COVID-19 Misinformation and Polarization on Twitter

This study investigated polarization on Twitter related to the COVID-19 pandemic by examining tweets containing #Plandemic (suggests the pandemic is a hoax) or #StayHome (encourages compliance with health recommendations). Over 35,000 tweets from over 25,000 users were collected in April 2020 and examined using sentiment and social network analyses. Compared to #StayHome tweets, #Plandemic tweets came from a more tightly connected network, were higher in negative emotional content, and could be sub-divided into specific categories of misinformation and conspiracy theories. To evaluate the stability of users' COVID-related perspectives, the prevalence of pro- and anti-mask sentiment was measured in same users' tweets approximately four months later. Results revealed substantial stability over time, with 40% of #Plandemic users tweeting anti-mask hashtags compared to just 2% of #StayHome users. Findings demonstrate COVID-related polarization on Twitter and have implications for public health interventions to quell the propagation of misinformation.

Understanding Decisions to Share Minor Public Safety Incidents on Twitter Through a Collective Action Theory Lens

Social media feeds provide a lot of information that would be of great value to law enforcement. Previous research dedicated considerable attention to sharing large-scale public safety incidents on social media. However, little research focused on minor public safety incidents. According to collective action theory, rational people would not participate in a public good unless there are external incentives other than the benefit from the public good. In this research, the authors use this theory to test public safety as the public good and see if such incentives have an effect on people's decisions to share incidents. They utilize a survey of U.S. adults with a sample of 285 participants. In this research, they hypothesize a positive relationship between decisions to share and engage in public safety on social media and 1) incident location proximity, 2) relationship with the victim, and 3) coercion. Results show general support for the theory's assumptions.

The Mediating Effect of Bridging Social Capital Between Social Media Usage and Affective Attitude

In this work, the authors develop and test a theoretical model that investigates the mediating effect of bridging social capital between usage of a brand specific social network site and consumer attitude towards the brand. Specifically, they see how usage of online social network sites drives consumer purchase intent, using university football as a domain to test the model. They find that bridging social capital is indeed a mediating construct between the university's sports social networking site usage and affective attitude towards the team brand. As social network site usage increases, both injunctive norms (perceptions about the expectations of referent others) and descriptive norms (perceptions of the actual behavior of referent others) increase. They show that these influence emotional reward, in the form of increased bridging social capital, which in turn influences affective attitude towards the brand. The findings contribute to understanding how consumer tribes form on online forums and how subjective norms influence affective consumer attitude.

Building Social Capital in Higher Education With Online Opportunistic Social Matching

Recently, colleges and universities have been forced to utilize distance learning. With students spending less time on campus, their sense of community may decrease because they would be less likely to participate in the community. This puts higher education commuter institutions at a disadvantage in terms of generating and maintaining social capital. The authors investigate the possibility to counter this disadvantage by actively promoting participation in a mobile online social network (OSN) supported by a context-aware notification and recommender system (NARS) to achieve opportunistic social matching, which mitigates information overload by considering each user's relational, social, and personal context as predictors of match opportunities. The results suggest that introducing a purposefully designed OSN has the potential to facilitate the creation of structural and relational social capital, but that it might not have an effect on cognitive social capital.

Internet, Social Media, and Mobile Device Addiction Effects on a Workplace

The purpose of this literature review was to address an existing gap in the literature in understanding how addiction in the form of internet, social media, and mobile device addiction and dependency positively and negatively affect a workplace. The objective of the research was to review over 70 publications on the topics of internet addiction, social media addiction, mobile device dependency, a lack of leading consensus, benefits in the workplace, and challenges in the workplace to include industrial espionage. Future research is also addressed.

Exploring the Role of Facebook Pages During the Mass Student Protest for Road Safety in Bangladesh

The mass student protest for road safety in Bangladesh started in the capital city Dhaka after the death of two students by a road accident. Focusing on the event during 2018, this paper analyses the comments and memes of selected Facebook pages to find out the reactions by netizens towards the protest. Although there are several studies based on protest and social media in different nations, in Bangladesh it remains an under-researched field. Data were collected from four selected public Facebook pages using the thematic analysis method. Through the analysis of the data, it became clear that netizens wanted to express their feelings and thoughts freely in this open space as new media offers them an almost censor-free platform. The findings contribute to understanding how social media plays a role in providing an open platform of freedom of expression.

Affordances of Business Pages on Social Networking Sites

This paper initially undertakes a comparative analysis of business page architecture of different SNSs by employing a desktop-based research approach consisting of surveying existing business pages, creating sample business pages, and reviewing official documentations of included SNSs. The observations indicate that the existing SNSs exhibit vast diversity and impose platform-specific boundaries that result in the fragmentation and dispersion of business information across multiple sites. Accordingly, the next part of the paper explores the potential of SNS APIs as an opportunity for the aggregation and centralization of SNS business information and successively proposes a conceptual model of business page integration. The proposed model is validated and evaluated through a web-based application for the integrated business page search and interaction over multiple SNSs. The discussion taken herein should assist the businesses in choosing an appropriate SNS for their web representation and establishes the grounds and guidelines for next generation of integrated data applications.

Definition and Evaluation of BPMN4Social

The emergence and quick adoption of social media, exemplified with Web 2.0 applications like Facebook and Instagram, has led to a new form of business processes (BP) called social business processes (SBP). An SBP encompasses aspects from both the business world and the social world. Contrarily to the business aspects, which can be captured using existing modeling languages like the standard business process modeling notation (BPMN), the social aspects cannot be modeled by these languages. This paper addresses this limitation by defining BPMN4Social, a domain specific language for SBP modeling. BPMN4Social minimally extends BPMN with social concepts that are independent of any particular Web 2.0 application. Besides its support by the BPMN2 modeler editor, BPMN4Social is accompanied by a catalog of socialization patterns that describe common social scenarios and that can assist business process designers in their modeling activities. This paper also reports on the evaluation of BPMN4Social usability in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction.

Analysis of Discourses on WhatsApp Coup Reported in the Media

Use of social media applications has become popular in the context of developing countries. Social media are transforming the way individuals and organisations communicate and interact in their social settings. This paper presents a critical analysis of discourses on use of WhatsApp among opposition party politicians. Using the case of Malawi, the study analysed media reports and government documents using critical social theory. The findings showed power relations issues related to domination, communication distortions, and conflict of interests in the social and political discourses. Further, the study highlighted the effects of absence and outdated laws and legal frameworks in dealing with emerging use of new technologies in political activities (e.g., use of WhatsApp) in the context of a developing country. The study makes recommendations for policymakers and law enforcement agencies in addressing challenges related to the use and regulation of new technologies.

Today Is Your Birthday!

Facebook birthdays have become increasingly trendy among young people globally and in Africa since the arrival of smart technologies. The study investigates the idea of celebrating birthdays on Facebook among selected Nigerian university students and reactions to this new trend. Using the diffusion of innovations theory and mixed research methods, in-depth interviews were conducted on six respondents, and profile activities of 300 Facebook users' content was analysed to investigate the research objectives. Findings demonstrate that most users found it convenient and economical to celebrate birthdays on Facebook. Online celebrations offer more global online visibility than offline parties leading to the formation of digital cultures and connections. The result led to a proposal for the bicultural convergence model that explains user experiences to social media effect. Poor network and high-cost data tariff, among others, posed challenges. The study recommends the provision of cheap or free internet access in Nigeria and Africa to enable increased growth of the digital social culture.