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This article reports on focus groups exploring the best way to reach young men with vulgar comedy videos that provide sexual health information. Young people reported that they found the means by which the material was presented – as a locked down app – to be problematic, and that it would better be delivered through social media platforms such as YouTube. This would make it more 'spreadable'. By contrast, adult sex education stakeholders thought the material should be contained within a locked down, stand-alone app – otherwise it might be seen by children who are too young, and/or young people might misunderstand the messages. We argue that the difference in approach represented by these two sets of opinions represents a fundamental stumbling block for attempts to reach young people with digital sexual health materials, which can be understood through the prism of different cultural forms – education versus entertainment.

This collection of essays provides an overview of research on the social uses of media. Drawing on long traditions in both cultural studies and the social sciences, it brings together competing research approaches usually discussed separately. The topics include up-to-date research on activity and interactivity, media use as a social and cultural practice, and participation in a cultural, political and technological sense. This book explores three general areas of current scholarly study of the social aspects of media use. First, the introduction of interactive and so-called social media has had repercussions for the definition of media use, reception and even our perception of media effects. Second, the recognition that media constitute social practice, which utilizes media for its own goals, has been highly influential in communication research. Third, media provide many opportunities for participation in cultural and political issues. Yet media also shape participation in certain - and sometimes constraining - ways

Myanmar ICT for Development Organization (MIDO) is a non-governmental organization in Myanmar focusing on Internet and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Established in 2012, MIDO focuses on ICTs for development, Internet freedom, and Internet policy advocacy. In 2013, it organized the first Myanmar Internet Freedom Forum in Myanmar, supported by Freedom House. Phyu Phyu Thi is both co-founder and research and development manager of MIDO. She holds a master's degree in sustainable development from Chiang Mai University, Faculty of Social Sciences in Thailand, and a bachelor's degree in science from Yangon University. Her interests include technology and development, social media, diffusion of information, and behavior. Htaike Htaike Aung is co-founder and executive director of MIDO. She is working as a digital security and privacy consultant. She is also co-founder of the Myanmar Blogger Society and co-organizer of BarCamp Yangon - a user-generated conference primarily focusing on technology and the Internet which is part of a larger international network.

The present work proposes social media as a tool to understand the relationship between journalists' social networks and the content they produce. Specifically, we ask, "what is the association between the partisan nature of the accounts journalists follow on Twitter and the news content they produce?" Using standard text scaling techniques, we analyze partisanship in a novel dataset of more than 300,000 news articles produced by 644 journalists at 25 different US news outlets. We then develop a novel, semi-supervised model of partisanship of Twitter following relationships and show a modest correlation between the partisanship of whom a journalist follows on Twitter and the content she produces. The findings provide insight into the partisan dynamics that appear to characterize the US media ecosystem in its broad contours, dynamics that may be traceable from social media networks to published stories.

"The Routledge Companion to Media and Activism is a wide-ranging collection of original essays by leading contributors from around the world. In 42 essays, with an extensive editor's introduction, it introduces and explores central debates about the relationships between media and protest, communication and social movements" --

Professional and amateur sport throughout the world experienced an industry-wide disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The initial stage of the pandemic required the postponement of leagues and games, until athletic events were resumed without fans. This disruption required the sport industry to adapt and supply substitute products to engage users without the access to the primary product, live sport. In this study, we compare how a North American league (National Basketball Association) and a European league (English Premier League) adapted to these changes using social media to engage with fans. We examine changes in the volume of Tweets and engagements with official team Twitter posts. Our data contain categorical control variables accounting for different stages of the pandemic. This includes when games were canceled for health and safety reasons, when play was resumed in a bubble format, in-season periods, and offseason periods. Examining social media engagement during these periods is a unique opportunity to compare team (supply) strategies and fan reactions (demand) to a disruption, and to explore the longer-term implications such as expanded engagement after the disruption has ended or when its effects have lessened.

New legal and regulatory challenges are emerging as technology infiltrates every aspect of public and private life on a global scale. The growing dominance of largely unregulated global technology and social media companies presents grave concerns for international and national lawmakers
and regulators grappling with health, safety and security issues such as cyber exploitation and discrimination, digital harassment and violence, online human trafficking and cyber sexual exploitation, particularly of vulnerable populations living in conflict zones. Additional issues relate
to the biases and discrimination programmed into artificial intelligence and how global technology and social media companies are using powerful algorithms to expand their global audiences without possessing the technical language competency needed to enforce their community standards prohibiting
the dissemination of hate speech, illegal content and unlawful activities on their platforms. While social media has benefits, it can also facilitate crimes such as cyber exploitation, sexual terrorism and online human trafficking that especially harm socially marginalized and economically
vulnerable people—specifically women and children. This law article focuses on the nexus between cyber exploitation, enslavement, sexual torture and online human trafficking on global technology and social media platforms and its connection to terrorism financing with a detailed discussion
of what happened to Yezidi women and children and other religious and ethnic minorities during the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, ISIL, IS or the Islamic State). This law article will also explore the legal frameworks in the United States, Europe and Iraq that might allow
victims of cyber exploitation to pursue criminal and civil accountability against corporate actors.

Women in Pakistan are facing a number of problems. Their identities and rights are heavily influenced by sociocultural, legal and religious values upheld in the country. Media, as an industry and liberal agent of socialization, has become a platform for value contestation and value promotion. This paper analyzed the discourse of liberal and traditional values in daily Dawn (news, reports, articles, editorials), from July 15, 2016 to October 20, 2016, to explore how the murder of Qandeel Baloch was discussed and analyzed while constructing the liberal and traditional values about women's issues. The results show that individualism, self-interest, freedom of expression, sexual freedom, free mobility and visibility, and liberal principles of justice were constructed as rational and pro-women. Tradition, religion, religiosity, piety, modesty, submissiveness and virginity were constructed as oppressive and patriarchal constructs to be left behind on the way of modernity, liberation and empowerment. The sexual freedom and provocative activities of Qandeel Baloch were admired and praised and she was constructed as a woman of substance and honour.

Social media platforms are seen as the most important communication tools of the digital age. The use of social media comes to the forefront as a new norm in terms of increasing the institutional reputation and globalization of universities. Thanks to social media, universities have the opportunity to communicate with current and new students, as well as to develop new projects, collaborations and other scientific research with individuals or institutions in many different parts of the world. While many posts with different content are shared in the social media accounts of universities with thousands of followers, content that is deemed valuable by other social media accounts can create interaction. For this reason, the increase in content that is not considered valuable by the followers can reduce the effectiveness of the social media account. In this direction, within the scope of the study, it is aimed to examine Twitter accounts of universities with content analysis method and to compare the posts made between universities. Based on this purpose, the findings obtained by examining the Twitter accounts of the ten universities with the highest globalization score in Turkey between April and September 2021 were evaluated. According to the research findings, it has been concluded that the focus of posts on social media accounts of universities in Turkey consists of promotion and information activities. It has been observed that there is not enough space for sharing about academic activities. It is predicted that universities' differentiation and enrichment of the content of their posts will increase the effectiveness of their social media accounts, and it is suggested that more scientific studies should be included in to posts.

La crisis de los medios de comunicación se vincula a la crisis de las instituciones públicas. Esto denota la emergencia de prácticas sociales centradas en una activación de los usuarios; y, por consiguiente, se advierte un declive de la mediación vertical. Sin embargo, estos fenómenos no se extienden de manera horizontal a nivel global. En este estudio, comparamos los resultados de una encuesta realizada a más de dos mil estudiantes universitarios de México y Ecuador, en la que cuestionamos las percepciones de estos grupos estratégicos sobre fenómenos como la participación política dentro y fuera de línea y el consumo de información ; The media crisis is linked to the crisis of public institutions. This shows the emergence of social practices focused on user activation and consequently, we can observe a decline of vertical mediation. However, these phenomena do not extend horizontally at a global level. With this study, we compare the results of a survey of more than two thousand university students from Mexico and Ecuador, in which we question the perceptions of these strategic groups about phenomena such as political participation on and offline, and political information consumption

The apparent success of President Obama's online election campaigns in the 2008 and 2012 U.S. presidential elections and the rapid growth in use of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter by British voters since the last election has led to much speculation that 2010 would be a 'watershed' moment for UK politicians and parties in their adoption of digital tools. This article seeks to measure the precise extent of online campaigning during the 2010 general election campaign and explain the patterns of adoption observed. It does so by using an extensive and original data set that measures the adoption of Web sites by candidates from six parties in all constituencies in England, and measures adoption and use of four types of social media for a smaller group of more competitive constituencies. It aims to test one of the leading theories in the field of online campaigning, the normalization thesis, using the most comprehensive and rigorous data collected in the United Kingdom to date. The normalization thesis states that actors who already have the most influence will be the ones most likely to benefit from new online campaign methods. This paper finds that although patterns of Web site adoption among candidates do support normalization overall, adoption and use of certain types of social media refute normalization on some measures, some to a strong degree. Adapted from the source document.