While social network analyses often demonstrate the usefulness of social media networks to affective publics and otherwise marginalized social justice groups, this book explores the domination and manipulation of social networks by more powerful political groups. Jeffrey Layne Blevins and James Lee look at the ways in which social media conversations about race turn politically charged, and in many cases, ugly. Studies show that social media is an important venue for news and political information, while focusing national attention on racially involved issues. Perhaps less understood, however, is the effective quality of this discourse, and its connection to popular politics, especially when Twitter trolls and social media mobs go on the attack. Taking on prominent case studies from the past few years, including the Ferguson protests and the Black Lives Matter movement, the 2016 presidential election, and the rise of fake news, this volume presents data visualization sets alongside careful scholarly analysis. The resulting volume provides new insight into social media, legacy news, and social justice.

Social media is said to radically change the way in which public communication takes place: information diffuses faster and can reach a large number of people, but what makes the process so novel is that online networks can empower people to compete with traditional broadcasters or public figures. This book critically interrogates the contemporary relevance of social networks as a set of economic, cultural and political enterprises and as a public sphere in which a variety of political and socio-cultural demands can be met. It examines policy, regulatory and socio-cultural issues arising from the transformation of communication to a multi-layered sphere of online and social networks. The central theme of the book is to address the following questions: Are online and social networks an unstoppable democratizing and mobilizing force? Is there a need for policy and intervention to ensure the development of comprehensive and inclusive social networking frameworks? Social media are viewed both as a tool that allows citizens to influence policymaking, and as an object of new policies and regulations, such as data retention, privacy and copyright laws, around which citizens are mobilizing.

Social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are enormously popular: they are continuously ranked among the most frequently accessed websites worldwide. However there are as yet few studies which combine critical theoretical and empirical research in the context of digital and social media. The aim of this book is to study the constraints and emancipatory potentials of new media and to assess to what extent digital and social media can contribute to strengthen the idea of the communication and network commons, and a commons-based information society. Based on a critical theory and political economy approach, this book explores: the foundational concepts of a critical theory of media, technology, and society users’ knowledge, attitudes, and practices towards the antagonistic character and the potentials and risks of social media whether technological and/or social changes are required in order to bring about real social media and human liberation. Critical Theory and Social Media examines both academic discourse on, and users’ responses to, new media, making it a valuable tool for international scholars and students of sociology, media and communication studies, social theory, new media, and information society studies. Its clear and interesting insights into corporate practices of the global new media sector will mean that it appeals to critical social media users around the world.

As governments, citizens and organizations have moved online there is an increasing need for academic enquiry to adapt to this new context for communication and political action. This adaptation is crucially dependent on researchers being equipped with the necessary methodological tools to extract, analyze and visualize patterns of web activity. This volume profiles the latest techniques being employed by social scientists to collect and interpret data from some of the most popular social media applications, the political parties' own online activist spaces, and the wider system of hyperlinks that structure the inter-connections between these sites. Including contributions from a range of academic disciplines including Political Science, Media and Communication Studies, Economics, and Computer Science, this study showcases a new methodological approach that has been expressly designed to capture and analyze web data in the process of investigating substantive questions.

This book explores the potential of social media as a space for teaching and bringing about sustainable peace. Using cutting-edge research, the editors and authors analyze the fundamental transformations taking place in the digital and interactive public sphere, most recently with the advent of the ‘post-truth’ age and the impact of this upon young people’s perceptions of ‘friend’ and ‘foe’. Peace initiatives at almost every level recognize the importance of education for sustainable peace: this volume examines the opportunities emerging from these societal transformations for both formal and informal education. This book will appeal to students and scholars of social media, peace education and the post-truth age.

This study explores the nascent political economy of the online social network industry. Exemplars of online social networking, Facebook and Twitter have been often understood as revolutionary new media tools. My findings show that these social networks are taking on a logic of capitalist production and accumulation, calling into question their perceived revolutionary character. Evidence suggests that user-generated content are now being commodified and exchanged for profit. A critical discourse analysis of Facebook and Twitter's privacy policy and terms of use reveals that these texts primarily function as work contracts rather than as treatises on privacy protection. Drawing on the work of Karl Marx, this study revisits his theory of value and develops an expanded form of variable capital model to demonstrate how social networkers fit into this new capitalist circuit of accumulation. This extension of the working day is problematic. Policy recommendations are offered in order to negate the commodification of user data.

The Encyclopedia of Social Media and Politics explores how the rise of social media is altering politics both in the United States and in key moments, movements, and places around the world. Its scope encompasses the disruptive technologies and activities that are changing basic patterns in American politics and the amazing transformations that social media use is rendering in other political systems heretofore resistant to democratization and change. In a time when social media are revolutionizing and galvanizing politics in the United States and around the world, this encyclopedia is a must-have reference. It reflects the changing landscape of politics where old modes and methods of political communication from elites to the masses (top down) and from the masses to elites (bottom up) are being displaced rapidly by social media, and where activists are building new movements and protests using social media to alter mainstream political agendas. Key Features This three-volume A-to-Z encyclopedia set includes 600 short essays on high-interest topics that explore social media’s impact on politics, such as “Activists and Activism,” “Issues and Social Media,” “Politics and Social Media,” and “Popular Uprisings and Protest.” A stellar array of world renowned scholars have written entries in a clear and accessible style that invites readers to explore and reflect on the use of social media by political candidates in this country, as well as the use of social media in protests overseas Unique to this book is a detailed appendix with material unavailable anywhere else tracking and illustrating social media usage by U.S. Senators and Congressmen. This encyclopedia set is a must-have general, non-technical resource for students and researchers who seek to understand how the changes in social networking through social media are affecting politics, both in the United States and in selected countries or regions around the world.