Hate groups are increasingly using multiple social media platforms to promote extremist ideologies. Yet we know little about their communication practices across platforms. How do hate groups (or "in-groups"), frame their hateful agenda against the targeted group or the "out-group?" How do they share information? Utilizing "framing" theory from social movement research and analyzing domains in the shared links, we juxtapose the Facebook and Twitter communication of 72 Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) designated hate groups spanning five hate ideologies. Our findings show that hate groups use Twitter for educating the audience about problems with the out-group, maintaining positive self-image by emphasizing in-group's high social status, and for demanding policy changes to negatively affect the out-group. On Facebook, they use fear appeals, call for active participation in group events (membership requests), all while portraying themselves as being oppressed by the out-group and failed by the system. Our study unravels the ecosystem of cross-platform communication by hate groups, suggesting that they use Facebook for group radicalization and recruitment, while Twitter for reaching a diverse follower base.
People compare themselves to one another both offline and online. The specific online activities that worsen social comparison are partly understood, though much existing research relies on people recalling their own online activities post hoc and is situated in only a few countries. To better understand social comparison worldwide and the range of associated behaviors on social media, a survey of 38,000 people from 18 countries was paired with logged activity on Facebook for the prior month. People who reported more frequent social comparison spent more time on Facebook, had more friends, and saw proportionally more social content on the site. They also saw greater amounts of feedback on friends' posts and proportionally more positivity. There was no evidence that social comparison happened more with acquaintances than close friends. One in five respondents recalled recently seeing a post that made them feel worse about themselves but reported conflicting views: half wished they hadn't seen the post, while a third felt very happy for the poster. Design opportunities are discussed, including hiding feedback counts, filters for topics and people, and supporting meaningful interactions, so that when comparisons do occur, people are less affected by them.
In the course of every member's integration into an online community, a decision must be made to participate for the first time. The challenges of effective recruitment, management, and retention of new users have been extensively explored in social computing research. However, little work has looked at in-the-moment factors that lead users to decide to participate instead of "lurk", conditions which can be shaped to draw new users in at crucial moments. In this work we analyze 183 million messages scraped from chatrooms on the livestreaming platform Twitch in order to understand differences between first-time participants' and regulars' behaviors and to identify conditions that encourage first-time participation. We find that presence of diverse types of users increases likelihood of new participation, with effects depending on the size of the community. We also find that information-seeking behaviors in first-time participation are negatively associated with retention in the short and medium term.
While personal devices are often used to connect online with others far away, public media rarely offers opportunities to connect with collocated individuals. We explore novel interaction strategies to enhance opportunistic collocated sociality through technologically augmented daily objects. ThinkCushion is an augmented cushion allowing users to record and playback audio messages either explicitly or implicitly by leaning on it. We deployed ThinkCushion in an open coworking space and gathered quantitative and qualitative data over one month to unveil how individuals discovered it and interacted. We individuate three modes of discovery (serendipitous, spectated and facilitated) and their relations with situated socio-spatial aspects. We discuss the interplay of active and passive interaction modalities for locally accessing and creating content, and how verbal content can be used in either performative or informative ways. We suggest future research on how to design public technologies supporting collocated sociality already from the phase of technological discovery.
Values are an integral part of human identity and have a pervasive impact upon human behavior. This makes understanding them a central concern in the design of technology, as exemplified by approaches such as Value Sensitive Design ("VSD"). Identifying and concreting the values held by a given population can be a difficult endeavor, especially where there is a cultural barrier limiting an effective discussion of them, for example in societies where freedom of expression is discouraged. Addressing this concern requires an in-depth consideration of appropriate value elicitation methods, which responds to the fact that it is not possible to understand values detached from their cultural context. We introduce a novel implicit method, Scenario Co-Creation Cards, and show how it can be used to incorporate existing models of culture in the value elicitation process. We demonstrate this in a case study of Saudi women's visibility in the digital media.