Terms of Service and Community Guidelines as “Value-Laden” Documents: An (Adapted) Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis of “Sexual Content”

The goal of this study was to investigate whether exposure to sexual reality television content and Internet pornography (IP) is related to sexual self-presentation on social media. Based on a two-wave panel survey among 1,765 adolescents aged 13-17 years, we found that watching sexual reality television content stimulated adolescents to produce and distribute sexual images of themselves on social media. In turn, sexual self-presentation on social media led adolescents to watch sexual reality television content more frequently. These relationships were similar among boys and girls. No reciprocal relationship between exposure to IP and boys' and girls' sexual self-presentation on social media was found. The results suggest that sexual content in mainstream mass media may predict adolescents' sexually oriented behavior on social media and vice versa. Moreover, adolescents seem to differentiate between types of sexual content (i.e., mainstream versus more explicit sexual content) when incorporating sexual media content in their sexual behavior online.

This study examined the relationship between sexual content in music and sexual cognitions and risk among emerging adults in the USA and Australia. Music content was examined via lyrics, videos and social media. It was hypothesised that there would be a positive association between sexual content in music and sexual cognitions and risk. Sexual content in music lyrics, videos, and social media was assessed using content analysis of the top artists rated by participants in the USA and Australia. Findings indicated variations in sexual content based on music genre and location, and that music lyrics, videos and social media all contain sexual content. Results from hierarchical regression analyses indicated that sexual lyrical content, sexual content in music videos, and sexual references in the social media posts of artists were related to negative sexual cognitions for both samples. This trend was also found for the degree of sexual risk for both samples. While findings point to the direction of a universal impact of the association between sexual content in music and sexual cognitions and degree of sexual risk, they also highlight trends in these relationships across countries.

While there has been extensive research into consumption of “traditional” forms of explicit sexual and violent media (within pornography, videogames and movies), the informal exchange and viewing of explicit real-world violent and sexual content via social media is an under-investigated and potentially problematic behaviour. The current study used an online survey (n = 225: 169f, 55m, 1x, mean age 30.61 (SD 12.03)) to explore self-reported reactions to unsolicited explicit violent and sexual content that participants had received from friends or contacts. In line with our predictions based on previous studies of fictional explicit content, we found effects of both gender and prior exposure on these reactions. Specifically, females rated both sexual and violent explicit content as significantly less funny and exciting and more disturbing than males did. Amongst males, those with high previous exposure rated violent content as more exciting than those with lower or no prior experience. Regardless of gender, participants with higher exposure to sexual content rated it as funnier than those with mild or no exposure, and those with higher exposure to violent content rated it as more amusing and more exciting. However, contrary to what desensitization theories would predict, prior exposure did not attenuate how disturbing explicit content (of either a sexual or a violent nature) was rated. Multiple avenues for further investigation emerged from this preliminary cross-sectional study, and we suggest priorities for further qualitative or longitudinal work on this novel topic.

This study aims to contribute to the current literature on adolescent sexting prevalence by reporting an accurate description and characterisation of participants based on the adolescent sexting scale A-SextS as a standardised measurement instrument. The study includes a convenience sample of 579 Spanish secondary students (52.7% boys; interquartile range 13–15 years). Participants were asked about five active sexting behaviours (sending sexts; making voice calls with sexual content; making video calls with sexual content; posting sexual content on the internet or social media networks; live-streaming video of sexual content on the internet or social media networks) with an amorous or sexual purpose, during the month prior to the survey, distinguishing between three possible addressees (boyfriend/girlfriend; someone known in person; someone known only on the internet), three media formats (text messages; images or videos; and audio messages), and three levels of sexual explicitness (nude; in underwear; and dressed but in a sexy pose). Both the proportion of students reporting to have partaken in all individual sexting behaviours and the number of times they did so in the study timeframe were higher when the addressee was reported as their romantic partner. Approximately half of the participants reported having engaged in sexting with a partner or with someone they knew in person, whereas a fifth sexted with someone they only knew online. Additionally, a third of adolescents posted some sort of sext, and a tenth presented themselves in a live-stream. The exchange of nude sexts was less prevalent than those depicting the subject in underwear or rather dressed and in a sexy pose. Girls posted significantly more images or videos both in underwear and dressed and in a sexy pose than boys, and girls also made more video calls with sexual content in response to a request from someone they knew in person than boys.

Researchers from many different disciplines rely on social media data as a resource. Whereas some platforms explicitly allow data collection, even facilitating it through an API, others explicitly forbid automated or manual collection processes. A current topic of debate within the social computing research community involves the ethical (or even legal) implications of collecting data in ways that violate Terms of Service (TOS). Using a sample of TOS from over one hundred social media sites from around the world, we analyze TOS language and content in order to better understand the landscape of prohibitions on this practice. Our findings show that though these provisions are very common, they are also ambiguous, inconsistent, and lack context. By considering our analysis of the nature of these provisions alongside legal and ethical analysis, we propose that ethical decision-making for data collection should extend beyond TOS and consider contextual factors of the data source and research.

Sexist content is widespread on social media and can reduce women's psychological well-being and their willingness to participate in online discourse, making it a societal issue. To counter these effects, social media platforms employ moderators. To date, little is known about the effectiveness of different forms of moderation in creating a safe space and their acceptance, in particular from the perspective of women as members of the targeted group and users in general (rather than perpetrators). In this research, we propose that some common forms of moderation can be systematized along two facets of visibility, namely visibility of sexist content and of counterspeech. In an online experiment (N = 839), we manipulated these two facets and tested how they shaped social norms, feelings of safety, and intent to participate, as well as fairness, trustworthiness, and efficacy evaluations. In line with our predictions, deletion of sexist content - i.e., its invisibility - and (public) counterspeech - i.e., its visibility - against visible sexist content contributed to creating a safe space. Looking at the underlying psychological mechanism, we found that these effects were largely driven by changes in what was perceived normative in the presented context. Interestingly, deletion of sexist content was judged as less fair than counterspeech against visible sexist content. Our research contributes to a growing body of literature that highlights the importance of norms in creating safer online environments and provides practical implications for moderators for selecting actions that can be effective and accepted.

Rapid advancement in Web technologies has seen a shift from the use and implementation of closed applications to open information sharing in the form of Web APIs (Application Programming Interface). Developers make use of Web APIs by integrating them into their Web and mobile applications. These APIs however, come with Terms of Service (ToS) and Privacy Policies drawn up by the API providers that the developers must abide by. This research seeks to identify issues developers face with Web API ToS with regard to privacy. We propose to ground our understanding of ToS and privacy policy issues and their subsequent implications on Developer Experience from content analysis of developer discourse with card sorting. We report on a small scale pilot experiment.

Twitch’s Terms of Service (ToS) and Community Guidelines (CG) policies forbid discriminatory behavior and harassment, but many streamers from marginalized communities have been victimized while their harassers go unpunished. These inconsistencies in how safety violations are managed prompted the author(s) to perform a two-stage analysis of Twitch’s platform governance strategies to understand the relationship between platform governance and androcentric hegemony. The first stage included an inductive thematic analysis of ToS and CG documents, leading to the second analysis of two case studies that specify inconsistencies in policy enforcement dependent on opaque contextual exceptions. Ultimately, the authors provide evidence of contextual exceptions for safety, edgy humor, attire, and nudity which demonstrate how Twitch’s inconsistent governance reifies androcentric hegemony that benefits all men, rather than geek masculinity that largely prioritizes white men.

In this article, we propose (re)designing privacy literacy as an essential component of our digital lives in an age of Generative Artificial Intelligence (genAI). Our study emphasizes the layered digital, technical, rhetorical, and algorithmic literacies associated with design thinking and genAI to support theorizing privacy literacy. We introduce Design as an analytical element complementary to Woods and Wason's (2021) multi-pronged framework for analyzing Terms of Service (ToS) documents. Using a cluster of Adobe Generative AI ToS, we illustrate the necessity of including Design , which allows those invested in Communication Design (CD) and Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) to interrogate how or if design supports or undermines values related to user privacy, data ownership, and informed consent. We conclude by detailing how collective surveillance apathy regarding emergent data infrastructures signal a Post-Surveillance era in our global society and digital lives.

In this article, we propose (re)designing privacy literacy as an essential component of our digital lives in an age of Generative Artificial Intelligence (genAI). Our study emphasizes the layered digital, technical, rhetorical, and algorithmic literacies associated with design thinking and genAI to support theorizing privacy literacy. We introduce Design as an analytical element complementary to Woods and Wason's (2021) multi-pronged framework for analyzing Terms of Service (ToS) documents. Using a cluster of Adobe Generative AI ToS, we illustrate the necessity of including Design , which allows those invested in Communication Design (CD) and Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) to interrogate how or if design supports or undermines values related to user privacy, data ownership, and informed consent. We conclude by detailing how collective surveillance apathy regarding emergent data infrastructures signal a Post-Surveillance era in our global society and digital lives.

Despite the fact that social media enhances learning opportunities and increases access to information, it has also paved way for exposure to illicit sexual content online and misuse of social sites which has been linked to risky sexual behaviour among undergraduates. Therefore, an institutional-based cross-sectional design was utilized to determine the influence of social media use on sexual behaviour of undergraduate students in Ilorin, Kwara State, Nigeria. Purposive sampling technique was used to select a sample size of 315 bonafide students. Data were collected using self-developed structured questionnaires and the same were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics with level of significant set at 5% (0.05). The study revealed that all of the respondents 304 (100.0%) had access to internet and the majority 264 (86.8%) accessed the internet using mobile phones. Only 100(32.9%) of the respondents had high exposure to sexual content on social media and significant difference was observed in the extent of exposure to sexual contents via social media between the genders of participant with more males using social media for sexual purposes than females. The findings of the study also showed that there is significant association between exposure to sexual contents on social media and risky sexual behaviour among undergraduate students. Therefore, there is need for university authorities, parents and other stakeholders to plan interventional strategies to curb the use of social media to view illicit sexual content among undergraduate students.

Sexist content is prevalent in social media, which seriously affects the online environment and occasionally leads to offline disputes. For this reason, many scholars have researched how to automatically detect sexist content in social media. However, the presence of sarcasm complicates this task. Thus, recognizing sarcasm to improve the accuracy of sexism detection has become a crucial research focus. In this study, we adopt a deep learning approach by combining a sexism lexicon and a sarcasm lexicon to work on the detection of Chinese sexist content in social media. We innovatively propose a sarcasm-based masking mechanism, which achieves an accuracy of 82.65% and a macro F1 score of 80.49% on the Sina Weibo Sexism Review (SWSR) dataset, significantly outperforming the baseline model by 2.05% and 2.89%, respectively. This study combines the irony masking mechanism with sexism detection, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the deep learning method based on the irony masking mechanism in Chinese sexism detection.

This study is a type of qualitative research that aims to determine the intensity of the use of social media with sex content among early childhood and the significance of its influence on early marriage in Luyo District Polewali Mandar Regency. Data obtained from in-depth interviews with 25 respondents as perpetrators of early marriage and 10 supporting respondents and processed using Miles and Huberman Model Analysis. The results of this study stated that the intensity of social media use with sex content among minors in Luyo Sub-District, Polewali Mandar Regency, reached 3-4 hours/day. classified as moderate when compared to APJII data that reaches 5-6 hours/day in terms of the use of social media platforms, the significance of the influence of social media, based on research found the perspective of 19 informants from 25 interviewed said social media had quite an effect on early marriage decisions, sex content had an effect to arouse adolescent sexual arousal, so that social Media with sex content in Luyo District, Polewali Mandar Regency is said to have a significant influence on some informants in conducting early marriage practices. The implication of this study is that it can be a basis for educators, parents, and governments to understand the impact of social media on sexual content, can be a consideration for policy makers in formulating regulations that limit or regulate children and adolescents ' access to social media with sexual content and help communities and families to be more vigilant and control the use of social media by children and adolescents at home. For further researchers who are interested in researching a similar topic so that presumably before conducting research, it is necessary to first conduct a survey to clarify the data of the respondents to be studied and more detailed statements or questions used to make it easier to understand

In the present digital world, people rely extensively on social media for networking and socializing. As a consequence, they face numerous ethical challenges which make it necessary to constantly reflect on new media ethics emerging from social media. The terms of service (ToS) of social media provide the opportunities for big tech companies’ guidelines to design the ecology and the ethical environment of social media. The existing studies conducted in this domain emphasize on specific ethical issues pertaining to ToS such as privacy, freedom of speech, and copyright protection. But all of these studies lack the exploration of its general ethical framework. Considering the theoretical framework of the Potter Box Model of Reasoning, Schwartz’s value scale, and Christians and Ess’ ethical principles, this paper examines the ToS of social media run by six major platforms across the globe. The result reveals 15 values, which are summarized into three pairs of ethical principles: egoism and altruism, monism and pluralism, and utilitarianism and deontology. The paper further analyzes the hidden conflicts and reveals the emergence of “relational” ethical principle.

In April and September 2022, students in various regions in Indonesia held demonstrations. These activities demanded and protested against the government's discourse on the policy of 3 presidential terms. Meanwhile, in September, there was an action against the increase in fuel prices. Like the previous demonstrations, the action used posters as a medium of public communication. What was interesting about the posters was the content of the demonstration. The content of the posters tended to be more related to the body and sexual matters. The content used more metaphors of everyday life related to sexual activity. This spread massively in many social media. Through Theo Van Leeuwen's critical discourse analysis method, this research discusses several sexist poster texts and analyzes the social context behind the phenomenon. There are two assumptions that this paper tries to address. First, the poster content that appears is sexist content that demeans women. The second is that it is part of an expression of women's resistance to bodily restraint. Both arguments above will be reviewed in this paper. This research found that there was sexist content in posters that used direct or indirect expressions of sexism. The sexist expressions in the posters also show misogynistic practices because posters that denigrate women come from women. Findings also show that the sexist language used leads to pornography.Keywords: demonstration, poster, sexism, women, cda