Suchergebnisse

This study examines the dark information commons in Reddit, a pseudonymous social news site, in the context of illicit e-commerce communities. Unlike market forums that are hosted in the dark web, Reddit is open to users of both the clear and dark web, unwittingly serving as a gateway for potential newcomers to learn and prepare their entrance into darknet market systems. To illustrate how information commons in Reddit bolster the resilience of illicit e-commerce communication ecology, this study presents information and knowledge flows in a subreddit community dedicated to a now-defunct market called AlphaBay. This study expands the discussion of the challenges that Reddit, as information commons, encounters in governing the flow of dark knowledge.

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. \

Swearing, the use of taboo languages tagged with a high level of emotional arousal, has become commonplace in contemporary political culture. The current study attempts to understand the ways in which swearing influences citizen-to-citizen news commenting online. Based on a large corpus of the 2-month user comments from 26 news websites in South Korea, the study examines swearing effects as well as its interplay with anonymity on garnering public attention and shaping other users' perceptions of the comments. Findings suggest that swearing generally has a positive effect on increasing user attention to comments as well as gaining other users' approvals. Comparisons between political and nonpolitical topics further suggest that swearing effect on gaining public attention is particularly prominent for political discussions. In contrast, the magnitude of change toward positive valence in public perception to comments is much greater for nonpolitical topics than for politics. From the findings, we conclude that an acceptable degree of swearing norms in online discussions vary across news topical arenas. The results also lead to discussions about the possibility of like-minded exposure to political comments as a default condition for online discussions. Finally, the study highlights the role of high-arousal emotions in shaping discursive participation in contemporary networked sociodigital environment.

This study investigates cross-platform differences in social media by analyzing the contending candidates who represent different political ideology during the 2016 presidential election. Borrowing the frame-building and frame-effect perspectives, it examines the ways in which the two contending candidates (Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton) built their message frames in two different social platforms—Twitter ( N = 3,805) and Facebook ( N = 655)—and how the frame differences affected audience engagement in each platform. The results showed that Trump's messages presented more variety in frame selection than Clinton's, focusing on conflict and negative emotional frames on Twitter while displaying frequent positive emotional frames on Facebook. Clinton's strategy relied heavily on conflict and positive emotional frames on both Twitter and Facebook. The results also suggested that for both Trump and Clinton followers on Twitter, conflict and morality frames consistently attracted retweeting behaviors and emotional frames attracted favoriting behaviors. However, Facebook engagement behaviors did not show a consistent pattern between the followers of the two candidates.

• Purpose: The current study explores the spillover effects of offensive commenting in online community from the lens of emotional and behavioral contagion. Specifically, it examines the contagion of swearing –a linguistic mannerism that conveys high arousal emotion –based upon two mechanisms of contagion: mimicry and social interaction effect. • Design/methodology/approach: The study performs a series of mixed-effect logistic regressions to investigate the contagious potential of offensive comments collected from YouTube in response to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign videos posted between January and April 2016. • Findings: The study examines non-random incidences of two types of swearing online: public and interpersonal. Findings suggest that a first-level (a.k.a. parent) comment's public swearing tends to trigger chains of interpersonal swearing in the second-level (a.k.a. child) comments. Meanwhile, among the child-comments, a sequentially preceding comment's swearing is contagious to the following comment only across the same swearing type. Based on the findings, the study concludes that offensive comments are contagious and have impact on shaping the community-wide linguistic norms of online user interactions. • Originality/value: The study discusses the ways in which an individual's display of offensiveness may influence and shape discursive cultures on the Internet. This study delves into the mechanisms of text-based contagion by differentiating between mimicry effect and social interaction effect. While online emotional contagion research to this date has focused on the difference between positive and negative valence, Internet research that specifically look at the contagious potential of offensive expressions remain sparse. Keywords: Verbal Aggression, Offensive Comments, Emotional Contagion, Swearing and Profanity, Linguistic Mimicry, YouTube ; Kwon, K. H., & Gruzd, A. (2017). Is Offensive Commenting Contagious Online? Examining Public vs. Interpersonal Swearing in Response to Donald Trump's YouTube Campaign Videos. Internet Research, 27(4), 991-1010, https://doi.org/10.1108/IntR-02-2017-0072

Social media communication is characterized by reduced anonymity and off-to-online social interactions. These characteristics require scholars to revisit social influence mechanisms online. The current study builds on social influence literature to explore social network and gender effects on online behavior. Findings from a quasi-experiment suggest that both network-related variables and gender are significantly associated with online behavior. Perceived social environment, measured by personal network exposure rate, is more significant than objective reality, measured by frequency of received social messages, in determining behavior. We discuss the implications of social contagion effects on web-based strategic communication—including advertising, political campaigns, and social mobilization. Data limitations and the difficulty of measuring social network influence via social media are also discussed.

This article offers a definitional note of the dark social web and introduces the remaining articles in this collection.

Along with individuals' ideological factors, various network properties play a crucial role in the process of legislators' political decision making. Social networks among legislators provide relational resources through which communication occurs, exerting social influence among the members in a network. This paper examines six social relationships among the members of the 109th United States Senate as predictors of senatorial voting (roll call votes), shared committees, co-sponsorships, party membership, PAC donation, geographical contiguity, and internet hyperlinks, which may be considered as direct or indirect representations of communication networks. The six networks are modeled using MRQAP, and results suggest that roll call voting was predicted by party membership, co-sponsorship, geographical proximity, and PAC donation networks, while shared committee membership did not contribute significantly. As for hyperlinks, results were mixed, showing a small variance of contribution in a simpler model but not significant with more complex models.

Along with individuals' ideological factors, various network properties play a crucial role in the process of legislators' political decision making. Social networks among legislators provide relational resources through which communication occurs, exerting social influence among the members in a network. This paper examines six social relationships among the members of the 109th United States Senate as predictors of senatorial voting (roll call votes), shared committees, co-sponsorships, party membership, PAC donation, geographical contiguity, & internet hyperlinks, which may be considered as direct or indirect representations of communication networks. The six networks are modeled using MRQAP, & results suggest that roll call voting was predicted by party membership, co-sponsorship, geographical proximity, & PAC donation networks, while shared committee membership did not contribute significantly. As for hyperlinks, results were mixed, showing a small variance of contribution in a simpler model but not significant with more complex models. Adapted from the source document.

This study explores the intermedia agenda-setting of the U.S. gun control movement in 2018, with a specific focus on the role of activism/advocacy media and ephemeral websites in shaping the movement discourse in news outlets. Structural topic modeling and cross-lagged correlation analyses of the Facebook URLs Share dataset show that activism/advocacy media played an important role in proposing unique agendas and aligning them with other news outlets. Meanwhile, ephemeral websites were prone to containing conspiratorial information, which could have been purposive to influence the movement. The study provides empirical insights into how various media actors interact to shape social movement discourses.