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This article examines the discursive practices of Facebook users who use the platform to express racist views. We analyzed 51,991 public comments posted to 119 news stories about race, racism, or ethnicity on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News Facebook page. We examined whether users who hold racist viewpoints (the vocal minority) are less likely to express views that go against the majority view for fear of social isolation. According to the "spiral of silence" theory, the vocal minority would presumably fear this isolation effect. However, our analysis shows that on Facebook, a predominantly nonanonymous and moderated platform, the vocal minority are comfortable expressing unpopular views, questioning the explanatory power of this popular theory in the online context. Based on automated analysis of 8,636 comments, we found 64 percent mentioned race or ethnicity, and 18 percent exhibited some form of othering. A manual coding of 1,161 comments showed that 18 percent exhibited some form of othering, and 25 percent countered the racist discourse. In sum, while Facebook provides space to express racist discourse, users also turn to this platform to counter the hateful narratives.

This article examines how online groups are formed and sustained during crisis periods, especially when political polarization in society is at its highest level. We focus on the use of Vkontakte (VK), a popular social networking site in Ukraine, to understand how it was used by Pro‐ and Anti‐Maidan groups during the 2013/2014 crisis in Ukraine. In particular, we ask whether and to what extent the ideology (or other factors) of a particular group shapes its network structure. We find some support that online social networks are likely to represent local and potentially preexisting social networks, likely due to the dominance of reciprocal (and often close) relationships on VK and opportunities for group members to meet face‐to‐face during offline protests. We also identify a number of group‐level indicators, such as degree centralization, modularity index and average engagement level, that could help to classify groups based on their network properties. Community researchers can start applying these group‐level indicators to online communities outside VK; they can also learn from this article how to identify networks of spam and marketing accounts.

This special issue presents leading-edge work into how the characteristics of social media affect the nature of influence in networks. Our central thesis is that social influence has become networked influence. Influence is networked in two ways: by occurring in social networks and by propagating through online communication networks. We want to understand online social influence in its diversity: who is exercising influence, how it is done, how to measure influence, what its consequences are, and how online and offline influences intertwine in different contexts.

This study explores whether aggressive text-based interactions in social media are contagious. In particular, we examine swearing behaviour of YouTube commentators in response to videos and comments posted on the official Donald Trump's campaign channel. Our analysis reveals the presence of mimicry of verbal aggression. Specifically, swearing in a parent comment is significantly and positively associated with the likelihood and intensity of swearing in subsequent 'children' comments. The study also confirms that swearing is not solely a product of an individual speech habit but also a spreadable social practice. Based on the findings, we conclude that aggressive emotional state can be contagious through textual mimicry. \

The study applies and expands the routine activity theory to examine the dynamics of online harassment and violence against women on Twitter in India. We collected 931,363 public tweets (original posts and replies) over a period of 1 month that mentioned at least one of 101 influential women in India. By undertaking both manual and automated text analysis of "hateful" tweets, we identified three broad types of violence experienced by women of influence on Twitter: dismissive insults, ethnoreligious slurs, and gendered sexual harassment. The analysis also revealed different types of individually motivated offenders: "news junkies," "Bollywood fanatics," and "lone-wolves", who do not characteristically engage in direct targeted attacks against a single person. Finally, we question the effectiveness of Twitter's form of "guardianship" against online violence against women, as we found that a year after our initial data collection in 2017, only 22% of hostile posts with explicit forms of harassment have been deleted. We conclude that in the social media age, online and offline public spheres overlap and intertwine, requiring improved regulatory approaches, policies, and moderation tools of "capable" guardianship that empower women to actively participate in public life.

The notion of "community" has often been caught between concrete social relationships and imagined sets of people perceived to be similar. The rise of the Internet has refocused our attention on this ongoing tension. The Internet has enabled people who know each other to use social media, from e-mail to Facebook, to interact without meeting physically. Into this mix came Twitter, an asymmetric microblogging service: If you follow me, I do not have to follow you. This means that connections on Twitter depend less on in-person contact, as many users have more followers than they know. Yet there is a possibility that Twitter can form the basis of interlinked personal communities—and even of a sense of community. This analysis of one person's Twitter network shows that it is the basis for a real community, even though Twitter was not designed to support the development of online communities. Studying Twitter is useful for understanding how people use new communication technologies to form new social connections and maintain existing ones.

On May 25, 2018, the European Union (EU) implemented the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to protect individuals' privacy and data. This regulation has far-reaching implications as it applies to any organization that deals with data of EU residents. By studying the discussion about this regulation on Twitter, our goal is to examine public opinions and organizational public relations (PR) strategies about GDPR. The results show that the regulation is being actively discussed by a variety of stakeholders, but especially by cybersecurity and IT-related firms and consultants. At the same time, some of the stakeholders that were expected to have a more active role were less involved, including companies that store or process personal data, government and regulatory bodies, mainstream media, and academics. The results also show that the stakeholders mostly have one-way rather than two-way communication with their audiences, thus fulfilling the rhetorical than relational function of PR.