Combating the Digital Spiral of Silence: Academic Activists Versus Social Media Trolls

Olson, Candi S. Carter; LaPoe, Victoria

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-72917-6_14

Cited by 28 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…One study found that more than half of women 15–29 years censor themselves online to avoid harassment (Veletsianos et al, 2018). Other scholarship has found that female scholars, journalists, and politicians self-censor themselves online due to both online harassment and the fear of online abuse (Binns, 2017; Chen et al, 2020; Sobieraj et al, 2020), culminating in what Carter Olson and LaPoe (2018) call a “digital Spiral of Silence.”…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Morally Motivated Networked Harassment as Normative Reinforcement

Marwick

2021

Social Media + Society

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While online harassment is recognized as a significant problem, most scholarship focuses on descriptions of harassment and its effects. We lack explanations of why people engage in online harassment beyond simple bias or dislike. This article puts forth an explanatory model where networked harassment on social media functions as a mechanism to enforce social order. Drawing from examples of networked harassment taken from qualitative interviews with people who have experienced harassment ( n = 28) and Trust & Safety workers at social platforms ( n = 9), the article builds on Brady, Crockett, and Bavel’s model of moral contagion to explore how moral outrage is used to justify networked harassment on social media. In morally motivated networked harassment, a member of a social network or online community accuses a target of violating their network’s norms, triggering moral outrage. Network members send harassing messages to the target, reinforcing their adherence to the norm and signaling network membership. Frequently, harassment results in the accused self-censoring and thus regulates speech on social media. Neither platforms nor legal regulations protect against this form of harassment. This model explains why people participate in networked harassment and suggests possible interventions to decrease its prevalence.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Morally Motivated Networked Harassment as Normative Reinforcement

Marwick

2021

Social Media + Society

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“…These large, residual, and negative in tone categories seemingly reaffirm the role of participatory/social media as platforms for mobilising public opinion, frequently-but not exclusively-driven by grievances or complaints. If we take into account the empirically grounded knowledge about the self-censoring and self-silencing of many for fear of attracting trolls, online abuse, and threats (e.g., Carter Olson & LaPoe, 2018;Powers et al, 2019), it would be too simplistic to assume that those who do not actively participate in social media exchanges (even by simply retweeting a message) are content with the way that the issue at hand is being dealt with by political actors.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Challenges of Reconstructing Citizen-Driven EU Contestation in the Digital Media Sphere

Seibicke

Michailidou

2022

PaG

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This article reflects on the discursive representation, legal, and practical challenges of locating, classifying, and publishing citizens’ views of the EU in digital media discourse. We start with the discursive representation challenge of locating and identifying citizens’ voices in social and news media discourse. The second set of challenges pertains to the legal, regulatory framework guiding research ethics on personal data but also cuts across the academic debate on what constitutes “public” discourse in the digital public sphere. The third set of challenges are practical but of no less consequence. Here we bring in the issue of marketisation of the public sphere and of the digital commons, and how these processes affect the ethics but also the feasibility and reliability of digital public sphere analysis. Thereby we illustrate that barriers to content analysis can make data collection practically challenging, feeding dilemmas with data reliability and research ethics. These methodological and empirical challenges are illustrated and unpacked with examples from the Benchmark project, which analysed the extent to which citizens drive EU contestation on social and digital news media. Our study focuses on UK public discourse on a possible European Economic Area solution, and the reactions such discourse may have triggered in two EU-associated countries, Norway and Switzerland, in the post-Brexit referendum period 2016–2019. We thus take a broad European perspective of EU contestation that is not strictly confined within the EU public sphere(s). The case study illustrates the research process and the emerging empirical challenges and concludes with reflections and practical suggestions for future research projects.

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“…Spiral of silence theory proposes that, this reluctance to speak out is often driven by a fear of isolation when they do not conform to the prevailing opinion. Although studies explored the application of the spiral of silence theory in the context of misinformation and its effects [68,69], our investigation is not specifically focused on settings where users perceive themselves as in the minority. However, some reasons for not challenging misinformation are aligned with this theory such as feeling in the minority ("I want to avoid being viewed as odd") and fear of isolation ("I want to avoid people who posted or endorsed the post isolating me")…”

Section: Background and Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why Do We Not Stand Up to Misinformation? Factors Influencing the Likelihood of Challenging Misinformation on Social Media and the Role of Demographics

Gurgun,

Cemiloglu,

Arden-Close

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Combating the Digital Spiral of Silence: Academic Activists Versus Social Media Trolls

Cited by 28 publications

References 13 publications

Morally Motivated Networked Harassment as Normative Reinforcement

Morally Motivated Networked Harassment as Normative Reinforcement

The Challenges of Reconstructing Citizen-Driven EU Contestation in the Digital Media Sphere

Why Do We Not Stand Up to Misinformation? Factors Influencing the Likelihood of Challenging Misinformation on Social Media and the Role of Demographics

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