Pub Date : 2022-06-22DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2022.2091468
T. Nomura
{"title":"Relationships 5.0: How AI, VR, and robots will reshape our emotional lives","authors":"T. Nomura","doi":"10.1080/1369118X.2022.2091468","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2091468","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48335,"journal":{"name":"Information Communication & Society","volume":"26 1","pages":"2129 - 2130"},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47354444","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-19DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2022.2085611
Aaron Shaw, Floor Fiers, E. Hargittai
ABSTRACT In theory, the gig economy facilitates flexible, digitally mediated employment arrangements. Why do some people wind up doing gig work while others do not? We focus on how online participation inequalities, and Internet use experiences and skills, shape the composition of online gig workers. Specifically, we analyze a unique survey data set from a national sample of 1512 U.S. adults that includes information about background attributes and behaviors, detailed measures of Internet experiences and skills, as well as questions about whether study participants had completed specific steps necessary to becoming a task worker on two prominent gig economy platforms: Amazon Mechanical Turk and TaskRabbit. We use Bayesian regression to compare four stages of gig economy participation. Workers who participate in the gig economy tend to be younger, more highly educated, and more skilled Internet users. This implies that the gig economy increases labor market stratification and that digital participation inequalities compound labor inequalities.
{"title":"Participation inequality in the gig economy","authors":"Aaron Shaw, Floor Fiers, E. Hargittai","doi":"10.1080/1369118X.2022.2085611","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2085611","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In theory, the gig economy facilitates flexible, digitally mediated employment arrangements. Why do some people wind up doing gig work while others do not? We focus on how online participation inequalities, and Internet use experiences and skills, shape the composition of online gig workers. Specifically, we analyze a unique survey data set from a national sample of 1512 U.S. adults that includes information about background attributes and behaviors, detailed measures of Internet experiences and skills, as well as questions about whether study participants had completed specific steps necessary to becoming a task worker on two prominent gig economy platforms: Amazon Mechanical Turk and TaskRabbit. We use Bayesian regression to compare four stages of gig economy participation. Workers who participate in the gig economy tend to be younger, more highly educated, and more skilled Internet users. This implies that the gig economy increases labor market stratification and that digital participation inequalities compound labor inequalities.","PeriodicalId":48335,"journal":{"name":"Information Communication & Society","volume":"26 1","pages":"2250 - 2267"},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45060785","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-13DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2022.2085616
Xinyue Xu, Aaron Yikai Ng
ABSTRACT Specialty coffee is increasingly produced and consumed as part of routine life in many cities in modern China, but the social and cultural shifts it has engendered yet to be systematically examined. By examining the intersections between social media and the operations of independent Chinese coffeehouses in the field of taste, this paper puts forward the idea of new taste among Chinese millennials, which comprises individual subjectivity, heterogeneous social relationships, and forms of class distinction. Using taste-oriented keyword searches on WeChat official accounts, 20 articles were returned and analyzed in terms of their textural and visual orientations to examine the processes underlying how taste is influenced in the consumption of specialty coffee in China. Findings suggest the importance of taste makers in this process, from routine creation of aesthetic ambience in the coffeehouses to the construction of affective taste spaces online, and the establishment of taste cycles from online to offline, which all underpin class privilege. Moreover, the emergence of an ‘urban café community’ appears to be characterized by specific forms of belonging resulting from a productive effect of the interplay between independent coffeehouses and consumers in everyday urban life in which a set of aesthetic boundaries reside. Second, these digital consumers distinguish themselves socially by positioning themselves as having a cosmopolitan taste grounded in coffee appreciation instead of merely consuming coffee for physiological benefits. These findings extend taste propositions through engagement of Chinese digital millennial consumers to uncover the underlying cultural classifications.
{"title":"Cultivation of new taste: taste makers and new forms of distinction in China’s Coffee Culture","authors":"Xinyue Xu, Aaron Yikai Ng","doi":"10.1080/1369118X.2022.2085616","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2085616","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Specialty coffee is increasingly produced and consumed as part of routine life in many cities in modern China, but the social and cultural shifts it has engendered yet to be systematically examined. By examining the intersections between social media and the operations of independent Chinese coffeehouses in the field of taste, this paper puts forward the idea of new taste among Chinese millennials, which comprises individual subjectivity, heterogeneous social relationships, and forms of class distinction. Using taste-oriented keyword searches on WeChat official accounts, 20 articles were returned and analyzed in terms of their textural and visual orientations to examine the processes underlying how taste is influenced in the consumption of specialty coffee in China. Findings suggest the importance of taste makers in this process, from routine creation of aesthetic ambience in the coffeehouses to the construction of affective taste spaces online, and the establishment of taste cycles from online to offline, which all underpin class privilege. Moreover, the emergence of an ‘urban café community’ appears to be characterized by specific forms of belonging resulting from a productive effect of the interplay between independent coffeehouses and consumers in everyday urban life in which a set of aesthetic boundaries reside. Second, these digital consumers distinguish themselves socially by positioning themselves as having a cosmopolitan taste grounded in coffee appreciation instead of merely consuming coffee for physiological benefits. These findings extend taste propositions through engagement of Chinese digital millennial consumers to uncover the underlying cultural classifications.","PeriodicalId":48335,"journal":{"name":"Information Communication & Society","volume":"26 1","pages":"2345 - 2362"},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44087168","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-13DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2022.2085613
D. Paré, Charles Smith
ABSTRACT The myriad opportunities social media provide for amplifying individual expression are counterbalanced by the countless opportunities they afford employers to monitor and regulate employees’ off-duty speech. The embedding of social media platforms into peoples’ daily routines has blurred the boundaries between work and non-work domains. This presents a host of ethical, legal, and moral challenges pitting the rights and interests of employees against the authority and power of employers. In seeking to investigate whether, and the extent to which, employees’ off-duty expression is becoming subject to increasing employer control we conducted a systematic content analysis of Canadian judicial opinions from some 50 arbitration and court decisions involving the porous boundary between employees’ off-duty and work lives. The findings offer insights into the governance trajectory being charted by jurisdictional expressions in Canada that deal with reconciling employees’ right to freedom of expression with their contractual obligation to avoid harming employers’ public reputation. The analysis shows that employers are seeking to impose strong disciplinary measures for employee off-duty social media postings they deem contrary to their interests, and that adjudicators are upholding the imposing of such discipline while mitigating employer disciplinary excesses. These observations suggest the classic dichotomy between owners’ time and own time is being reconfigured into a distinction between owners’ time/space and one’s own tethered time/space. The recent introduction of ‘right to disconnect’ legislation offers labour unions a unique opportunity to develop collective bargaining proposals aimed at eliminating the tethering of employees’ time/space and better protecting their off-duty expression.
{"title":"Free to express yourself online while off-duty? Tracing jurisdictional expressions of shifting workplace boundaries in Canada","authors":"D. Paré, Charles Smith","doi":"10.1080/1369118X.2022.2085613","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2085613","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The myriad opportunities social media provide for amplifying individual expression are counterbalanced by the countless opportunities they afford employers to monitor and regulate employees’ off-duty speech. The embedding of social media platforms into peoples’ daily routines has blurred the boundaries between work and non-work domains. This presents a host of ethical, legal, and moral challenges pitting the rights and interests of employees against the authority and power of employers. In seeking to investigate whether, and the extent to which, employees’ off-duty expression is becoming subject to increasing employer control we conducted a systematic content analysis of Canadian judicial opinions from some 50 arbitration and court decisions involving the porous boundary between employees’ off-duty and work lives. The findings offer insights into the governance trajectory being charted by jurisdictional expressions in Canada that deal with reconciling employees’ right to freedom of expression with their contractual obligation to avoid harming employers’ public reputation. The analysis shows that employers are seeking to impose strong disciplinary measures for employee off-duty social media postings they deem contrary to their interests, and that adjudicators are upholding the imposing of such discipline while mitigating employer disciplinary excesses. These observations suggest the classic dichotomy between owners’ time and own time is being reconfigured into a distinction between owners’ time/space and one’s own tethered time/space. The recent introduction of ‘right to disconnect’ legislation offers labour unions a unique opportunity to develop collective bargaining proposals aimed at eliminating the tethering of employees’ time/space and better protecting their off-duty expression.","PeriodicalId":48335,"journal":{"name":"Information Communication & Society","volume":"26 1","pages":"2304 - 2325"},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47780482","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-29DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2022.2072752
Jennifer Sadler, Chantell LaPan
ABSTRACT Red Table Talk, a web series exclusively aired on Facebook Watch, represents the narrative of intergenerational Black women who tackle critical conversations. The show, developed by Jada Pinkett-Smith and featuring her daughter and mother, brings in special guests for discussions on race, gender identity, sexual and mental health, co-parenting, and relationships. This paper relies on both qualitative and quantitative data from an audience survey, supplemented by thematic analysis to explore these themes. We show how the alternative media model of Facebook Watch and the series itself act as rebellions against institutionalized narratives that perpetuate stereotypes against people of color. We examine how Black women creators reclaim agency and resist generational forms of silencing by authoring a counter-narrative at the intersection of their lived cultural experiences.
{"title":"At the red table: how intergenerational Black women are using Facebook Watch to cultivate critical conversations on health, identity, and relationships","authors":"Jennifer Sadler, Chantell LaPan","doi":"10.1080/1369118X.2022.2072752","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2072752","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Red Table Talk, a web series exclusively aired on Facebook Watch, represents the narrative of intergenerational Black women who tackle critical conversations. The show, developed by Jada Pinkett-Smith and featuring her daughter and mother, brings in special guests for discussions on race, gender identity, sexual and mental health, co-parenting, and relationships. This paper relies on both qualitative and quantitative data from an audience survey, supplemented by thematic analysis to explore these themes. We show how the alternative media model of Facebook Watch and the series itself act as rebellions against institutionalized narratives that perpetuate stereotypes against people of color. We examine how Black women creators reclaim agency and resist generational forms of silencing by authoring a counter-narrative at the intersection of their lived cultural experiences.","PeriodicalId":48335,"journal":{"name":"Information Communication & Society","volume":"26 1","pages":"2149 - 2167"},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43560906","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-24DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2022.2072751
Camille Tilleul
ABSTRACT Social networks are used by millions of people. These platforms are very popular with young audiences but also raise a growing number of questions: What are young people doing on social networks? What do they read and produce? Do they engage in a variety of activities? Are they media literate in relation to these social networks, and how do they develop these competences? This article focuses on the relationships between young adults’ social network practices and the development of their media literacy competences. Based on responses from 350 Belgian young adults, we identify profiles based on frequency and diversity of their practices. These profiles correlate with different levels of media literacy. We observe no relationship between frequency of participants’ reception practices (reviewing their newsfeed, reading posts, conducting in-depth research) and the development of their media literacy competences. However, we observe that the more young adults diversify these reception practices, the better their media literacy competences are. Conversely, and surprisingly, the more often they produce media content and the more they diversify these production practices (creating and sharing posts), the less media literate they appear to be.
{"title":"Young adults’ social network practices and the development of their media literacy competences: a quantitative study","authors":"Camille Tilleul","doi":"10.1080/1369118X.2022.2072751","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2072751","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Social networks are used by millions of people. These platforms are very popular with young audiences but also raise a growing number of questions: What are young people doing on social networks? What do they read and produce? Do they engage in a variety of activities? Are they media literate in relation to these social networks, and how do they develop these competences? This article focuses on the relationships between young adults’ social network practices and the development of their media literacy competences. Based on responses from 350 Belgian young adults, we identify profiles based on frequency and diversity of their practices. These profiles correlate with different levels of media literacy. We observe no relationship between frequency of participants’ reception practices (reviewing their newsfeed, reading posts, conducting in-depth research) and the development of their media literacy competences. However, we observe that the more young adults diversify these reception practices, the better their media literacy competences are. Conversely, and surprisingly, the more often they produce media content and the more they diversify these production practices (creating and sharing posts), the less media literate they appear to be.","PeriodicalId":48335,"journal":{"name":"Information Communication & Society","volume":"26 1","pages":"2107 - 2125"},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43224094","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-15DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2022.2072753
Marika Cifor, K. Rawson
ABSTRACT Libraries and archives have long been rich sites of exploration for LGBTQ+ people in search of self-understanding, identification, shared experience, and community. Yet the information infrastructures that guide every quest for queer and trans information remain silently powerful mediators of our research processes. Through an extended discussion of the Homosaurus, an international LGBTQ linked data vocabulary that the authors helped to develop, this article explores how queer information activism can confront the impoverished tools available for describing queer and trans resources. By focusing on both “corrective” and “analytic” strategies, the authors argue that the Homosaurus must work to expand the queer and trans terminology available for subject description while still challenging the structure and process of classificatory systems as always in tension with our queer aspirations.
{"title":"Mediating Queer and Trans Pasts: The Homosaurus as Queer Information Activism","authors":"Marika Cifor, K. Rawson","doi":"10.1080/1369118X.2022.2072753","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2072753","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Libraries and archives have long been rich sites of exploration for LGBTQ+ people in search of self-understanding, identification, shared experience, and community. Yet the information infrastructures that guide every quest for queer and trans information remain silently powerful mediators of our research processes. Through an extended discussion of the Homosaurus, an international LGBTQ linked data vocabulary that the authors helped to develop, this article explores how queer information activism can confront the impoverished tools available for describing queer and trans resources. By focusing on both “corrective” and “analytic” strategies, the authors argue that the Homosaurus must work to expand the queer and trans terminology available for subject description while still challenging the structure and process of classificatory systems as always in tension with our queer aspirations.","PeriodicalId":48335,"journal":{"name":"Information Communication & Society","volume":"26 1","pages":"2168 - 2185"},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48669674","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-11DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2022.2072754
Saadia Malik
ABSTRACT Sudan experienced a nationwide nonviolent revolution between December 2018 and July 2019, which has remained underrepresented in communication studies literature. This study employs empirical data from personal interviews with Sudanese activists as well as a theoretical framework of social movements based on media ecologies. The study’s theoretical framework considers social movements in terms of their historical contexts and as a whole consisting of communication networks and interaction between various forms of communication and actors, particularly the entanglement of online and offline elements of activism. The research contributes to the body of knowledge on social movements and communication, particularly in Sudan. The findings of the study show that the media ecology approach provides a more comprehensive understanding of the interplay and intertwinement of human actors in social revolution, collective agency, and technologies than the one-medium biased approach used in previous studies on social movements, particularly in the Arab world.
{"title":"Sudan’s December revolution of 2018: the ecology of Youth Connective and Collective Activism","authors":"Saadia Malik","doi":"10.1080/1369118X.2022.2072754","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2072754","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Sudan experienced a nationwide nonviolent revolution between December 2018 and July 2019, which has remained underrepresented in communication studies literature. This study employs empirical data from personal interviews with Sudanese activists as well as a theoretical framework of social movements based on media ecologies. The study’s theoretical framework considers social movements in terms of their historical contexts and as a whole consisting of communication networks and interaction between various forms of communication and actors, particularly the entanglement of online and offline elements of activism. The research contributes to the body of knowledge on social movements and communication, particularly in Sudan. The findings of the study show that the media ecology approach provides a more comprehensive understanding of the interplay and intertwinement of human actors in social revolution, collective agency, and technologies than the one-medium biased approach used in previous studies on social movements, particularly in the Arab world.","PeriodicalId":48335,"journal":{"name":"Information Communication & Society","volume":"25 1","pages":"1495 - 1510"},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45284706","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-11DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2022.2072750
Sandra González-Bailón, Michael A. Xenos
ABSTRACT Measures of news exposure are common in research that tries to explain political knowledge, political engagement, opinion formation and, more generally, media effects. Much of that research employs self-reported measures obtained with surveys, known to suffer from accuracy problems. Observational measures, however, also suffer from limitations derived from data collection and instrumentation. Here we offer new comparative evidence on the nature of those problems. We show that commonly used self-report measures of digital news consumption are problematic for three reasons: they only pay attention to a small fraction of all available sources; they underestimate audience share; and they distort the relative position of news sites in visibility rankings. Measurement problems, however, also exist in observational studies, especially when mobile access is excluded from data collection. Our analyses quantify the magnitude of these problems, offering unprecedented comparative evidence of online news consumption that spans nine countries and a period of five years. We discuss the implications of our findings for future research on news exposure.
{"title":"The blind spots of measuring online news exposure: a comparison of self-reported and observational data in nine countries","authors":"Sandra González-Bailón, Michael A. Xenos","doi":"10.1080/1369118X.2022.2072750","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2072750","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Measures of news exposure are common in research that tries to explain political knowledge, political engagement, opinion formation and, more generally, media effects. Much of that research employs self-reported measures obtained with surveys, known to suffer from accuracy problems. Observational measures, however, also suffer from limitations derived from data collection and instrumentation. Here we offer new comparative evidence on the nature of those problems. We show that commonly used self-report measures of digital news consumption are problematic for three reasons: they only pay attention to a small fraction of all available sources; they underestimate audience share; and they distort the relative position of news sites in visibility rankings. Measurement problems, however, also exist in observational studies, especially when mobile access is excluded from data collection. Our analyses quantify the magnitude of these problems, offering unprecedented comparative evidence of online news consumption that spans nine countries and a period of five years. We discuss the implications of our findings for future research on news exposure.","PeriodicalId":48335,"journal":{"name":"Information Communication & Society","volume":"26 1","pages":"2088 - 2106"},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47064749","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-29DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2022.2065213
F. Toepfl, D. Kravets, A. Ryzhova, A. Beseler
ABSTRACT This article advances extant research that has audited search algorithms for misinformation in four respects. Firstly, this is the first misinformation audit not to implement a national but a cross-national research design. Secondly, it retrieves results not in response to the most popular query terms. Instead, it theorizes two semantic dimensions of search terms and illustrates how they impact the number of misinformative results returned. Furthermore, the analysis not only captures the mere presence of misinformative content but in addition whether the source websites are affiliated with a key misinformation actor (Russia’s ruling elites) and whom the conspiracy narratives cast as the malicious plotters. Empirically, the audit compares Covid-19 conspiracy theories in Google search results across 5 key target countries of Russia’s foreign communication (Belarus, Estonia, Germany, Ukraine, and the US) and Russia as of November 2020 (N = 5280 search results). It finds that, across all countries, primarily content published by mass media organizations rendered conspiracy theories visible in search results. Conspiratorial content published on websites affiliated with Russia’s ruling elites was retrieved in the Belarusian, German and Russian contexts. Across all countries, the majority of conspiracy narratives suspected plotters from China. Malicious actors from the US were insinuated exclusively by sources affiliated with Russia’s elites. Overall, conspiracy narratives did not primarily deepen divides within but between national communities, since – across all countries – only plotters from beyond the national borders were blamed. To conclude, the article discusses methodological advice and promising paths of research for future cross-national search engine audits.
{"title":"Who are the plotters behind the pandemic? Comparing Covid-19 conspiracy theories in Google search results across five key target countries of Russia’s foreign communication","authors":"F. Toepfl, D. Kravets, A. Ryzhova, A. Beseler","doi":"10.1080/1369118X.2022.2065213","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2065213","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article advances extant research that has audited search algorithms for misinformation in four respects. Firstly, this is the first misinformation audit not to implement a national but a cross-national research design. Secondly, it retrieves results not in response to the most popular query terms. Instead, it theorizes two semantic dimensions of search terms and illustrates how they impact the number of misinformative results returned. Furthermore, the analysis not only captures the mere presence of misinformative content but in addition whether the source websites are affiliated with a key misinformation actor (Russia’s ruling elites) and whom the conspiracy narratives cast as the malicious plotters. Empirically, the audit compares Covid-19 conspiracy theories in Google search results across 5 key target countries of Russia’s foreign communication (Belarus, Estonia, Germany, Ukraine, and the US) and Russia as of November 2020 (N = 5280 search results). It finds that, across all countries, primarily content published by mass media organizations rendered conspiracy theories visible in search results. Conspiratorial content published on websites affiliated with Russia’s ruling elites was retrieved in the Belarusian, German and Russian contexts. Across all countries, the majority of conspiracy narratives suspected plotters from China. Malicious actors from the US were insinuated exclusively by sources affiliated with Russia’s elites. Overall, conspiracy narratives did not primarily deepen divides within but between national communities, since – across all countries – only plotters from beyond the national borders were blamed. To conclude, the article discusses methodological advice and promising paths of research for future cross-national search engine audits.","PeriodicalId":48335,"journal":{"name":"Information Communication & Society","volume":"26 1","pages":"2033 - 2051"},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48044182","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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