This week at CITAP, we welcome two new publications! Hear how YouTube response videos cause networked harassment, and how journalists’ uses of tweets allow for media manipulation.
Response videos as vehicles for networked harassment
When remix culture gets ugly: in American Behavioral Scientist, Alice Marwick, Becca Lewis, and Will Partin dig into YouTube’s tradition of “response videos” and how they drive harassment campaigns.
In their work, Dr. Marwick and her co-authors review the cycle of response-and-harassment as it plays out on YouTube. By selectively clipping from other creators’ videos and engaging with them in a pseudo-debate format, response videos create the illusion of a deeper discourse. Through deceptive framing, these responses stoke outrage in their viewers, while the use of ad hominem attacks provides those viewers the fodder to use against the target. In identifying targets for this outrage and amplifying their work within a hostile audience, these response videos trigger waves of networked harassment where audience members collectively heap abuse or threats on the designated target.
The researchers describe how YouTube’s design allows for this harassment. Its support for links in video descriptions, allows response video creators to link back to their targets, while up- and down-voting and comments offer audiences the opportunity to express their anger and scorn against the targeted creator. At the same time, YouTube’s community guidelines are unevenly enforced in ways that may “miss the forest for the trees” with videos that do not explicitly direct audiences to harass but nonetheless incite harassment.
Tweets: sources, or ‘content’?
In a review of news stories from 2018, Shannon McGregor and Logan Molyneux found that, when relying on tweets in a story, journalists “spent precious few words adding context, qualifiers, or modifiers.” They find no evidence that journalists citing tweets in their stories follow up with those sources to verify or otherwise expand upon their comments.
By treating tweets as content instead of sources that need to be interrogated and verified, journalists transfer their authority to Twitter. This conveys a misleading sense of legitimacy to unverified sources and compounds existing problems with the overamplification of certain voices.
"…journalists assume the role of discovery and amplification rather than that of independent verification, which constitutes a significant shift in journalistic values and roles. In many cases, they apparently pass along the tweets as if they were a police report, accepting the author’s words as presented.”
Their findings were published in Information, Communication & Society.
Interested in more information on how Twitter is used (and manipulated) in presenting public opinion? We have recommendations:
Recent publications and appearances
“People don’t understand that they have a problem... A light touch is really not going to do it here; we really have to pull out all the stops because we’ve seen what happens when we don’t.” Deen Freelon was featured in an NPR story on combating misinformation when a loved one is caught in a web of conspiracies.
Graduate research affiliate Daniel Johnson’s book #Inherent Resolve: Top Guns, Black Hearts, and Going Viral at War in Iraq became the #1 best seller on Amazon Kindle for photojournalism.
"While people using these literacy practices are not unaware of mainstream media narratives, they distrust them in favor of their own research..." Francesca Tripodi’s work supports an appeal to reconsider what teaching information literacy requires, in “Lizard People in the Library.”
Coming soon
Zeynep Tufekci will be the keynote speaker for February 18 event on Philanthropy and the Digital Revolution, presented by WINGS.