democratic institutions in the context of our elections, as well as about matters affecting our very health and lives in the context of the pandemic. This Article examines the extensive role recently assumed by social media platforms in the marketplace of ideas in …

#Kancelkulture: An Analysis Of Cancel Culture And Social Media Activism Through The Lens Of Minority College Students, Korri E. Palmer

Senior Independent Study Theses

I am investigating how minority students of color find cancel culture (boycotting a brand or celebrity) to be a beneficial or harmful form of social media activism. I situate social media as a networked public and discuss how consumer activism meets social media activism, specifically on Twitter, to create cancel culture. My study includes results from a combination of a focus group and individual interviews that discuss topics of social media use, participation in cancel culture and activism involvement. This study provides a definition of cancel culture through the perspectives of generation Z social media users and discusses the duality …

From Screen To Summit: An Investigation Of Claims About Social Media Use For Outdoor Recreation Purposes, Theodora M. Doyon

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Recent increases in visitation to public lands in the U.S. are often attributed to a rise in social media sharing of outdoor spaces, and particularly to the use of geotagging and hashtagging for location sharing. There are conflicting views on the influence of social media on visitation to public lands, including negative perceptions of social media users, and positive perceptions of social media’s potential to spread information to underrepresented and underserved communities. Due to the growing interest in social media use and its effects on outdoor spaces, it is important to understand how social media use correlates with recreational behavior …

Critical Race Theory, Twitter, Black Social Movements And Black Social Protest From A Critical-Cultural Perspective, Christopher Jacobie Conyers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

In 2016, Colin Kaepernick, the former starting quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, unknowingly bartered his athletic aspirations by exercising his First Amendment Right to freedom of expression. Frustrated with what he and many others perceived as pervasive extrajudicial tactics of law enforcement and a seemingly incessant lack of accountability from the American legal system, Kaepernick silently protested by sitting during the playing of the National Anthem. Although, Kaepernick's actions begun as a singular, almost imperceptible act, he has ultimately redefined the significance of taking a knee, and etched his name in a long list of other malcontents in the …

“People Are Reading Your Work,": Scholarly Identity And Social Networking Sites, Marie L. Radford, Vanessa Kitzie, Stephanie Mikitish, Diana Floegel, Gary P. Radford, Lynn Silipigni Connaway

Faculty Publications

Scholarly identity refers to endeavors by scholars to promote their reputation, work, and networks using online platforms such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and Twitter. This exploratory research investigates benefits and drawbacks of Scholarly Identity efforts and avenues for potential library support. Data from 30 semi-structured phone interviews with faculty, doctoral students, and academic librarians were qualitatively analyzed using the constant comparisons method (Charmaz, 2014) and Goffman’s (1959, 1967) theoretical concept of impression management. Results reveal that use of online platforms enables academics to connect with others and disseminate their research. Scholarly Identity platforms have benefits, opportunities, and offer possibilities for developing …

Deindividuation In Anonymous Social Media: Does Anonymous Social Media Lead To An Increase In Non-Normative Behavior?, Shayn S. Davidson, Amy Bradshaw Hoppock, Rebecca A. Rohmeyer, Joseph Keebler, Christina M. Frederick

Publications

This research presents several aspects of anonymous social media postings using an anonymous social media application (i.e., Yik Yak) that is GPS-linked to college campuses. Anonymous social media been widely criticized for postings containing threats/harassment, vulgarity and suicidal intentions. However, little research has empirically examined the content of anonymous social media postings, and whether they contain a large quantity of negative social content. To best understand this phenomenon an analysis of the content of anonymous social media posts was conducted in accordance with Deindividuation Theory (Reicher, Spears, & Postmes, 1995). Deindividuation Theory predicts group behavior is congruent with group norms. …

Law Students And Cell Phone Use: Results Of A Six-School Survey, Hugh D. Spitzer, Robert M. Jarvis, Cindy I.T. Archer, Linda Galler, Jodi L. Wilson, Mark E. Wojcik

Articles

The sight of a law student using his or her cell phone now is so common that law professors do not give it a second thought. But what, exactly, is the student doing? Texting with friends? Shopping? Watching a movie? To try to find out, during the Fall 2019 semester we asked our six diverse law schools to take an online survey consisting of eighteen questions. To our knowledge, this is the first phone survey of law students.

This paper presents the results of the survey, exploring applications used (text, social media, email, etc.) and differences by audience (e.g., whether …

To Empathize Or Iempathize: Social Networking And Adolescent Female Friendships, Jennifer A. Schonberg

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Through qualitative methodology, this dissertation aimed to explore adolescent girls’ use of social networking sites (SNS) and the impact these sites could be having on girls’ development of empathy and their ability to address conflict in their friendships. The topic is introduced by outlining the relevant statistics and through highlighting some of the negative and positive influences of SNS use on adolescent female life. Carol Gilligan’s theory of moral development is explained and used to frame the research questions for this phenomenological research study. Section One of this dissertation reviews the current literature on this topic, including how social media …

The Use Of Mobile Social Technology As Transitional Objects Impact On Personality Functioning, Peter Gleiberman

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the impact unlimited connectivity and unlimited access to voice, text, and video communication as well as multimedia content consumption through mobile social technology has on personality integration. The increased use of mobile social technology has changed how the user engages social relationships. Through mobile social technology, the user places importance in an inanimate object for engagement of social relationships. A reliance on the inanimate object as a social relationship is thought to compromise the ability to internalize integrated object relations and develop stable personality organization. This theoretical research uses hermeneutic analysis of …

Adolescent Perspectives On Media Use: A Qualitative Study, April Fiacco

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This qualitative study looks at adolescents’ engagement with media and explores their perceptions of how media plays a role in their lives. For the purpose of this study, media includes watching television shows, watching and reading the news, and involvement in various types of social media. The influence of parents and peers is also explored to examine adolescents’ views of whether parent and peer opinions affect the types of media with which the adolescent participants choose to engage. The study used a semi structured interview to collect data with participants from a Massachusetts public high school. The data were analyzed …

Social Media Platforms In International Criminal Investigations, Rebecca J. Hamilton

Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law

"YouTube’s tagline is “Broadcast Yourself.”64 People around the world have taken up the invitation, including people whose lives are being lived out in conflict zones. Proponents of international criminal justice have seized upon the resulting material for its evidentiary value, and we are seeing the field of international criminal investigations in the midst of a major transformation as a consequence. There has been plenty of commentary about this transformation in terms of the challenges and opportunities that the evidence itself brings. But less attention has been given to what these technology-driven developments have done to expand the range of actors …

Social Media: A Good Alternative, For Alternative Service Of Process, Emily Davis

Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law

A cost efficient and effective means of alternative service of process in civil and commercial cases upon both domestic and international defendants lies in social media. Traditional methods of service of process are preferred, but are not always practicable. When a defendant cannot be reached through traditional methods, judges should use their discretion and allow alternative service by social media in appropriate cases. Current methods of alternative service, such as publication, are not efficient or effective. By allowing alternative service of process via social media in certain cases, the defendant is much more likely to receive actual notice in a …

Moderating Content Moderation: A Framework For Nonpartisanship In Online Governance, Edward Lee

American University Law Review

Internet platforms serve two important roles that often conflict. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other internet platforms facilitate the unfettered exchange of free speech by millions of people, yet they also moderate or restrict the speech according to their “community standards,” such as prohibitions against hate speech and advocating violence, to provide a safe environment for their users. These dual roles give internet platforms unparalleled power over online speech—even more so than most governments. Yet, unlike government actors, internet platforms are not subject to checks and balances that courts or agencies must follow, such as promulgating well-defined procedural rules and affording …

Student's Perceptions Of Smartphone Use At Home And At A High School Regarding A New Smartphone Policy: A Case Study, Ana Zurita

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The new generation raised in the digital era continues to present unresolved challenges for both parents and teachers. The purpose of this case study is to analyze students' usage of their smartphones in their lives, and understand the success of a new school policy on smartphone use at an arts school in the U.S. For this qualitative research, I interviewed ten participants from the high school. The literary review informs us that smartphones are potentially addictive, with negative effects for healthy mental, emotional and social child development, as well as a source of misleading information. As a consequence, smartphones in …