Share Content Online Research Articles

Web's Progression: Moving from Passive Content Consumption to Active Content Creation and Content Validation

This research paper reviews the evolution of the Web from its early phase, web 1.0, to the present state, web 3.0. The primary emphasis is placed on the shift that users have undergone, transitioning from content consumption to content creation, and now towards content validation. During the Web 1.0 era, users could only passively view static web pages. The introduction of Web 2.0 allowed users to generate and share content online. However, in the current era of Web 3.0, personalized content recommendations are offered through machine learning, which makes content validation more important. This study highlights the significance of these changes for digital media professionals, web developers, and web users, and concludes with recommendations for future research.

Deepfakes: Vehicles for Radicalization, Not Persuasion

Deepfakes are an effective method of media manipulation because of their realism and also because truth is not a priority when people are consuming and sharing content online. Consumers are more focused on creating their own reality that aligns with their desires, opinions, and values. We explain how deepfakes differ from other sources of information. Their realism and vividness makes them unusually effective at depicting alternative facts, including fake news. Deepfakes are difficult to detect and will be even harder to detect in the future. However, people share deepfakes not necessarily because they believe them but because they want to reinforce their own identity and social position. The threat posed by deepfakes is that they can radicalize people by sowing chaos and confusion. They rarely change minds. We review the consequences of deepfakes in both the social sphere and private lives. We suggest potential solutions to reduce their negative consequences.

Using Visual Features and Early Views to Classify the Popularity of Facebook Videos

These days it is easy to create and share content online. Millions of people create and share their online content, that is consumed by millions more, daily. This flow of content and consumption has been used as a channel for disseminating digital advertisements, generating publicity for brands and financial return for content creators. Thus, identifying whether a video will be popular in the first moments after its publication is of great value to advertisers. Using Random Forest, we classify Facebook videos as popular or unpopular based on their number of views, using early views and visual features extracted from the videos as predictor features. Our results indicate that using the combination of early views with visual features yields the best results, allowing the prediction of popularity to be made as early as possible.

“I Didn’t Have the Language”: Young People Learning to Challenge Gender-Based Violence through Consumption of Social Media

In recent years, young people in Australia and abroad have taken to social media to express their concerns about the violent behaviour of their peers, and to share content that challenges the causes of gender-based and interpersonal violence. From launching policy-changing petitions to responding to and engaging with online campaigns, young people are pushing action and momentum from generational changes in feminist movements. Young people have their own contexts and influences that affect understandings and responses to gendered inequality and violence. This paper discusses the findings of nine focus groups with 32 young people who share content online about preventing gender-based violence, exploring their perceptions on their reasonings for using these tools and how they came to assumptions about gender inequality. It explores the contexts that young people in Australia draw upon to challenge existing gender inequalities and their reasonings for using social media to share ideas about preventing violence with others. The findings of this paper, thus, have implications for how young people are engaged in the primary prevention of gender-based violence, suggesting better use for social-media-campaign content engagement.

From connective actions in social movements to offline collective actions: an individual level perspective

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to investigate the role of connective action characterised by interconnection and personal communication on social media (SM) for participating in collective action in the physical world of social movements.Design/methodology/approachA research model is developed integrating different modes of connective action into the social identity model of collective action (SIMCA) to investigate pathways to participating in offline collective action (CA) from an individual perspective. Following a survey design approach, data collected from 194 respondents in the background of Egypt's social movements are examined using partial least squares (PLS) path modelling and mediation analyses.FindingsThe authors' main results reveal that interactive socialisation (IS) on SM provides an important momentum for the user to internalise (consume) and externalise (share) content online from a social learning perspective. In terms of translating these activities to participating in offline CA, the authors find support for two independent causal chains: An “instrumental” chain building on content externalisation (CE) and efficacy considerations and an “obligatory” chain based on content internalisation (CI) and collective identity.Originality/valueThe authors' results highlight the individual-level origins of offline mobilisation in social movements, which are not only grounded in social-psychology, but also develop out of interrelated connective actions supporting social learning. Prior work has mainly conceptualised the value of SM in social movements for online political communication. The authors' conceptualisation is novel in terms of integrating online and offline behaviours with social-psychological perspectives and the application with primary data in a protest movement context that heavily relied on connective actions for offline mobilisation.

The influence of marketing-related mobile activities on the adoption of mobile marketing transactions: a uses and gratification perspective

There is an increasing attention being accorded to the adoption of mobile marketing transactions in recent years, as both practitioners and researchers recognise that mobile commerce (m-commerce) is poised to burst into the mainstream. This study identifies a literature gap in which there seems to be an insufficient critical mass of studies on the adoption of innovative marketing technologies within the South African context. More specifically, very few studies have been conducted regarding the contribution of mobile marketing-related activities on consumer behaviour towards m-commerce. In view of this development, guided by the uses and gratification theory, the purpose of this study is to ascertain the influence of marketing-related mobile activities on the adoption of mobile marketing transactions, specifically focusing on the South African youth consumers. To fulfil the purpose of the study, the objectives of the study are centered on examining the degree to which the following marketing-related mobile activities: (1) provide information online, (2) access content online, and (3) share content online, influence consumers’ adoption of mobile marketing transactions. Following a quantitative research technique and a descriptive single cross-sectional design, data was gathered through a self-administered questionnaire, using a sample of 810 students from three selected South African universities. Three research hypotheses were advanced in line with the study objectives, and they were tested using linear regression analysis. The study findings confirm the positive significant effects of marketing-related mobile activities in driving adoption of mobile marketing transactions. Managerial implications of the findings are discussed, and limitations and future research directions are also indicated.

REVERIE Virtual Hangout

Social media sites have gained popularity in the past decade by enabling people to create and share content online easily. However, social media cannot engage users on a level beyond content prosumption to create immersive experiences. A promising technology to create such experiences is multimodal virtual reality. REVERIE is a multimodal framework with an integrated workflow for developing immersive experiences, including various forms of virtual representation of human users (e.g., replicas and avatars). To demonstrate the social and collaborative capabilities of the framework, the authors created the Virtual Hangout. It features a VE where people can meet online to socialise and collaborate. This paper presents a study designed to evaluate user immersion using participants with variable computer skills. The results showed that participants experienced engagement-based immersion but not presence. Barriers to immersion were the absence of pleasurable interactions and the participants' computer skills. The authors propose DGs for deeply immersive experiences in Virtual Hangout and similar systems.

Age Differences in the Relationship Between Daily Social Media Usage and Affect

Social media platforms allow people to connect and share content online (e.g., Facebook, Twitter). Although older adults are becoming more frequent users of social media, there continue to be mixed views on whether social media positively or negatively impacts well-being. Past studies have mainly focused on cross-sectional analyses for individual differences. However, both the time spent on social media and one’s affect can fluctuate on a daily basis. Thus, it is important to understand how the relationship between daily social media usage and affect varies within individuals from day to day. The current study adds to the literature by examining whether daily variations in time spent with social media are related to daily positive and negative affect and whether there are age differences in these relationships. The current study used an eight-day daily diary from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) Refresher dataset for 782 participants (ages 25-75). Multilevel modeling results revealed that age moderated the relationship between daily time spent on social media and negative affect: for younger adults, on days when they spent more time on social media, they had more negative affect. For older adults, on days when they spent more time on social media, they had less negative affect. Surprisingly, daily time spent on social media was not related to daily positive affect, nor did this relationship differ by age. Implications for future research are discussed with a focus on how social media usage can contribute to daily well-being for adults of different ages.

Assessment of Dark Tourism Awareness in Youtube Social Network

This paper deals with dark tourism, as fast-developing phenomenon and a form of alternative tourism, which is defined as visiting real and artificial places of disaster, exile, poverty and death. Dark tourism does not come into existence without social media, which is commonly understood as a set of web applications that allow users to publish and share content online and is associated with international brands. One of the most popular social networks is YouTube, which captures millions of viewers. Therefore, the scientific problem arises that thanks to YouTube social media platform travellers can gather information and experience from others to widen their knowledge, but it’s not clear how dark tourism is rated and assessed on YouTube. The research aim is to assess dark tourism in the social media platform YouTube. The research object is dark tourism in the social media platform YouTube. An empirical study has shown that in order to attract more tourists to visit dark tourism sites through social networks, the technical elements of video production, their content and image quality have to be carefully considered as it is important for the viewers. Respondents were interested not only in the videos about dark tourism, but also in written or spoken information, with particular emphasis on completeness, not just the musical background. Good quality and informative footage on YouTube encourage more interest in the object being seen and lead to a desire to read comments and ratings from other active social network members. The YouTube network is well-suited to promoting a variety of tourist attractions, as it is easily accessible and at no cost. Some respondents emphasized and did not change their opinion even after the discussions that the term ‘dark tourism’ itself is macabre and unattractive and only referred to it as a new trendy word.

Negotiating Under the New EU Copyright Directive 2019/790 and GDPR

Directive 2019/790 expands copyright protections for copyright owners who share content online. This new regulatory regime further invokes the data transfer obligations of the GDPR, and licensors of online content, as well as licensees, must be aware of not only issues that may arise but leverage opportunities.

Producing Online Youth Fiction in a Nordic Public Service Context

This article investigates the conditions for making online youth fiction in a public service context at a time when young people increasingly are abandoning both legacy mass media and linear flow television to consume and share content online. The article’s starting point is the production of online youth fiction in two Nordic public service institutions, the Norwegian NRK and the Danish DR, and it discusses how digitisation and new competitors present both challenges and opportunities for institutions such as these. Furthermore, the article discusses the organisation of online youth fiction in both institutions and investigates how organisational strategies and production cultures come into play in each of these broadcasters’ early signature youth series: the widely popular online teen drama SKAM (NRK, 2015-2017) and the far less known youth series Anton 90 (DR, 2015). Our findings show that it was the pressure imposed by digitisation and new competitors that led these institutions to take new risks with their youth fiction production, changing their production patterns to make short-form drama series tailored to online streaming, and ultimately treating online youth fiction as a distinctly different task than “regular” fiction.

Converging practices: Fashion exhibits across museums and social media

The term ‘curation’ has migrated from the museum into everyday life, particularly on social media, and this speaks to a shifting understanding of people’s engagement with arts, culture and commodities. ‘Curation’ accentuates the participatory nature of social media, as users co-produce, edit and share content online. The term also alludes to social media’s capacity as archive and exhibition space for the documentation, display, collection and recollection of looks and styles, experiences, events and emotions. The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) in New York was one of the first museums to acknowledge the increasing impact of participatory media with the 2007 exhibition blog.mode: addressing fashion. This established a connection between the museum collection and the fashion blog as two different forms of fashion archiving, display and discourse. Today, the use of social media and the museum visitor’s own image production (for example, for #artselfies) is a component of curatorial practice, increasing the appeal of fashion exhibitions and new forms of engagement with museums and museum objects. By reviewing selected examples of fashion museums and archives in the United States – two major museums and two independent online archives – this article explores some of the convergences between the material culture of fashion, mediatization and musealization, including fashion curation beyond the museum, and cultural memory-making through ephemeral media.

Consumers' Perceptions of Native Advertisements

With the rapid growth of native advertising, there has been an increased interest to address ethical concerns and deception online. To address this concern, we look at the consumer's ethical efficacy toward native ads and we compare native ads (such as in-feed and advertorial) to banner ads. Results confirm that consumers trust native ads more than banner ads. Moreover, we uncover that consumers ethical efficacy (i.e., confidence in ethical decision making) affects their intention to share native ads through eWOM. However, consumer individual differences influence intention to share content online and trust in the native ads. We study the moderating effects of salience, using the fashion context, and its influence on ad trust and willingness to share through eWOM. Recommendations for business professionals and academics are discussed and future research guidelines are addressed.

Internet surveillance, regulation, and chilling effects online: a comparative case study

With internet regulation and censorship on the rise, states increasingly engaging in online surveillance, and state cyber-policing capabilities rapidly evolving globally, concerns about regulatory online—the idea that laws, regulations, or state surveillance can deter people from exercising their freedoms or engaging in legal activities on the internet have taken on greater urgency and public importance. But just as notions of are not new, neither is skepticism about their legal, theoretical, and empirical basis; in fact, the concept remains largely un-interrogated with significant gaps in understanding, particularly with respect to chilling effects online. This work helps fill this void with a first-of-its-kind online survey that examines multiple dimensions of chilling effects online by comparing and analyzing responses to hypothetical scenarios involving different kinds of regulatory actions—including an anti-cyberbullying law, public/private sector surveillance, and an online regulatory scheme, based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), enforced through personally received legal threats/notices. The results suggest not only the existence and significance of regulatory chilling effects online across these different scenarios but also evidence a differential impact—with personally received legal notices and government surveillance online consistently having the greatest chilling effect on people's activities online—and certain online activities like speech, search, and personal sharing also impacted differently. The results also offer, for the first time, insights based on demographics and other similar factors about how certain people and groups may be more affected than others, including findings that younger people and women are more likely to be chilled; younger people and women are less likely to take steps to resist regulatory actions and defend themselves; and anti-cyberbullying laws may have a salutary impact on women's willingness to share content online suggesting, contrary to critics, that such laws may lead to more speech and sharing, than less. The findings also offer evidence of secondary chilling effects— where users' online activities are chilled even when not they, but others in their social networks receive legal processes.

Digital Wildfires

Social media platforms provide an increasingly popular means for individuals to share content online. Whilst this produces undoubted societal benefits, the ability for content to be spontaneously posted and reposted creates an ideal environment for rumour and false/malicious information to spread rapidly. When this occurs it can cause significant harm and can be characterised as a “digital wildfire.” In this article, we demonstrate that the propagation and regulation of digital wildfires form important topics for research and conduct an overview of existing work in this area. We outline the relevance of a range of work from the computational and social sciences, including a series of insights into the propagation of rumour and false/malicious information. We argue that significant research gaps remain—for instance, there is an absence of systematic studies on the effects of digital wildfires and there is a need to combine empirical research with a consideration of how the responsible governance of social media can be determined. We propose an agenda for research that establishes a methodology to explore in full the propagation and regulation of unverified content on social media. This agenda promotes high-quality interdisciplinary research that will also inform policy debates.

The Role of Social Networks in Egypt’s January 2011Revolution

This paper examines the role of the online social networks, especially Facebook, during the Egyptian revolution in January 2011. Analysis of a sample of pages shows how these networks helped people exchange information before, during and after the 18 days revolution which ended the reign of former president - Hosni Mubarak. The study analyzes how online discussions and media coverage before the revolution enabled citizens to communicate with each other and share content online, and eventually move their revolutionary ideas from the virtual world to the streets of Egypt. Analysis shows that during the revolution, social media functioned as a political organizer, an alternative media, and a medium for citizen journalism. The study reveals that social media created an alternative public sphere for Egyptian activists, thus helping them communicate their ideas with the general public without restraints. In addition, social networks provided people with the opportunity and the freedom to discuss their country’s situation at all levels. Success of the revolution shows the important role social media plays as a means of information sharing. The study concludes that using social media networks helped the Egyptian revolution and had significant impact on the democratic transition in Egypt.

The Role of Social Networks in Egypt’s January 2011Revolution

This paper examines the role of the online social networks, especially Facebook, during the Egyptian revolution in January 2011. Analysis of a sample of pages shows how these networks helped people exchange information before, during and after the 18 days revolution which ended the reign of former president - Hosni Mubarak. The study analyzes how online discussions and media coverage before the revolution enabled citizens to communicate with each other and share content online, and eventually move their revolutionary ideas from the virtual world to the streets of Egypt. Analysis shows that during the revolution, social media functioned as a political organizer, an alternative media, and a medium for citizen journalism. The study reveals that social media created an alternative public sphere for Egyptian activists, thus helping them communicate their ideas with the general public without restraints. In addition, social networks provided people with the opportunity and the freedom to discuss their country’s situation at all levels. Success of the revolution shows the important role social media plays as a means of information sharing. The study concludes that using social media networks helped the Egyptian revolution and had significant impact on the democratic transition in Egypt.

Searching and Clustering Methodologies

People create, consume, and share content online in increasingly complex ways, often including multiple news, entertainment, and social media platforms. This article explores methods for tracing political media content across overlapping communication infrastructures. Using the 2011 Occupy Movement protests and 2013 consumer boycotts as cases, we illustrate methods for creating integrated datasets of political event-related social media content by (1) using fixed URLs to link posts across platforms ( URL-based integration) and (2) using semiautomated text clustering to identify similar posts across social networking services ( thematic integration). These approaches help to reveal biases in the way that we characterize political communication practices that may occur when we focus on a single platform in isolation.

Understanding the user generated content and interactions on a Facebook brand page

Social networks provide the technological platform for individuals to connect, produce and share content online. As such, they are becoming an additional marketing channel that could be integrated with the traditional ones as a part of the marketing mix. In order to contribute to the companies’ understanding of utilisation of social networks as a marketing platform, our study approaches the problem from the perspective of understanding the user generated content and the interactions. First we analyse the topics, intentions for participation and emotions shared by the users on a Facebook brand page. Second, we analyse the activities and interactions, in terms of their evolution over time and dependency on the community size. Finally, we discuss the implications of the obtained results for social media marketing.

Social Media and Postelection Crisis in Kenya

This article analyzes the role of the media during the two months of postelection crisis in 2008 in Kenya. We discuss how people exchanged information during and after the media ban and analyze online discussions and media coverage. Particular emphasis is given to the role of the social media, such as Web 2.0 communication tools and services, which enable citizens to interact or share content online. Our analysis shows that during the crisis, the social media functioned as an alternative medium for citizen communication or participatory journalism.This experience has important implications for the process of democratization in Kenya.