Tag Archives: twitter

I think that Twitter’s announced change to enable users to hide replies to tweets will likely allow users to have more control over their conversations on Twitter. In my research, I have seen far right groups post racial hate as replies to tweets of users from racial and ethnic minority groups. Allowing hide and mute functions could provide these types of users a level of content moderation control in terms of how their profile is being presented to the world. Of course, this does not abrogate Twitter and other social media platforms from actively looking for content that needs to be moderated and part of the broader movements towards platform accountability have put pressure on social media platforms to take charge and make an effort to do their part in terms of promoting healthier online communicative spaces. I think giving increased options to users to be able to moderate what sort of content are publicly displayed in their profiles is important and can be contextualized within larger privacy debates around social media platforms.

There is always a potential for features that provide levels of user-level moderation and editorial control to skew how users are being portrayed. Since its founding, Twitter has been seen as a very open, sometimes ‘Wild West’ space of the mainstream Internet. The good, the bad, and the ugly are easily seen in viral hashtags and reply chains to prominent ‘verified’ users.

Part of the attraction of Twitter, and something I note in my book Twitter: Social Communication in the Twitter Age, is that users have always liked the function of being able to tweet at whoever they want and to be able to see those replies there. There is, of course, some empowerment in this ability to interact with anyone on the platform. If Tweet streams are being curated, this can also present a particular side of the reception of their tweets.

However, just because replies are hidden or @-mentions blocked does not mean that users can not call out the inaccuracy or injustice in a tweet. Tweets can still be mentioned within other tweets and I have not heard plans to change this functionality.

Of course, any moderation has its challenges, but many users have faced significant issues in terms of abusive content in replies and mentions and creating a seamless experience towards being able to moderate the sorts of content that are associated with your tweet will be seen as a really welcome change for some users. I think it is really easy to focus on the fact that curation can present a particular reception of a tweet, but we often forget some of the racist, homophobic, misogynistic, and other extremely hateful content that can appear in replies to tweets and @-mentions. Creating a balance is clearly going to be challenging for Twitter. I am sure that the agents of certain verified users such as some politicians and celebrities will use this feature to maintain a particular image within reply streams that fits their client’s brand or image. But, on the other hand, celebrities that are ethnic and racial minorities can use this functionality to manage racist trolls.

In terms of Twitter’s initiatives towards monitoring its own ‘health’, I think changes such as this are part of Twitter trying to be a more accountable social media platform and taking notice that, again as my book Twitter argues, the platform has become an everyday form of communication in terms of social, political, and economic issues. As such, it is crucially important that the platform is accountable for fake news, bots, and extreme content that affects the health of Twitter. For example, Twitter’s move to ban political ads likely partially comes from a feeling that such ads were creating unhealthy levels of targeting and polarization.

Ultimately, I think content moderation, both in terms of machine-based algorithms as well as human-based methods are something that Twitter needs to continue to invest in to be able to monitor content given that it has become part of everyday conversation as well as profound conversation. Many turn to Twitter as their first port of call for the public broadcasting of their opinions, given the much stronger privacy controls of platforms such as Facebook that limit who you can engage with. However, these opinions can lead to bullying and have real impacts on the lives of users (including bullying leading to suicides). Giving users methods that are akin to privacy settings on platforms such as Facebook may provide some users much greater levels of control over their experience on Twitter and be a game changer for these users.

Algorithms and social media

November 19, 2016

Facebook, Social Media, Twitter

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Social media is heavily influenced by algorithms. For example, the Facebook feed algorithm, from what we know about it, is based on what you and your friends are liking, posting, and doing on the platform (and perhaps even ‘people like you’ that Facebook is data mining). Many social media algorithms are designed around homophily. And algorithms theoretically are value neutral. If someone consumes and produces criminal content, the algorithm will try to be helpful and guide the user to relevant criminal content. The algorithms are just following what they are programmed to do. algorithms can equally encourage content around positive civic responsibility, if a user has displayed a preference in that direction.

To be critical about algorithms, we do have acknowledge the advantages and disadvantages of algorithm proliferation. For example, some algorithms are designed for safeguarding and this can be a real positive. There might be algorithmically-based filters for Internet searching or video delivery specific to kids for example. If a child has a profile on Netflix which is specifically set to Netflix’s child setting, then by the algorithm’s definition, they are not supposed to receive content that is age inappropriate. This tends to work in practice. Though, if content is inappropriately categorized, the algorithm would of course just follow its rule-based rubric instructions and would guide kids to inappropriate content as well. So humans are very much part of this process and if errors occur, then not having humans in the loop can partially be attributable to some of the issues of whether algorithms break down in these instances.

Ultimately, the algorithms driving social media are what are called ‘black box algorithms’. These can be defined as algorithms that are generally proprietary, and which are open-source. The algorithm is meant to be private in terms of its design and operation and documentation is not made publicly available, nor is data made available in terms of the decisions made by the algorithm. In this way, black box algorithms are also similar in that we can only infer particular aspects of the algorithm based on observing the algorithm’s behavior ‘in the wild’.

Social media use in times of crisis

January 9, 2015

Charlie Hebdo, Research, Social Media

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After the horrific attacks on Charlie Hebdo in which 12 people were killed, many have turned to social media to express their feelings, show solidarity with the attack’s victims, or to produce/consume information regarding the attack. The emergence of #JeSuisCharlie on social media and the chanting of it at rallies around the world indicates how central social media has been as a public outlet during this crisis. Indeed, #JeSuisCharlie speaks to the larger point that crisis hashtags are built around a notion of ‘event society’ where social media activity can become part of a public sphere that rallies around events such as crises. However, though we consume and produce social media content in times of crisis, we often do not step back to reflect on our motivations for doing so nor do we question whether social media spaces bring us together or polarize us.

Individuals use social media in times of crisis for several reasons. In my work on Twitter use during Hurricane Sandy, I found that some users turn to social media as a form of ‘self therapy’, an outlet to communicate their anxieties or stresses during a crisis and to receive direct or indirect support. Individuals also turn to social media to produce and consume memes and other humorous content; this can also be a form of self therapy. Though one would not expect humor to be present in #JeSuisCharlie, it is. In homage to the cartoonists who were killed in the attack, some of the images within the hashtag use humor to both cope as well as attack the motives and means of the terrorists. For example, there are numerous cartoons that have been retweeted, which show masked terrorists being attacked by showers of pencils and pens or a gunman shooting a fountain pen and ink spilling out. Some of the most retweeted images include a pencil shoved into a machine gun and a pencil being attacked and then attacking a gunman after being sharpened.

Social media – especially Twitter – is used by many as source of information. Important news stories are retweeted and friends and followers engage in social bookmarking or other means to suggest important sources of information. Social media is well known for being timely in terms of information dissemination during crises. This has also been the case with Charlie Hebdo. Citizen journalists use social media to report on what is happening on the ground. Often citizen journalists can be closer to the epicenter of a crisis. For example, eyewitness accounts outside Charlie Hebdo’s offices were being tweeted as the events unfolded and the opinions of Parisians were being retweeted right away. Though, like in any crisis, because much of this information is produced by non-professional journalists, social media has and continues to be plagued by issues of information integrity. In the case of Charlie Hebdo, factually inaccurate accounts in terms of the number of dead or number of gunmen were widely circulating on social media.

Social media is also used to check how friends and family are faring during the crises and many platforms including Facebook and Twitter afford us the ability to keep tabs on large circles of friends, family members, and colleagues during crises. In the case of Charlie Hebdo, social media was being used to both collectively express solidarity as well as for Parisians to talk to each other as small and large groups about what happened and how they were feeling.

In following #JeSuisCharlie, it remains clear that we have to remember that trending topics by definition trend because they are popular. As such, they are also attractive targets for anyone who wants a soapbox. Because of the usually open nature of social media, hijacking is possible (whether through bots or masses of supporters). Companies have also tried to sell products via popular hashtags during times of crises – usually in poor taste. Extremists have also had success in inserting themselves into trending topics. Pro-ISIS supporters, for example, have made social media a central aspect of their recruitment and propaganda machine. In the case of #JeSuisCharlie, supporters of the gunmen also emerged. In my book, I argue that the openness of social media makes it able to be used by any side (including extremists, spammers and trolls). In this sense social media like all communication media is value neutral. This can have real consequences on civil society as people increasingly turn to social media as a community space to interact publicly.

This can lead to a certain divisiveness on social media. What often happens in social media and more broadly online are processes of polarization that can often privilege certain positions. Additionally, certain individuals and groups have more social media savvy/knowledge and are able to better leverage the platforms to get their points across. This can result in floods of retweets or mentions where polarized sides and up preaching to the choir and not talking to each other. This is not exclusive to crisis communication, but is a broader trend on Twitter and other social media. Sadly, this polarization does not advance collective dialogues during times of crisis.

Ultimately, we may be tempted to view #JeSuisCharlie as a peripheral part of the Charlie Hebdo crisis. However, social media plays an important role in shaping public perceptions of crises. This is particularly true when celebrities, politicians, and social media ‘influencers’ direct or spark conversations, chatter, or the circulation of information. Often just a handful of tweets are what are most read and responded to during crises. For example in the recent shooting at Florida State University in the US, a tweet about a shooting victim whose life was saved by a bullet hitting a stack of library books in his backpack generated the most discussion on Twitter and was highly influential in shaping social media discussions. In the case of Charle Hebdo, the same is true with next week’s cover of the New Yorker the most retweeted and commented on image and tweets by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Stephen Fry the most retweeted and commented on. Even though social media contains a deluge of content during crises, certain themes can and do shape public opinion during crises.

Where will Twitter be in 140 days?

May 29, 2014

Social Media, Twitter

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Are tweets going to be a thing of the past?

For most reading Twitter’s April 29, 2014 earnings report, the outlook for the popular social media site looks glum. The market read the report one way as evidenced by Twitter’s stock opening down 11.78%. However, slowing user growth should not be equated with Twitter peaking as a social network. Twitter is a complex entity and has gone through various epochs in its short history. Its origins in San Francisco were very much rooted with solving the need for like-minded young tech and media workers to stay updated of social events. It has moved from this narrow remit to what it is today, a household name in social communication. This is not to say that Twitter use has become ubiquitous. User adoption is heavily skewed by age and influenced by region, race, language, and educational level. Indeed, the declining user growth figures are testimony that Twitter has some way to go towards ubiquity. However, though user growth is important, other aspects of the medium are important too. Specifically, Twitter’s recent earnings report highlights that mobile advertising revenue has shot up to 80% of total ad revenue and that mobile monthly active users (MAUs) have gone up by 8% since the last quarter. Twitter is perhaps entering a mobile-oriented period, where it refashions itself in ways to creatively facilitate social networking and social media services on mobile devices. This mobile shift has great potential for Twitter as a more pervasive social network and information network. Specifically, Twitter’s mobile experience has the potential to become attractive to a wider user demographic, enabling the company to add users faster than it has recently.

Will Twitter just be full of fake accounts in 140 days?

Some argue that Twitter has significant spam, virus, and fake account issues which make the medium hard to navigate and are crippling the user experience. This position sees spam increasing on Twitter. Though malicious uses of Twitter are not insignificant, the medium is not fundamentally experienced as a malicious space for the vast majority of users. Additionally, Twitter as a social space is divided into vast, but intermeshed, subnetworks. These subnetworks often have citizen patrolling functions (not unlike Wikipedia). Of course, like all social media, hoaxes can and do spread on most online social platforms. If we remember back to Hurricane Sandy, Photoshopped images of ominous dark clouds circling the Statue of Liberty went viral across social media as a whole. With Twitter’s 255 million users, patrolling is not always an easy task. However, its power as a social network comes into its own through everyday crowdsourced patrolling on Twitter.

The question of what can Twitter do to limit spam, fake accounts, etc. I think is already being tackled by the social media industry more broadly and Twitter is part of this process. Additionally, the successes of Twitter and its popularity make clear that spam and fake accounts do not dictate most people’s Twitter experience. Indeed, most Twitter users experience significantly higher forms of spam via e-mail and phone and have not abandoned these mediums. Closing down Twitter is more likely to alienate users than spur user growth. Additionally, its power as a global communications medium overshadows spam issues.

One of the unique aspects of Twitter is the ability to send a tweet with anyone in the world and potentially begin a continuing conversation with them. I have had students, for example, tweet to authors of books they are studying and exchanged a couple of highly illuminating tweets with them. Being able to tweet to anyone, of course, can be a double-edged sword in that malicious users can use the medium’s openness in the same ways. But, this is not a major risk and is actually part of the selling point of the very varied uses of Twitter (from social activism to disaster coordination). Indeed some users are active on Twitter for entertainment news and it is meaningful for them to be able to openly tweet at Justin Bieber even though he won’t respond.

People may have more personalized Twitter experiences 140 days from now

Let us not forget that Twitter is many things for many people. Like LinkedIn, Twitter fosters professional networks; like Facebook, it fosters friend networks; like YouTube, Instagram, and Flickr, it fosters media sharing. The medium is perhaps still finding its feet in these areas and a knock-on effect is that its users may be finding new and unique ways to use Twitter that could potentially lead to higher levels of user engagement and growth in the next 140 days to come.

Dick Costolo, Twitter’s CEO has been quite vocal on his thoughts on the subject. Specifically, he has publicly argued that the medium has a larger platform strategy in which mobile is at the heart (I mentioned some of the medium’s growth in this area) and Costolo sees this as game changing. The acquisition of MoPub, a mobile advertising exchange, is testament of Twitter’s commitment to mobile and its moves into more far reaching in-app advertising, which could have major impacts on advertising revenue.

Mass adoption of communications media takes time. However, evidence of the pervasiveness of Twitter to our everyday social lives is really not hard to find. Hashtag culture has been part of the recent Indian elections and billboards from London to Beijing have hashtags. We could see the rise of more localized hashtag-based experiences on the medium.

Twitter’s power is, of course, as a text-based medium. But, my Twitter book makes the sociological argument that Twitter is many things for many people and I think it has great promise in growing its user base amongst those who are tweet-speak phobic by making one type of experience of Twitter highly visual.

Twitter will face challenges in the next 1400 days

I think Twitter remains unique in many ways in terms of being an open public space. Some scholars have put great hope in Twitter as the bringer of a networked, global public sphere. In a time of increasing government clampdowns on media and moves towards state-censored media, having social media as a potential outlet to voice citizen discontent is fundamentally important to global civil society. Twitter plays an important part in social change movements and reform (both governmental and corporate). It is hardly perfect in this regard, but I remain positive on the outlook for Twitter as an instrument for change. It continues to be used to get the word out on social issues and to organize people (e.g. protest flash mobs). Indeed, the use of Twitter to bring together online and offline activism has been particularly powerful in quite a few cases (though not all!). Additionally, celebrity-led fundraising efforts on Twitter for social causes have been particularly successful due to the prominent role celebrities play on Twitter.

I think in the next 1400 days, Twitter will likely have major user experience changes to try to make the medium more accessible to a wider audience. The lingua franca of Twitter (@, #, tweet, retweet) has created a perceived technical barrier (tweet speak) for many people. I think Twitter is aware of this shortcoming and will likely introduce substantial changes that make the mobile Twitter experience more like texting and email, processes that seem almost second nature to many people around the world.

1400 days is a long time in technology years. However, I think our demands of modern social communication will continue to call for seamless information sharing, public communication, and easy modes of social communication. The latter will definitely remain important and Twitter may continue to uniquely differentiate itself in this area. In other words, a Twitter in 1400 days will still likely be premised on its simplicity of being able to reflect the pulse of the online world. Because of this, Twitter 1400 days from now is likely to be based on open communication. And this openness will likely bring Twitter to more of a center position in data insights and analytics for everyone from the United Nations to small brands. What do people think of X leader or policy? Don’t poll them, tweet them! (Twitter’s acquisition of GNIP is the start of this process.)Though, for this to work, everyday people will need to have a real and meaningful voice on the Twitter of the future. This is not an easy task, but if it is pulled off, it would have real impacts on our social, political and economic lives.

Parts of this article were published as part of a moderated debate in The Wall Street Journal.

Twitter and Social TV Watching

May 29, 2014

Social Media, Twitter

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A key domain in which Twitter is becoming important is in shaping the two-way relationship of television and social media. Specifically, live tweeting during television watching is shaping live media experiences in general. And, we are increasingly tweeting to the events of our lives (from news events to concerts). Twitter currently fills an important gap in social media which goes beyond information exchange to making entertainment and other events more socially experienced.

Dick Costolo has made clear that Twitter’s growth model is not focused on specific user growth targets, but rather is about building higher levels of engagement with the platform. What Twitter has is a global presence and household name recognition. But its problem is that perhaps the structure and form of the medium both put people off of joining or make it hard for them to be active. This has led to the trend of Twitter geeks who tweet often and don’t think twice about @-mentions. Your average person may just see the @ and shy away from a perceived wall of geek-based syntax. I think this last challenge is major, but one that is surmountable through creative, easy-to-use interfaces and other innovations and can lead to a new phase for Twitter and our engagements with it.

Television watching has always been a social process (e.g. a family gathering around the TV or colleagues at work talking about a show from the night before). However, the types of social interaction now possible with social media have changed how we watch TV. Specifically, new forms of ‘social TV viewing’ have produced conversations between TV watchers who are not geographically co-located and may or may not even be watching the TV show at the same time. This is a major change in the form and reach of the social side of TV watching.

Estimates have placed around 40% of evening tweets as television-related. Last year, Twitter Amplify, a TV ad targeting system was launched in the US. Twitter’s ad buy remains small in comparison to Facebook, but Amplify and similar products may provide new ways to market video advertising and, importantly, data analytics regarding engagement with a brand’s TV ads. The success of this is partially premised on the fact that users tweeting about a TV show are assumed to have watched the TV program the ad ran against. There are, of course, some limitations with this approach. However, an ad by Heineken during the US open men’s finals in September 2013 was promoted via Amplify and saw about 18,000 views, retweets, and comments. I think there is definitely potential for Twitter to better these relatively new products and further capitalize on social TV viewing, especially as it expands its social TV products outside of US markets.

Twitter’s social TV products like Amplify are still very young (Amplify was launched last year). Amplify is completely oriented to just the US market right now. However, social television watching has become a global trend. So, Twitter has totally new ad markets to tap into. Additionally, user engagement in terms of social TV watching is still very simple and organized around noisy hashtag-oriented engagement which is not always easy from a smart phone or tablet.

I think creative aggregation tools to distill the complex discourses emerging from social TV (and beyond) are completely lacking and Twitter has this and many other potential product avenues to not only spread its market reach, but greatly increase its user engagement (both of which affect revenue and profits). After all, Twitter is (currently) cash rich and could spend some real effort on helping users navigate through the sometimes tidal deluge that is a Twitter timeline.

I am not arguing that Twitter can or will deliver a mass audience on the scale of Facebook. Indeed, I think Twitter’s real promise is in distinction to Facebook in the sense of being a tool for public discourse rather than the more bounded friend networks of Facebook (which also have value of course). In my opinion, Twitter’s success is dependent on not deviating from its attractiveness to users, but creatively taking on user experience challenges.

I think our current experience of social television watching via Twitter is quite primitive. I think users want to spend more time on Twitter and further interact with not just television, but media content more generally. For example, I think people want a more immersive social TV experience which includes the ability to watch content within Twitter and tweet in reference to a particular scene (or even drawing a circle around a part of the frame) and this rich context is embedded within the tweet. Users want to engage at these more sophisticated levels and Twitter just doesn’t have the power to do this yet. In terms of ads, these much higher levels of detail could lead to much more relevant ad delivery (like pushing information about the Nike Air Jordan XX9 if an actor is wearing the shoe and it has been tagged in a tweet). More advanced machine-learning driven data backends could enrich this process even further.

Importantly, these features could also play a role in bettering Twitter’s role in global civil society and keep Twitter in the public limelight for years to come. Visual interfaces don’t just have utility for social TV watching but could be used in social activism and disaster recovery for example.

Parts of this article were published as part of a moderated debate in The Wall Street Journal.

Twitter and Cancer : The Lisa Bonchek Adams / Keller incident

January 15, 2014

Health, Social Media, Twitter

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I have published about Twitter and cancer in my book as well as in articles. However, it is not every day that the topic itself reaches global media coverage. Cancer is a disease which continues to be surrounded by taboos and its coverage is often about novel research or innovative treatment modalities. While we understand more and more about cancer, media coverage generally does not focus on the disease and Twitter. Enter Lisa Bonchek Adams (@adamslisa), a breast cancer patient whose cancer has spread to her bones and mother of three from Connecticut.

She has tweeted over 165,000 times (with many of those about her own cancer experience). She tweets about her current state (e.g. on January 4: ‘Very rough day here. Dizziness, weakness, pain. Need the tumors to shrink for relief. That will take time: chemo and radiation.’) and about media coverage of cancer (e.g. on December 30: ‘Articles about “defiant patients” who “refuse” to accept prognoses continue to reinforce the BS that attitude determines long term survival.’) for example. As I discuss in my book, there are many cancer patients, survivors and their family members who use Twitter to find out about treatments, side effects, or as a place of support. In other words, what Lisa Bonchek Adams is part of a much larger trend of cancer patients using Twitter.

However, Emma Gilbey Keller a US-based columnist for The Guardian took offense to Adams’ tweets and wrote a column (since removed by The Guardian) which argues that @adamslisa is sharing too much on Twitter and even goes so far as to say she is ‘dying out loud’. Emma Gilbey Keller wrote in the column, “Should there be boundaries in this kind of experience? Is there such a thing as TMI [too much information]?”. My work on social media clearly indicates that social media has shifted the boundaries of public and private and what is considered TMI now versus pre-Facebook and Twitter has changed quite a bit. Therefore, Keller’s argument seems out of context and disconnected with the Twitter Age we live in. Indeed Emma Gilbey Keller’s unsympathetic comment of “dying out loud” [“She’s in terrible pain. She knows there is no cure, and she wants you to know all about what she is going through. Adams is dying out loud.”] misses the larger social context here, which is that we do quite a lot of things “out loud” on social media from announcing what we had for breakfast to how we are having a fight with a best friend. Ditto for births, deaths, and cancer diagnoses.

Bill Keller (Emma Gilbey Keller’s husband and former executive editor of the New York Times) weighed in via a column in the New York Times where he argues along the same vein as his wife, but went a step further, adding that she should die quietly rather than loudly on Twitter. Social media has been ablaze with angry responses from cancer patients, survivors, their family, and the general public. Besides his harsh condemnation of Adams, Bill Keller also makes an unnatural distinction between the online and offline worlds, emphasizing her writing as ‘tweeting’ rather than as an important form of publishing. And, there are many patients of terminal or other serious illnesses who publish and journalists don’t write about them ‘dying loudly’. This is a critical distinction as online writing is no less ‘real’ than the printed word, indeed broadsheet ink has become the minority today anyways! Moreover, publishing on Twitter is not intended by most Twitter users as broadcast to a wide audience. Rather, many use it as a form of diary writing or a means to broadcast to their specific, usually small audience of followers. Doctors often ask cancer patients to reflect on their experience to better their psychological health and some patients find Twitter to be an ideal outlet for this.

One of the values of Twitter and other social media is that they have been found to help patients of terminal and other major illnesses stay socially connected, whereas many often become socially isolated. Or as one study puts it:, social media “may help promote patient happiness and safety and serve as an educational platform.”. This has real benefits for health. Because cancer patients on Twitter do not usually have the goal of reaching large audiences on Twitter, but rather often use the medium as a diary or to form small support networks, they are often not trying to deliver a specific normative message. Or as @adamslisa tweets: “Why is she tweeting if it hurts so much?” I am sure people ask. It helps to distract me especially when I am alone (it’s 6 AM here).” This distraction through publishing on Twitter is something many cancer patients who tweet feel and there is research to support a net health benefit.

Though social media can have medical disinformation and is not always a good thing for all cancer patients, this is not a decision for the Kellers’ to make. Rather, it is a case for individual cancer patients and survivors.

To hear more of my take on Twitter and Cancer, you can listen to me on the BBC World Service.

Twitter and activism

December 3, 2013

Social Media, Twitter

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The role of social media in activist movements is a regular staple of news media. Just recently, political activism in Ukraine over the issue of whether Ukraine should join the European Union has been discussed across several hashtags on Twitter. As the Ukranian state cracked down on protests in Independence square in Kiev, I have been reflecting on the role of Twitter in recent social and political movements. I recently spoke on the BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed about the role of Twitter in social movements and the BBC World Service’s Have Your Say regarding the cases of Ukraine and Thailand more specifically.

More close to home, the UCU, UNISON, and UNITE are striking over fair pay in higher education. And, though much more localized in comparison to Ukraine and Thailand, Twitter is being used (via #fairpayinhe) to coordinate real-time discussion during the strike action. Des Freedman asked me to blog about Twitter and activism as he is staging a ‘teach-out’ (#goldteachout) today during the strike action and wanted to include some material on social media and movements. This blog post attempts to highlight the complex and nuanced role social media plays in contemporary activism using the case of recent events in Ukraine to provide a context.

In Ukraine over the weekend, the #Euromaidan hashtag (and, to a lesser extent, #Ukraine) has been used as venue for both citizen journalism and to circulate news regarding the Ukranian protests against President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to scrap an EU accession deal. Tweets were not restricted to citizen journalists, but included lawmakers as well. For example, Andriy Shevchenko, opposition Ukranian lawmaker, tweeted: “The Maidan has been brutally mopped up,” referring to the government’s violent dispersal of Independence Square in Kiev. On a more micro-level, various social media has been used to circulate firsthand accounts of Independence Square (via YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter).

@ivanbandura TwitPic in Kiev

For example, the Twitter user Ivan Bandura (@ivanbandura), acting as a citizen journalist, tweeted from Kiev: ‘Despite the cold and rain tonight, people still came to protest Ukraine government’s snub to EU #euromaidan pic.twitter.com/G50TX5n0G1’

The violent disbursal by the Berkut (Ukrainian special forces) incensed young Ukranians in Independence Square who turned to Twitter and other ubiquitous social media to report their version of what took place on the ground. As news reports indicate, many of the protesters in Kiev were armed with smart phones. In the case of the Arab Spring, many of the #egypt tweets, for example, were being produced outside of the Middle East. The case of the Ukraine may be the same (with empirical study needed to confirm or discern differences). However, there is a prima facie indication of greater citizen perspectives rather than a glut of celebrity retweets as the tweet below highlights:

“I will get cold or sick, or even die in Kyiv, but I will go [there]! Because otherwise my consciousness would not allow me to live here if everything works out #євромайдан” (from @neksichka via globalvoicesonline)

The Kyiv Post headlined: ‘Role of social media in EuroMaidan movement essential‘, arguing that ‘unlike the Orange revoultion’, Twitter and Facebook were central to EuroMaidan. They report that the frequency of tweets from November 21-28th ranged from 1,500-3,000 (which is not insignificant). Though prima facie, this seems important, it is not the raw frequency that is important as many of these tweets could be retweets of news stories (again, empirical work would be needed to discern this). What did definitively happen is that social media use went up during EuroMaidan. My argument here is not of a Twitter revolution, but that we tweet during activist movements (I found the same during natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy and the Tōhoku earthquake in Japan).

Any technology that is around/cost-effective/efficient will be used during activist movements. This was true of cassette tapes and photocopies in the 1970’s in Iran and social media today. In other words, the difference is that we now have social technologies that are exponentially more advanced and have far greater reach than older technologies such as faxes or cassette tapes. However, the inherent utility of technology to social activism has not changed in principle. Rather, social media are technologies and just that. Reifying them is dangerous. Rather, social media are used to facilitate activism around issues that have bred sufficient sociopolitical discontent ex-ante (i.e. the discontent is not fomented by the technology per se but rather social technologies are used to inform and rally). In other words, people have been feeling the social issues around them in their everyday lived experience. Social media technologies provide ubiquitous modes of broadcast that can help individuals join global discursive collectives to express those feelings during and after a movement to a wider audience that would not be possible in a localized space. A big difference is also that actors on the ground who are not professional journalists can broadcast their views and experience. Most likely their voice will be blurred into a hashtag – which is not ineffective – and exceptional tweets can be picked up by major news media and circulated to a wide, global audience. Though, it is the exception rather than the rule for tweets to garner a global audience. This highlights a very important point: the efficacy of social media is often dependent on the fact journalists are active on social media and see social media as an integral part of their source mix. Because of this link, social media is important to a movement’s strength on the ‘media battleground’ of winning hearts and minds, an argument made by the Wall Street Journal reporting in Thailand.

As I sit in a cafe writing this, there are three students at a table across from me (one American and one British and one French). I can’t help but overhear as they are talking about the HE strikes. The American says ‘it’s such a British thing to strike’. The British student retorts saying strikes are a very European thing and the French student concurs. It strikes me [pun intended] that it is just this type of discourse which takes place on Twitter during many protests. In other words, perhaps we should be thinking of Twitter as providing a massive public sphere during an activist movement. And like any public space, certain interlocutors have power and influence over others and certain conversations stay micro (like the cafe chat I am eavesdropping on). But unlike the cafe chat, any Twitter conversation can be lifted from obscurity as it is a public medium (and the interlocutors may not even want their tweets to leave the realm of obscurity).

Ultimately, we need to ask whether tweets lead individuals or collectives of protesters, in the case of Thailand for example, to seize government buildings and offices, actions which placed them in direct danger. What I mean is that there must be a compelling motive to bring people to the streets and it is usually not a tweet. In the case of the HE strikes, it is years of unhappiness over low pay that rallied the unions and HE staff to strike (twice). Twitter and other social media can help circulate news and information real time from citizen journalists and journalists alike, but social media are not usually instrumental in breeding the discontent.

My book in a tweet asks a Sociology 101 class at George Mason University

November 21, 2013

Pedagogical, Social Media, Twitter

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Yesterday, JL Johnson @jaeljohnson was teaching my Twitter book to his Sociology 101 class at George Mason University. He asked his class to summarize my Twitter book in less than 140 characters.

@jaeljohnson tweeted: “Limitless comm in digi era&brevity reigns @dhirajmurthy asks good/bad? Look @ history 4 connections w/past tech says +info -depth #sociology”

When he and some of his students tweeted at me regarding this assignment, it reminded me of the many occasions I have been asked to summarize my book into a tweet. A former colleague of mine, Brian Purnell, asked me to do this during a filmed discussion (on YouTube) we had about my book. The best I could come up with on the spot, at the time was ‘I tweet therefore I am’, a reference to a chapter in my book which plays on the famous Cartesian aphorism. But, I quickly backtracked (as I do in my book) saying that Twitter does not follow the strict, reductive Cartesian dualism (separating mind and body), but rather is a part of modern social communication for many of us. What I mean by this is that Twitter is highly socially embedded for many users and any strict dualism is highly problematic. I ended up in my response to Professor Purnell [around 1:13 on the YouTube video] with the answer: ‘I am social therefore, I tweet’. This ties in with the larger argument in my book that Twitter is part of complex social relations and we tweet for a multitude of sociopolitical reasons, which span from updating our followers to what we just ate to a cancer diagnosis or, more criminally, to hitting a cyclist (with that tweet leading to the Tweeter getting arrested).

I’m glad to hear my book went down well in @jaeljohnson’s sociology 101 class! I thought that the class’ tweet was insightful in teasing out some of the key aspects of my book, including its commitment to historicizing Twitter.

Selected quotes from Twitter: Social Communication in the Twitter Age

October 8, 2013

Research, Social Media, Twitter, Twitter

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This week, I have been invited to be a guest on Laurie Taylor’s BBC Radio 4 Program Thinking Allowed to talk about my book, Twitter: Social Communication in the Twitter Age (Polity Press). The BBC has kindly linked to my blog and I thought I would blog some quotes from the book that can both serve as talking points, but also a way in which to stimulate critical discussion of Twitter (via my blog’s comment space at the bottom of the page). Twitter is at a particularly formative time as the company is gearing up for a initial public offering on the NASDAQ of ~ $20 billion. I look forward to comments as well as tweets directed to @dhirajmurthy.

Selected quotes from Twitter: Social Communication in the Twitter Age (Polity Press):

“…like a radio, a user’s Twitter timeline could be playing in the background and if the user becomes interested in a particular story, Twitter moves from the ambient periphery to the active center”

“The ability to tweet and post YouTube videos of your “disaster experience” has the potential for normally marginalized individuals and groups to update the world about their situation”

“Hashtag categories illustrate the ability of Twitter to be both an individual and communal news space simultaneously”

“Twitter is not displacing traditional media… [and] news organizations have found the medium useful in their coverage of breaking news”

“Phantom’ Twitter accounts…post banal information with a trending hashtag to dilute activist hashtags”

“Twitter and Facebook… lend themselves to being used by authorities to ‘spy’ on activists”

“‘Citizen-journalists,’ non-professional journalists, are taking pictures from their smartphones and embedding them in tweets, and this material has now become part of some journalists’ source mix.”

“much of the talk on Twitter is monological, or just never listened to or responded to”

“it is impossible to monitor the integrity of information on Twitter”

“Twitter’s citizen journalism is not exempt from the hierarchies endemic in traditional media industries. Rather, new forms of elitism are emerging”

“tweets regarding breaking news, disasters, and public health epidemics can be misleading, incorrect, or even fraudulent”

”Tweets are analagous to bees in that they exist both as individuals and as part of a collectively built whole”

“Twitter in some ways has redefined existing cultural practices such as diary keeping, news consumption, and job searching”

“Twitter works…because [you] stop thinking about what you’re revealing and who’s on the other end.”

“Twitter has not determined social sharing across great distances, but has facilitated already emergent shifts in social behaviors.”

“If a tweet is retweeted often enough or by the right person(s), it gathers momentum that can emulate a snowball effect”

“Twitter enables users to wear two hats of producer and consumer.”

“even if the audience is not “obvious or apparent,” that does not translate to an absence of an audience with tweets disappearing into the ether”

‘Hate-watching’ and Twitter

April 20, 2013

Twitter, Twitter

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Please cite this as: Murthy, D. (2013), “’Hate-watching’ and Twitter”, iSociology, http://www.dhirajmurthy.com/hate-watching-and-twitter

In my Twitter research, I have been exploring ‘social television watching’. There are two key points which come to mind regarding how the rise of social media has impacted our approach to television-viewing generally. First, scholarship on television has seen TV viewing as ‘parasocial’, an unbalanced relationship where television viewers feel ‘intimacy at a distance’ with celebrity actors (MR Levy 1979). In other words, TV viewers perceive an intimate relationship, where they have the illusion that they ‘know’ the celebrity on screen; however, the celebrity knows nothing of the television watcher. The promise, or at least perception, of social media such as Twitter is that this parasociality may be broken down or challenged one @-mention at a time by the likes of Ashton Kutcher. So the impact here is a perceived decrease of parasociality (a decrease in the traditional gap between television viewer and celebrity on the screen).

Additionally, social media, by encouraging television audience members to be quite active, tweeting under #thefollowing or #dexter can form engaged public audiences, which include both fans who know each other and fans who do not. This social TV watching is powered by social media use via mobile smartphones and laptops. Interestingly, an argument can be made that this increases our sociability while engaging in an activity which many have viewed as becoming less and less social (in juxtaposition to historical TV watching as a family or other group).

Hate-watching has been a part of television since its inception. It’s not that Twitter and other social media encourage hate watching per se, but that social media make it easier to publicly hate-watch. In other words, shows like Single Ladies or Toddlers & Tiaras would have had hate-watchers with or without social media. It is not only the publicness of hate watching that has changed, but also that it is real time, global, and not limited to one’s living room or to a single telephone call. What social media does is enable a ‘networked public’ (see ‘Networked’ by Barry Wellman) to hate-watch together. Additionally, after Emily Nussbaum’s 2012 New Yorker piece, ‘Hate-Watching “Smash”‘, Twitter has seen many incidents of people tweeting under #hatewatching and similar hash tags shows that are the top of their hate-watch list. Twitter can ultimately egg people on to hate watch (especially during the network broadcast of a show or in the immediate days after the show is aired).

As mentioned above, social media creates new social communities and formations. Often, these are focused around particular events (something I discuss in my book). In the case of television, these events are particular TV shows. Events encourage social responses. My view is that hate-watching is not more popular today per se. Rather, it is the way in which we hate-watch that has changed. Melrose Place in the 90s comes to mind here! Though by no means the same as hate-watching, the best term to describe similar historical processes of this type of television watching is ‘guilty pleasure’. An Associated Press article in 2002 refers to Jerry Springer shows in this vein.

What is different, and why we may perceive hate-watching to be more popular today, is that Twitter makes it very easy to publicly broadcast your hate-watching. Not only that, but the social engagement of rapid @-mentions between hate-watchers leads us to think it is on the rise. Not only is it very public and in your face now, but it is highly networked, real-time, and global.

—iSociology

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