Social Media Commons^™

Fall Sustainability Festival, Julia Canuel

Senior Honors Projects

There has been an increased interest in sustainability and “green” products in recent years. In my sophomore year, I started working with the URI Free Farmers’ Market, a group that sustainably grows, harvests and provides students with free produce. My work with the URI FFM inspired me to look into sustainable agriculture and explore what other aspects of a college students’ life could be adapted to be more sustainable. To do this, I created a Fall Sustainability Festival focusing on sustainable initiatives at URI and in the Rhode Island community. The RI Food Policy Council, Rhode Island Office of Energy …

The Power Of Identity Cues In Text-Based Customer Service: Evidence From Twitter, Yang Gao, Huaxia Rui, Shujing Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Text-based customer service is emerging as an important channel through which companies can assist customers. However, the use of few identity cues may cause customers to feel limited social presence and even suspect the human identity of agents, especially in the current age of advanced algorithms. Does such a lack of social presence affect service interactions? We studied this timely question by evaluating the impact of customers’ perceived social presence on service outcomes and customers’ attitudes toward agents. Our identification strategy hinged on Southwest Airlines’ sudden requirement to include a first name in response to service requests on Twitter, which …

Small Historically Black Colleges And Universities Bridging Social Capital: The Use Of Language, Tone And Content To Share Information On Instagram, Pamela Peters

Journal of Research Initiatives

The COVID-19 pandemic has strained higher education institutions, especially small Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). As campuses closed and reopened, Black communities' digital divide grew, adding to the need to stay connected. This study uses social capital to examine how institutions use language, tone, content, and information to bridge social capital. An analysis of 35 small liberal arts HBCUs’ Instagram posts was undertaken to compare post frequency, types of information, engagement, tone, language, and content in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic and during the pandemic, 2020 and 2021. This study indicates that post-oversaturation in 2020 and 2021 and information …

Taking Comfort In Virtual Humor: Tolkien Memes As Adaptation And Escape, Nick Polk

Journal of Tolkien Research

Presented at the inaugural Prancing Pony Podcast Moot in 2021, this paper's aim is to argue that Tolkien memes can be classified as adaptation as Linda Hutcheon defines adaptation and argue for a hermeneutic of Tolkien's concept of Escape, as laid out in his essay On Fairy-stories, as way to understand Tolkien meme creation and circulation. Concluding remarks are given to the spreadability of Tolkien memes among Tolkien fan communities.

All The News That’S Fit To Be Identified: Facilitating Access To High-Quality News Through Internet Platforms, Sonja R. West, Jonathan Peters, Lefteris Jason Anastasopolous

Scholarly Works

Roughly half of Americans get some of their news from social media, and nearly two-thirds get some of their news from search engines. As our modern information gatekeepers, these internet companies bear a special responsibility to consider the impact of their platform and site policies on users’ access to high-quality news sources. They should adopt policies that clear the digital pathway between the public and press by facilitating such access. To that end, the companies must first, address the threshold issue of how best to identify high-quality news sources. This article examines factors that would be useful, drawing from legal …

Trust But Verify: The Influence Of Social Media And Core Values On Consumer Trust In Business, Zoie M. Lagoudis

Student Theses and Dissertations

This research will evaluate the relationship personal core values have with businesses we see on social media. Three different research questions will be considered: (a) How do companies' social media presence impact consumer trust in a company? (b) How do social media marketing and advertising campaigns influence consumer purchasing intentions? (c) How does the alignment or misalignment of values portrayed through CSR activities affect trust in a company's brand?

Social media has become an expansive e-commerce tool companies use for promotional purposes. Companies take many approaches to advertising campaigns, but a popular method is incorporating advocacy efforts into their marketing …

Altering Attitudes On Climate Change: Testing The Effect Of Time Orientation And Motivation Framing, Kylie Clark, Aubrie Adams

CSU Journal of Sustainability and Climate Change

Climate change has become a defining issue of the 21st century. According to a Pew Research (2020) survey, for the first time in its two-decade history, a majority of Americans now believe that dealing with climate change should be a top priority for the President and Congress, which is a 14% rise from four years prior. Nonetheless, this rise is accompanied by a deep partisan divide amongst citizens of the United States (U.S.) and Republicans are far less likely to consider climate change a top public priority with a roughly 50% partisan gap on the issue (Popovich, 2020). Thus, this …

Crisis Communication For Public Organizations: Examining Pakistan Railways' Use Of Information Technology And Social Media For Image Repair, Shafiq Ahmad Kamboh, Muhammad Ittefaq, Yan Jin

School of Communication Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This study examines the induction of information technology and the use of image-repair focused crisis response strategies on social media by Pakistan Railways amid a recent crisis. A mix-method based content analysis (i.e., qualitative and quantitative) to investigate whether and if so, how Pakistan Railways used Benoit's suggested image restoration strategies on social media to repair its image among customers and in print media. Our results show that Pakistan Railways predominantly used reducing the offensiveness of event (40%), followed by corrective action (34.6%), evasion of responsibility (10.6%), denial (8%) and mortification (6.4%) strategies, respectively. In addition, the use of image-repair …

"It Is In Our Dna": Athlete Activism And Social Media Discourse During The 2020 Wnba Season, Kendra Gilbertson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

This dissertation analyzes the athlete activism in the WNBA, the use of social media for activism, and the social media discourse during the 2020 basketball season. I applied Critical Discourse Analysis to a defined set of texts including social media posts from Instagram and Twitter, user comments on social media, news articles from sports and non-sports publications, and a documentary, all related to the activism of the WNBA athletes. I chose the 2020 season because it is an exceptional case study of athlete activism and the use of social media for activism because the season was played in a single …

Review, Democracy And Fake News: Information Manipulation And Post-Truth Politics, Peter Krapp

Secrecy and Society

No abstract provided.

Advocacy On Facebook: A Content Analysis Of How Small Los Angeles- Based Npos Use Social Media To Engage Audiences, Wen Chen Denq

Dissertations

This dissertation examined the Facebook activities of seven small nonprofits in Los Angeles to understand their social media use and audience responses. Prior research has distinguished three broader engagement strategies used by Nonprofit Organizations (NPOs), including information provision (awareness-raising), action-related messaging (mobilizing), and community-building efforts (organizing). These strategies can play essential roles in drawing in audiences, but also in moving individual supporters toward greater levels of engagement by increasing donations or becoming more engaged champions for the cause. A qualitative and quantitative analysis of organizational Facebook messages and audience responses was conducted over 3 months. The NPOs included in this …

Terror Management And The News: An Exploration Into The Effects Of Framing On Mortality Salience, Peter Montwill

Masters Theses, 2020-current

The present study explores the link between Terror Management Theory and the use of its principles within news media. Political news media in the digital age undergoes a variety of framing effects, more specifically episodic and thematic frames of stories. To induce mortality salience, college-aged participants were presented with stories framed from the perspective of an individual’s experience or a general theme of experiences regarding the controversial pro-life topic and a non-controversial hiking topic. These stories are presented in the style of Instagram posts to mirror how college-aged people consume news media. The stories also contain wording designed to induce …

Museums, Covid-19 And The Pivot To Social Media, Jamie Larkin, Andrea Ballatore, Ekaterina Mityrova

CCI Articles and Research

This paper examines social media activity by UK museums during the COVID-19 pandemic. There is a general perception that as museums closed their doors for extended periods, their digital presence increased to maintain connections with their audiences. However, much of the research conducted in this area is based on small-scale studies and examples of best practice from large, well-resourced museums. By contrast, this study utilizes a comprehensive database of over 3300 active UK museums to understand the use of Facebook and Twitter across the sector. Specifically, the paper examines the frequency with which museums posted to these digital platforms as …

Social Media Skills And Safety Education Program For Adolescents With Idds: An Occupational Therapy Approach, Janelle A. Rodriguez, Monica Watford, Nooreen Khalid, Kate Lundgren

Summer 2023 Virtual OTD Capstone Symposium

Adolescents with intellectual and developmental disabilities are interested in using the internet and social media to maintain friendships. There is a gap in the literature exploring social media skills training programs to educate this population to safely use social media and the internet.

#Disruptjmm: Online Social Justice Advocacy And Community Building In Mathematics, Rachel Roca, Carrie Diaz Eaton, Drew Lewis, Joseph Hibdon, Stefanie Marshall

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

In 2019, \#DisruptJMM, a Twitter hashtag, began circulating after an Inclusion/Exclusion blog by Dr. Piper H pointing to the need to make commonplace conversations about human suffering in the Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM). While the \#DisruptJMM hashtag has been used since 2019, the vast majority of use was in the JMM 2020 meetings. Twitter hashtags are used by activists to push forward conversations, join communities around a single idea, and create change. In this article, we draw on frameworks from community building seen in other equity and inclusion advocacy hashtags such as \#GirlsLikeUs [7] to qualitatively code and analyze tweets …

Screen Ruptures: Disrupted Content For The Prosumer Generation, Kelsey Clark

Postgraduate

Television content has faced various forms of interruption to the viewing experience since the very beginning with the location of the television set and interruptive nature of advertising breaks. Irani et al. (2010) note that television has always been “a fixed temporal structure” and that the physical location of the television set has always had a place in the home where the opportunities for distraction and disengagement form a part of the viewing experience (p. 621). Similarly, the presence of advertising intermittently interrupting episodes of television programs quickly became a norm, which further characterises television viewing as a disrupted practice. …

Queer Crises: Movements From Queerness And Feelings Of White Religion In The United States, Austin Williams Miller

Communication ETDs

Anchored by contemporary crises surrounding queer and trans people in the United States, I employ movements from queerness within an affective queer phenomenological framework to understand how arrangements of “white religion” (Schaefer, 2015, p. 63), a process whereby U.S. American Christian forms escape ideology into religious affective economies in the United States, relegate queer people “to the background… to sustain a certain direction” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 31). I assemble a queer rhetorical context analyzing white religious space in documentary film, secular sexual regulation through contemporary U.S. legal contexts around marriage, and settler colonial Christian nationalist political imaginations to critique how …

User-Generated Content, Satisfaction, And Wom In The Context Of Cultural/Heritage Site, Mahlagha Darvishmotevali, Hu Qian

University of South Florida (USF) M3 Publishing

Research remains scant and ambiguous despite the need to understand better user-generated content (UGC) and its relationship with behavioral outcomes. In this regard, the influence of UGC on two types of visitors' word of mouth (WOM) was examined. In addition, satisfaction as a mediator was tested to gain more insight into the UGC and WOM relationships. Using a sample of 260 visitors (tourists & excursionists) who visited the historical site in China, SmartPLS was used to evaluate the study model and hypotheses. Findings demonstrate that UGC directly and positively affects two types of WOM. The results also show the full …

Online Gastronomy Image: Content Analysis Of Tripadvisor Reviews Of Restaurants In Istanbul, Rana Sat

University of South Florida (USF) M3 Publishing

Nowadays, where technology forms a large part of our lives, with the increase of comment sites, consumers benefit from these comment pages at the stage of purchasing decision. In this way, they get information about the destination region by reading more reviews or sharing their experiences in the social environment. Evaluations on social networking sites affect individuals’ decision-making and purchasing behaviors, as well as positively or negatively in the mentioned restaurants. Based on this situation, user comments on restaurants in Istanbul on TripAdvisor.com were analyzed in this study. For this purpose, 17921 user comments made in various languages between 01.10.2022 …

The Antagonistic Anatomy Of Anti-Shippers: A Thematic Analysis, Adrian A. Stone

Student Theses

Within the transformative fandom community is an ideologically-affiliated group known as anti-shippers, whose rhetoric contends that fictional interests are an indication of those held in reality. Anti-shippers focus solely on fictional material perceived to be sexual in nature and make frequent references to pedophilia. This rhetoric is used to justify harassment against individuals who do not share in their beliefs. As this population primarily operates on social media, this study was designed to conduct an exploratory investigation into themes gleaned from posts authored by anti-shippers on Twitter. Utilizing latent content analysis, a total of 187 posts from 222 unique users …

Social Distortion: Disinformation, Polarization, And The Politics Of Identity In An Online World, Jennifer Duck Brown

All Dissertations

This dissertation addresses three issues that intertwine: Disinformation, polarization, and the politics of identity. Social media currently dominates how we receive our news and information. This coincides with a disinformation pandemic full of false news and propaganda running rampant online. What often ensues is a social distortion that poses as reality. Seventy-two percent of all Americans use some type of social media according to Pew Research. Not all social media is nefarious, but the design of the social platforms further aggravate how people learn and communicate. Through original and peer-reviewed mixed methods research on topics including the conspiracy theories of …

The Effect Of Viewing Different Modalities Of Alcohol-Related Social Media Content Shared By Friends On Alcohol Outcomes: A Longitudinal Examination, Megan E. Strowger

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Social influences have robust associations with problematic alcohol use among emerging adult college students. Examinations of social influences increasingly focus on social media influences via alcohol-related content (ARC) sharing and viewing. Limited longitudinal research suggests that increased exposure to ARC is associated with increased alcohol consumption among college students over time. Most research examining exposure has not focused on who (e.g., specific friends) is sharing this content, the modality (e.g., photos) or the qualities of those sharing content and their relationship (e.g., closeness) to the viewer. The current study examined cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between alcohol consumption/consequences and: 1) sharing …

Deconstructing Beauty Standards: Unpad Geulis Instagram Account, Muhammad Wisnu Danang At Thariq, Aditya Candra Lesmana, Wahyu Gunawan

Masyarakat: Jurnal Sosiologi

This study aims to deconstruct the discourse of beauty standards represented by Unpad Geulis' Instagram account. Using Derrida's framework of deconstruction, the authors dismantle the text structure on Unpad Geulis' beauty standards, in the form of a slim body, clean, smooth face, white skin color and healthy hair as a dominative, hegemonic, and discriminative. Furthermore, the authors employ the reading of différance, to explore the possibility that Unpad Geulis' beauty standards would not exist without the marginalized beauty standards. Such a reading is done by reading horizontally the text structure of Unpad Geulis, to find a new meaning that was …

Reactions To The U.S. Surgeon General’S Advisory On Social Media & Youth Mental Health, Susannah Stern

Communication: Faculty Scholarship

The United States Surgeon General issued an Advisory on Social Media and Youth Mental Health on May 23 2023. Warnings by the Surgeon General are infrequent, but have the potential to influence the course of history. This survey captures awareness of and reaction to the Advisory. The survey finds that respondents are already convinced that social media influences young people, mostly negatively. The Surgeon General remains a meaningful public health communicator, with substantial reach and some power to influence both beliefs and behaviors. There is widespread agreement that more research is needed to better understand how social media impact youth …

Online Media Literacy Intervention In Indonesia Reduces Misinformation Sharing Intention, Trenton Ford, Michael Yankoski, Matthew Facciani, Tim Weninger

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Media literacy is widely viewed as an important tool in the fight against the spread of misinformation online. However, efforts to boost media literacy have primarily focused on Western-media and Western-oriented social media platforms, which are substantively different from the media and platforms used widely in the Global South. In the present work, we focus on the media ecosystem of Indonesia and report the results of an online media literacy intervention consisting of short-videos that were targeted specifically to social media users in Indonesia (N= 656). We found that participants in our media literacy intervention were 64% more …

Improving Indonesian Seniors’ Digital Resilience And Quality Of Life Through The Digital Academy For Seniors Program, Mite Setiansah, Nuryanti Nuryanti, Edi Santoso, Agus Ganjar Runtiko, Wiwik Novianti

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Digital literacy education is essential for everyone, including seniors to sustain their quality of life. The Digital Academy for Seniors aims to instill digital skills among seniors through a non-formal learning program. This qualitative research aimed to provide a comprehensive description of how the program can develop digital resilience and improve the quality of life of seniors. This study concluded that the program can improve the knowledge and attitudes of seniors in using digital media safely. Both of these are important assets for seniors to develop their digital resilience so that they can take advantage of digital media to support …

Twitter Trends During The 82nd Session Of The Nevada Legislature, 2023, Annie Vong, Zachary Billot, Mary Blankenship, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Elections & Governance

This fact sheet examines Twitter trends during the 82nd Session of the Nevada Legislature (2023). Data are comprised of tweets posted on Twitter by users located in Nevada addressing the most discussed topics during the session.

Triggered By Socialbots: Communicative Anthropomorphization Of Bots In Online Conversations, Salla-Maaria Laaksonen, Kaisa Laitinen, Minna Koivula, Tanja Sihvonen

Human-Machine Communication

This article examines communicative anthropomorphization, that is, assigning of humanlike features, of socialbots in communication between humans and bots. Situated in the field of human-machine communication, the article asks how socialbots are devised as anthropomorphized communication companions and explores the ways in which human users anthropomorphize bots through communication. Through an analysis of two datasets of bots interacting with humans on social media, we find that bots are communicatively anthropomorphized by directly addressing them, assigning agency to them, drawing parallels between humans and bots, and assigning emotions and opinions to bots. We suggest that socialbots inherently have anthropomorphized characteristics and …

From Archive To Anarchive: How Bereal Challenges Traditional Archival Concepts And Transforms Social Media Archival Practices, Mandi Li

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

BeReal, an “anti-Instagram” photo-sharing app, not only challenges the performative culture of social media but also revolutionizes the very concept of ‘archives.’ By employing the technical walkthrough method grounded in software studies, this research found that BeReal can be conceptualized as an anarchive that consists of diverse storytellers, decentralized micro-narratives, and interdependent contexts. More specifically, although some classical archival elements can be found in BeReal, the platform challenges the traditional archival industry in two ways: one, its ordinary record subjects and high level of accessibility shatter the centralization of traditional archives; two, it challenges the humanist value of archivists by …

Impact Of Difficult Negatives On Twitter Crisis Detection, Yuhao Zhang, Siaw Ling Lo, Phyo Yi Win Myint

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter has become an alternative information source during a crisis. However, the short, noisy nature of tweets hinders information extraction. While models trained with standard Twitter crisis datasets accomplished decent performance, it remained a challenge to generalize to unseen crisis events. Thus, we proposed adding “difficult” negative examples during training to improve model generalization for Twitter crisis detection. Although adding random noise is a common practice, the impact of difficult negatives, i.e., negative data semantically similar to true examples, was never examined in NLP. Most of existing research focuses on the classification task, without considering the primary information need of …