01/28: Brooke Foucault Welles

[smiklin]

Comment below with questions or thoughts about the reading for this week's workshop.

Please make your comments by Wednesday 11:59 PM, and upvote at least five of your peers' comments on Thursday prior to the workshop. You need to use 'thumbs-up' for your reactions to count towards 'top comments,' but you can use other emojis on top of the thumbs up.

[Panyw97]

Thank you for sharing! It's an outstanding trend that people are more likely to join in the spread of social activism (online/offline) in this decade, especially the activity related to gender, race, etc. And Common topics (shows as #hashtags online) are more likely to be "hijacked" and change into social activities by the counterparties. Since such social issues existed for years, what stimulates the prevalence of this trend? And what would you expect from the development of this trend?

[Jasmine97Huang]

Thank you Dr. Foucault Welles for sharing this very interesting topic with us. I am curious about your opinion on the concept of commodity activism in the context of networked counterpublic. Describing social media as platforms or tools implies a level of neutrality and objectivity that often disguises the algorithmic biases, commercial motivation and centralized power behind the design, promotion and commercialization of these digital social products. I am wondering what roles do these communications technology companies play in the #hashtagactivism movement?

[hihowme]

Thank you so much for your presentation! It is really interesting that how the networks are affecting people's behavior online. I am wondering do you see any takeaways that economics could take to better build their research? Thanks a lot!

[ghost]

What do you think about the future of hashtags?

[wanxii]

I wonder how we should precieve or handle this kind of tremendous power seized by the Internet nowadays. Sometimes the divergence between our surroundings and the world captured in the screens would just intrigue me to wonder to what extend or what entities should be entitled to govern the virtual society.

[Dxu1]

Thank you for sharing your research! I have a question on your data collection for #nypd. How did you guarantee randomness in collecting the 10% sample of tweets over the two day period? Thank you!

[NaiyuJ]

Thanks for sharing the hashtag research! They are really inspiring. From my experience, most of these hashtag issues can be quite sensitive. I wonder as a researcher how we consider ethics problems when doing such kind of research. Thanks!

[ginxzheng]

Thank you so much for having these research and the upcoming presentation! I was wondering would you talk more about how to calculate the networked reciprocal effect given the content data? How did you approach the indicators of measurements?

[LFShan]

Thank you. One concern I have about social media is that while it empowers people that have access to it. It could have a negative externality that diverts most people's attention to social media and thus reduces the chance of things not posted on social media being investigated.

[adarshmathew]

Thank you for presenting at our workshop, Dr. Foucault-Welles! Long-time admirer here of the work you and your students work on, at the intersection of communication studies and network science.

Your #MeToo paper was one of the most memorable papers I read early last year, for a bunch of reasons, but especially the way you handled these disclosures and built (and audited) a classifier for annotation.

I have a couple of questions:

1. On hashtag sampling: Your sampling of tweets explicitly containing the hashtag of interest serves as an explicit form of selection -- you end up looking at tweets that want to tap into the public conversation and form the networked counterpublic, as you discuss. But there was also a significant volume of discourse around the same issues that did not use the hashtag, if memory serves me correctly. In this regard, if you had to go back and repeat this study with the new Firehose API options Twitter has for academics, how would you design the sampling/collection process? Would you add relevant search terms, which could also add much more noise to your data?
2. Re the dynamics in Fig 5.: I loved this figure because it captures quite neatly the lifecycle of disclosures and network consolidation. Can you provide a breakdown of the interplay between the two sets of metrics:

• Were 'Joining Component' interactions mostly non-disc -> non-disc retweets?
• Was the steady 50% of Intra-Component interactions after hour 2 meta-commentary around the disclosures?
• What was the increase in node-count like over this timeline, since you provide only proportion of interactions?
• By my reading of the figure, did the network stop 'expanding' after the 2nd hour, since bridging components and joining isolates make for a tiny proportion of interactions? Or is it small because of the increase in number of nodes participating in the #MeToo network?

Thank you!

[william-wei-zhu]

Thank you for your paper. How great is the danger for right wing extremists to also use similar methods to hijack conversations on twitter? Is there a way for twitter to moderate the content?

[xxicheng]

Thank you for sharing. Besides Twitter, what other social media platforms do you think can be used for your researches? Do you expect different results？

[shenyc16]

Thank you for your sharing your interesting research with us. It is an inspiring work that investigates the specific impact of Internet platform over human behaviors in reality. My question is how will you handle other hashtags, other than #myNYPD, that may have the similar impact?

[chun-hu]

Thank you for sharing. I'm wondering if there are gender differences in these movements?

[97seshu]

Thank you for presenting. How well do you think the patterns you observe from the digital world can be generalized to the non-digital world? Is that possible that people would act more differently or eagerly online to win attention compared to face-to-face interaction?

[vinsonyz]

Thank you for sharing your research with us. I am curious about the mechanism of social media in other countries, will it be the same story?

[FrederickZhengHe]

Thanks for sharing this insightful analysis. I am wondering whether there are substantial differences (or variance) combining different genders and racial identities.

[Raychanan]

Do you agree that hashtag is only used to measure attention, not to discuss?

[Bin-ary-Li]

While I like the idea of reciprocal disclosure, I wonder if it also creates some sort of peer pressure environment that makes women feel like they need to furnish their story with extra details to be on a par with everyone else?

[FranciscoRMendes]

I am very curious about the absence of hashtag hijacking in the #metoo movement, I am very curious about why this did not occur. Are their other hashtags that have become a safe space for the people who use them? I would like to know how these results can translate to real actionable insights that can help victims of abuse. Are you thinking along those lines?

[qishenfu1]

Thank you for sharing? Do you think currently on every social media, the relatively "politically incorrect" people tend to keep silent because they are afraid of being abused? Do you think this phenomenon will affect social science researchers to learn from social media?

[zixu12]

Thanks for your sharing your inspiring work! Indeed hash tags provide a way to power the counter public opinions. Do you think there should be a balance to hold against it as well?

[weijiexu-charlie]

Thanks for your presentation. I'm wondering how your research could guide today's internet companies wrt the design of the function of hashtags.

[Rui-echo-Pan]

Thank you for the paper. I'm curious that how NLP can be applied to analyzing the tweet content. And how are analysis of content and analysis of nodes-network different?

[RuoyunTan]

Thank you for sharing your work. When using the content of the tweets as a data source, do you think there should be a way to weigh a user's own words and the tweet that the user's retweeting?

[siruizhou]

These are very inspiring work. I look forward to learning more about the mixed method approach and the role regulation plays in these campaigns.

[Qlei23]

Thank you for sharing your amazing work! I'm also very interested in the #metoo hashtag activism. I'm wonderring if such activism on the social media would have limited influence on the specific group of social society (for example: young women) compared to traditional activism. Thank you so much! Looking forward to your presentation!

[YanjieZhou]

Thanks for your presentation! I am very curious about when you studies #metoo, what your test set is? I think the validity of test set can be a important criterion for the validity of the whole research.

[caibengbu]

Thank you for sharing your research with us. I am curious about the mechanism of social media in other countries, will it be the same story?

[minminfly68]

Thanks for having the presentation. I am wondering how it would apply to other countries of social media? Would it apply to the authoritarian countries as well? Thanks in advance for your presentation.

[ziwnchen]

Thanks a lot for sharing these intriguing works! I am particularly interested in your story about the relationship between dominant mainstream media and marginalized voices. What do you think could be the major obstacle that limits the permeability between the public sphere and the counterpublic? Why certain voices are marginalized and cannot have equal access to institutions and journalism? What could be the possible solutions to this kind of segregation?

[tianyueniu]

Thank you for the inspiring work! From a social science researcher's perspective, other than empowering minorities, do you think it is possible that social medias such as twitter has also played a significant role in polarizing opposing views?

[timqzhang]

Thank you for the research ! I'm quite curious on the conditions to make such a so-called activism in the network, where the environment is anonymous and people send messages with high privacy. Is there a kind of threshold, beyond which people decide to move from the casual chats to some more formal organizations?

[j2401]

Hello! I have a question about the role of alternative/variant of such Hashtags. Do you believe it helpful to also consider materials in these tags? Would it be helpful to conduct a simple research on their interactions with the main hashtag?

[chentian418]

Thanks for bringing up these innovative work combining race and gender justice with computational content analysis. I am especially interested in this paper Reclaiming Stigmatized Narratives: The Networked Disclosure Landscape of #MeToo, and my question is related to the limitation of the observed data. As you have evaluated network-level reciprocal interactions based on tweets, retweets and replies to #MeToo tweets, how do you account for those impact that people with disclosure didn't have any interactions with the #MeToo tweets but are greatly influenced by them? Thanks!

[Yaweili19]

Thank you very much for explaining your research for us! I am also very interested in the topic of gender and racial equality, but the research question you have chosen is indeed very novel and of high exploratory value. The practice of using social media hashtags as empirical evidence also gave me a lot of inspiration.

[Yiqing-Zh]

Thank you for your presentation. I am wondering whether the hashtag activism not only complements other forms of activism but also substitutes some other forms of activism in the reality. Thank you.

[lyl010]

Thank you for your inspiring works on the technological impact on the public discourse systems. We can notice that the voices which once could not be heard could gain their popularity on social media where different domains of information are much more accessible to groups of people. The numerical minority could still make a strong voice. I would like to know more about technology's function on this twist of the lens on discourses. Why small voices could make such a big shack of the whole system?

[heathercchen]

Thank you for your presentation!

[k-partha]

Thank you for your presentation! I'm really interested in hearing your thoughts on the recent GameSpot saga - it seems to be a highly relevant case to discuss given the backdrop of your research!

[yongfeilu]

Thank you for your presentation! I wonder how you get the inspiration to conduct the research. What will you elaborate on in today's workshop?

[bowen-w-zheng]

Thanks for the presentation! I am curious about the replicability of such an approach. There are some hyperparameters in the model, and I wonder if we can conclude the same result using different datasets.

[JuneZzj]

Thank you for presenting. I am wondering if there is no specific conventional mathematics method to choose the degree. is there any other way to identify the in-degree distribution in the scenario. Thanks a lot.

[Leahjl]

Thank you so much for sharing this research! I'm curious about the race inequity in the metoo movement, what's the cultural background behind this?

[TwoCentimetre]

I am curious about how such hashtags are created. Are those hashtags created by the twitter administrative or generated by netizens? Also, will twitter allow the use of some "hatred" or "not widely accepted" hashtag to appear on the twitter? If so, the data may be biased.

[ZhouXing19]

Thanks for sharing. As @bakerwho mentioned, I think it's crucial to look into the decentralized power gathered by social media. It's clear that this power is giving huge effect not only in politics (e.g. MAGA, QANon etc.), but also in stock market. The GME and AMC surging stock price in these couple days is a vivid example for an epic fight between large Wall Street investors and small-scale social media betters. And just yesterday, Raddit banned the r/wallstreetbets channel (though it's back now), which raised a heated discussion about whether the game rules should be reconsidered in this era. I'm curious about your opinion about how social media could change the game rules in different domains in the future.

[AlexPrizzy]

Very interesting work! I think it's great that social media platforms create open spaces for people to discuss topics which have been traditionally seen as taboo. Though do you think this creates echo chambers in a way? While this is very empowering for marginalized groups who are typically oppressed by media, is there not a possibility that this can also perpetuate a certain narrative?

[YijingZhang-98]

(sorry that I found my comment was posted to the 01/21 issues...) Thanks for your excellent work! I was wondering that only including the tweets with tags would leave out some tweets without any text? It bears watching that some people only post a photo without any text. So I was thinking that maybe techniques of computer vision can also be applied to this research.