An eye-opening look at the invisible workers who protect us from seeing humanity's worst on today's commercial internetSocial media on the internet can be a nightmarish place. A primary shield ...against hateful language, violent videos, and online cruelty uploaded by users is not an algorithm. It is people. Mostly invisible by design, more than 100,000 commercial content moderators evaluate posts on mainstream social media platforms: enforcing internal policies, training artificial intelligence systems, and actively screening and removing offensive material-sometimes thousands of items per day. Sarah T. Roberts, an award-winning social media scholar, offers the first extensive ethnographic study of the commercial content moderation industry. Based on interviews with workers from Silicon Valley to the Philippines, at boutique firms and at major social media companies, she contextualizes this hidden industry and examines the emotional toll it takes on its workers. This revealing investigation of the people "behind the screen" offers insights into not only the reality of our commercial internet but the future of globalized labor in the digital age.
The Social Media Disorder Scale van den Eijnden, Regina J.J.M.; Lemmens, Jeroen S.; Valkenburg, Patti M.
Computers in human behavior,
August 2016, 2016-08-00, 20160801, Volume:
61
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
There is growing evidence that social media addiction is an evolving problem, particularly among adolescents. However, the absence of an instrument measuring social media addiction hinders further ...development of the research field. The present study, therefore, aimed to test the reliability and validity of a short and easy to administer Social Media Disorder (SMD) Scale that contains a clear diagnostic cut-off point to distinguish between disordered (i.e. addicted) and high-engaging non-disordered social media users.
Three online surveys were conducted among a total of 2198 Dutch adolescents aged 10 to 17. The 9-item scale showed solid structural validity, appropriate internal consistency, good convergent and criterion validity, sufficient test-retest reliability, and satisfactory sensitivity and specificity. In sum, this study generated evidence that the short 9-item scale is a psychometrically sound and valid instruments to measure SMD.
•The 9-item Social Media Disorder (SMD) Scale is a psychometrically sound instrument.•The development of the 9-item SMD-scale was based on the 9 DSM-5 criteria for IGD.•The 9-item SMD-scale shows appropriate internal consistency and test-retest reliability.•The 9-item SMD-scale demonstrates good convergent and criterion validity.•The 9-item SMD-scale shows adequate sensitivity and good specificity.
•Extensive literature review on social media analytics providing clear definitions of the most common used terms.•Discovery of social media data covers a wide interdisciplinary field.•Data quality ...and description of procedure have much room for improvement.•Majority of social media data stems from Twitter, while sentiment and content analysis are the current prevailing methods.
The spread and use of social networks provide a rich data source that can be used to answer a wide range of research questions from various disciplines. However, the nature of social media data poses a challenge to the analysis. The aim of this study is to provide an in-depth overview of the research that analyzes social media data since 2017. An extensive literature review based on 94 papers led to the findings that clear definitions are neither established nor commonly applied. Predominant research domains include marketing, hospitality and tourism, disaster management, and disruptive technology. The majority of analyzed social media data are taken from Twitter. Sentiment and content analysis are the current prevailing methods. Half of the studies include practical implications. Based on the literature review, clear definitions are provided, and future avenues for high-quality research are suggested.
Digital Methods Rogers, Richard
2013, 20130510, 2019-06-20
eBook
In Digital Methods , Richard Rogers proposes a methodological outlook for social and cultural scholarly research on the Web that seeks to move Internet research beyond the study of online culture. It ...is not a toolkit for Internet research, or operating instructions for a software package; it deals with broader questions. How can we study social media to learn something about society rather than about social media use? How can hyperlinks reveal not just the value of a Web site but the politics of association? Rogers proposes repurposing Web-native techniques for research into cultural change and societal conditions. We can learn to reapply such "methods of the medium" as crawling and crowd sourcing, PageRank and similar algorithms, tag clouds and other visualizations; we can learn how they handle hits, likes, tags, date stamps, and other Web-native objects. By "thinking along" with devices and the objects they handle, digital research methods can follow the evolving methods of the medium. Rogers uses this new methodological outlook to examine the findings of inquiries into 9/11 search results, the recognition of climate change skeptics by climate-change-related Web sites, the events surrounding the Srebrenica massacre according to Dutch, Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian Wikipedias, presidential candidates' social media "friends," and the censorship of the Iranian Web. With Digital Methods , Rogers introduces a new vision and method for Internet research and at the same time applies them to the Web's objects of study, from tiny particles (hyperlinks) to large masses (social media).
The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods offers a step-by-step guide to overcoming the challenges inherent in research projects that deal with 'big and broad data', from the formulation of ...research questions through to the interpretation of findings. The handbook includes chapters on specific social media platforms such as Twitter, Sina Weibo and Instagram, as well as a series of critical chapters. The holistic approach is organised into the following sections: * Conceptualising & Designing Social Media Research * Collection & Storage * Qualitative Approaches to Social Media Data * Quantitative Approaches to Social Media Data * Diverse Approaches to Social Media Data * Analytical Tools * Social Media Platforms This handbook is the single most comprehensive resource for any scholar or graduate student embarking on a social media project.
Social media use research remains dominated by self-report measures, despite concerns they may not accurately reflect objective social media use. The association between commonly employed self-report ...measures and objective social media use remains unclear. The aim of this study was to determine the degree of association between an objective and commonly employed subjective measures of social media use. The study specifically examined a single-estimate self-report measure, a problematic social media use scale, and objective use derived from smartphone data, in a sample of 209 individuals. The findings showed a very weak non-significant relationship between the objective measure and the single-estimate measure, (r = −.04, p = .58, BF10 = 0.18), and a weak significant relationship between the objective measure and the problematic social media use scale (r = .19, p = .01, BF10 = 3.04). These findings converge with other recent research to suggest there is very little shared variance between subjective estimates of social media use and objective use. This highlights the possibility that subjective social media use may be largely unrelated to objective use, which has implications for ensuring the rigor of future research and raising potential concerns regarding the veracity of previous research.
•There is an overreliance on self-report measures of social media in research.•There was no relationship between single estimate self-report social media use and actual social media use.•There was a weak relationship between scores on a problematic social media use scale and actual use.
In this article, the authors present the results from a structured review of the literature, identifying and analyzing the most quoted and dominant definitions of social media (SM) and alternative ...terms that were used between 1994 and 2019 to identify their major applications. Similarities and differences in the definitions are highlighted to provide guidelines for researchers and managers who use results from previous research to further study SM or to find practical applications. In other words, when reading an article about SM, it is essential to understand how the researchers defined SM and how results from articles that use different definitions can be compared. This article is intended to act as a guideline for readers of those articles.
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