Digital Social Platforms Research Articles

Digitally enabled diverse economies: exploring socially inclusive access to the circular economy in the city

ABSTRACT Technology is increasingly reshaping social relations and transforming associated urban spatial configurations. Advancements such as digital social platforms and mobile apps have helped to connect social actors, empower citizens, and enable diverse circular economy practices in cities. Paradoxically, technology is also contributing to loneliness, anxiety, and depression among urban populations, and raises nuanced questions about access and inclusivity in increasingly digitized urban settings. In this contribution, we consider the possibilities and challenges inherent in applying digital technologies to leverage the development of inclusive and diverse circular economic spaces around a city’s reuse, repair and recycling infrastructure and drive socio-ecological transformations of urban spaces. We conclude that uneven access to digital tools potentially reinforces existing urban social inequalities, and that emphasis must be placed on understanding how technologies should be more effectively designed and leveraged for a socially inclusive circular economy in the city.

IEEE Access Special Section: Digital Forensics Through Multimedia Source Inference

With the prevalence of low-cost imaging devices (smartphones, tablets, camcorders, digital cameras, scanners, wearable, and IoT devices), images and videos have become the main modalities of information being exchanged in every walk of life. The ever-increasing convenience of image acquisition has facilitated instant distribution and sharing of multimedia on digital social platforms. In the meantime, powerful multimedia editing tools allow even unskilled people to easily manipulate digital content for malicious or criminal purposes. In all cases where multimedia serves as critical evidence, forensic technologies that help to determine the origin, the authenticity of multimedia sources, and the integrity of multimedia content become essential to forensic investigators. Imaging devices and post-acquisition processing software leave unique “fingerprints” in multimedia content. This allows many challenging problems faced by the multimedia forensics community to be addressed through source inference. Source inference is the task of linking digital content to the source device or platform (e.g., social media such as Facebook) responsible for its creation. It can facilitate applications such as identification and verification of source device and platform, common source inference, content integrity verification, and source-oriented image clustering. It also allows the establishment of digital evidence or the history of multimedia processing steps applied to the content, starting from the acquisition procedure and up to tracking the spread. The recent adoption of multimedia source inference techniques in the law enforcement sector (e.g., U.K. Sussex Police, Guildford Crown Court, and INTERPOL) in real-world criminal cases and child sexual exploitation databases has manifested the significant value of multimedia source inference in the fight against crime. This Special Section in IEEE Access aims to collect a diverse and complementary set of articles that demonstrate new developments and applications in digital forensics through multimedia source inference.

DİJİTAL DÜNYADA GENÇLERİN POLİTİK ETKİNLİKLERİNE YÖNELİK NİTEL BİR ÇALIŞMA: DEMOKRASİ, ÖZGÜRLÜK VE SINIRLARI

Today, digital social platforms, as a tool for political expression or activities, are an important part of everyday life for younger generations. However, at times, especially during times of crisis nation states may perceive these digital platforms as a threat. Thus, over the last twenty years, states are increasingly willing to restrict access to content on the internet or block access to digital social at varying degrees. In this study, young people‟s thoughts or attitudes about the state policies such as restricting or blocking access to digital social platforms permanently or temporarily has been examined in the context of democracy and freedom. In the context of the qualitative method, in-depth interviewing technique was used as data collection tool. The sample of the research is composed of young people who are studying at Aydin Adnan Menderes University in Turkey. According to findings, there is two main alternative approaches or attitudes towards the potential of digital social platforms to spread democracy and freedom: views of cyber-utopians and cyber-skeptics. Though there are different attitudes towards the state policies such as restricting and blocking access to digital social platforms, it is thought that the resources or facilities offered by the digital world may positively contribute to democracy and freedom in real terms as long as people and other internet stakeholders such as governments, policymakers are acting responsibly.

Is It Better to Give Than to Receive? Leveraging Digital Social Connections for Healthy Behavior

We examine the role of reciprocity enabled by digital social platforms for offline healthy behavior. Although reciprocity is a fundamental aspect of human psychology, its application in promoting healthy behavior has been limited. We conduct a large randomized field experiment with over 1,700 pairs of users on a mobile social network platform. Individuals in the reciprocity treatment group receive a gift from their friends and are asked to return this favor by participating in a running challenge. Their performance is compared to the self-interest incentives widely used in practice. Building on social exchange theory, we argue that reciprocity-based incentives will outperform self-interest incentives for motivating behavior change. We find that on average, reciprocity is stronger than self-interest in inducing exercise behavior by a substantial amount. Furthermore, our results reveal that the magnitude of the reciprocity effect is contingent on the social closeness between senders and receivers. Interestingly, social closeness has an inverted U-shaped influence on the reciprocity effect. The effect is strongest when closeness is moderate, and wanes when closeness is either too strong or too weak. Compared to the widely used self-interest based financial incentives, our findings offer a potentially more powerful avenue for mechanism design in promoting healthy behavior.

Opportunities for community awareness platforms in personal genomics and bioinformatics education.

Precision and personalized medicine will be increasingly based on the integration of various type of information, particularly electronic health records and genome sequences. The availability of cheap genome sequencing services and the information interoperability will increase the role of online bioinformatics analysis. Being on the Internet poses constant threats to security and privacy. While we are connected and we share information, websites and internet services collect various types of personal data with or without the user consent. It is likely that genomics will merge with the internet culture of connectivity. This process will increase incidental findings, exposure and vulnerability. Here we discuss the social vulnerability owing to the genome and Internet combined security and privacy weaknesses. This urges more efforts in education and social awareness on how biomedical data are analysed and transferred through the internet and how inferential methods could integrate information from different sources. We propose that digital social platforms, used for raising collective awareness in different fields, could be developed for collaborative and bottom-up efforts in education. In this context, bioinformaticians could play a meaningful role in mitigating the future risk of digital-genomic divide.