Misinformation and disinformation are rife, but so far it’s been seen as a challenge for policy-makers and big tech, including social media platforms.
The sheer volume of data being created makes it hard to tell what’s real and what’s not. From destroying 5G towers to conspiracies like QAnon and unfounded concern about election fraud, distrust is becoming the default – and this can have incredibly damaging effects on society.
So far, the tech sector – primarily social media companies, given that their platforms enable fake news to spread exponentially – have tried to implement some measures, with varying levels of success. For example, WhatsApp has placed a stricter limit on its message-forwarding capability and Twitter has begun to flag misleading posts.
the rise of tech startups that are exploring ways to detect and stem the flow of disinformation, such Right of Reply, Astroscreen and Logically.
Bibliographical data analysis with Zotero and nVivo
Bibliographic Analysis for Graduate Students, EDAD 518, Fri/Sat, May 15/16, 2020
This session will not be about qualitative research (QR) only, but rather about a modern 21st century approach toward the analysis of your literature review in Chapter 2.
However, the computational approach toward qualitative research is not much different than computational approach for your quantitative research; you need to be versed in each of them, thus familiarity with nVivo for qualitative research and with SPSS for quantitative research should be pursued by any doctoral student.
Once you complete the overview of the resources above, please make sure you have Zotero working on your computer; we will be reviewing the Zotero features before we move to nVivo.
Familiarity with Zotero is a prerequisite for successful work with nVivo, so please if you are already working with Zotero, try to expand your knowledge using the materials above.
Please use this link to install nVivo on your computer. Even if we were not in a quarantine and you would have been able to use the licensed nVivo software on campus, for convenience (working on your dissertation from home), most probably, you would have used the shareware. Shareware is fully functional on your computer for 14 days, so calculate the time you will be using it and mind the date of installation and your consequent work.
For the purpose of this workshop, please install nVivo on your computer early morning on Saturday, May 16, so we can work together on nVivo during the day and you can continue using the software for the next two weeks.
Please familiarize yourself with the two articles assigned in the EDAD 815 D2L course content “Practice Research Articles“ :
Brosky, D. (2011). Micropolitics in the School: Teacher Leaders’ Use of Political Skill and Influence Tactics. International Journal of Educational Leadership Preparation, 6(1). https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ972880
Tooms, A. K., Kretovics, M. A., & Smialek, C. A. (2007). Principals’ perceptions of politics. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 10(1), 89–100. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603120600950901
It is very important to be familiar with the articles when we start working with nVivo.
whereas the snapshots are replaced with snapshots from nVivol, version 12, which we will be using in our course and for our dissertations.
Concept of bibliographic data
Bibliographic Data is an organized collection of references to publish in literature that includes journals, magazine articles, newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government and legal publications. The bibliographical data is important for writing the literature review of a research. This data is usually saved and organized in databases like Mendeley or Endnote. Nvivo provides the option to import bibliographical data from these databases directly. One can import End Note library or Mendeley library into Nvivo. Similar to interview transcripts, one can represent and analyze bibliographical data using Nvivo. To start with bibliographical data representation, this article previews the processing of literature review in Nvivo.
Importing bibliographical data
Bibliographic Data is imported using Mendeley, Endnote and other such databases or applications that are supported with Nvivo. Bibliographical data here refers to material in the form of articles, journals or conference proceedings. Common factors among all of these data are the author’s name and year of publication. Therefore, Nvivo helps to import and arrange these data with their titles as author’s name and year of publication. The process of importing bibliographical data is presented in the figures below.
select the appropriate data from external folder
Coding strategies for literature review
Coding is a process of identifying important parts or patterns in the sources and organizing them in theme node. Sources in case of literature review include material in the form of PDF. That means literature review in Nvivo requires grouping of information from PDF files in the forms of theme nodes. Nodes directly do not create content for literature review, they present ideas simply to help in framing a literature review. Nodes can be created on the basis of theme of the study, results of the study, major findings of the study or any other important information of the study. After creating nodes, code the information of each of the articles into its respective codes.
Nvivo allows coding the articles for preparing a literature review. Articles have tremendous amount of text and information in the forms of graphs, more importantly, articles are in the format of PDF. Since Nvivo does not allow editing PDF files, apply manual coding in case of literature review. There are two strategies of coding articles in Nvivo.
Code the text of PDF files into a new Node.
Code the text of PDF file into an existing Node. The procedure of manual coding in literature review is similar to interview transcripts.
The Case Nodes of articles are created as per the author name or year of the publication.
For example: Create a case node with the name of that author and attach all articles in case of multiple articles of same Author in a row with different information. For instance in figure below, five articles of same author’s name, i.e., Mr. Toppings have been selected together to group in a case Node. Prepare case nodes like this then effortlessly search information based on different author’s opinion for writing empirical review in the literature.
Nvivo questions for literature review
Apart from the coding on themes, evidences, authors or opinions in different articles, run different queries based on the aim of the study. Nvivo contains different types of search tools that helps to find information in and across different articles. With the purpose of literature review, this article presents a brief overview of word frequency search, text search, and coding query in Nvivo.
Word frequency
Word frequency in Nvivo allows searching for different words in the articles. In case of literature review, use word frequency to search for a word. This will help to find what different author has stated about the word in the article. Run word frequency on all types of sources and limit the number of words which are not useful to write the literature.
For example, run the command of word frequency with the limit of 100 most frequent words . This will help in assessing if any of these words remotely provide any new information for the literature (figure below).
and
and
Text search
Text search is more elaborative tool then word frequency search in Nvivo. It allows Nvivo to search for a particular phrase or expression in the articles. Also, Nvivo gives the opportunity to make a node out of text search if a particular word, phrase or expression is found useful for literature.
For example: conduct a text search query to find a word “Scaffolding” in the articles. In this case Nvivo will provide all the words, phrases and expression slightly related to this word across all the articles (Figure 8 & 9). The difference between test search and word frequency lies in generating texts, sentences and phrases in the latter related to the queried word.
Coding query
Apart from text search and word frequency search Nvivo also provides the option of coding query. Coding query helps in literature review to know the intersection between two Nodes. As mentioned previously, nodes contains the information from the articles. Furthermore it is also possible that two nodes contain similar set of information. Therefore, coding query helps to condense this information in the form of two way table which represents the intersection between selected nodes.
For example, in below figure, researcher have search the intersection between three nodes namely, academics, psychological and social on the basis of three attributes namely qantitative, qualitative and mixed research. This coding theory is performed to know which of the selected themes nodes have all types of attributes. Like, Coding Matrix in figure below shows that academic have all three types of attributes that is research (quantitative, qualitative and mixed). Where psychological has only two types of attributes research (quantitative and mixed).
In this way, Coding query helps researchers to generate intersection between two or more theme nodes. This also simplifies the pattern of qualitative data to write literature.
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Please do not hesitate to contact me with questions, suggestions before, during or after our workshop and about ANY questions and suggestions you may have about your Chapter 2 and, particularly about your literature review:
The documents claim that investigators are still unaware of what’s in his WhatsApp, Signal, Wickr, and ProtonMail logs. More importantly, what was the Swash Buckler up to?
Facebook’s board works more like an advisory committee than an overseer, because Mark controls around 60 percent of voting shares. Mark alone can decide how to configure Facebook’s algorithms to determine what people see in their News Feeds, what privacy settings they can use and even which messages get delivered. He sets the rules for how to distinguish violent and incendiary speech from the merely offensive, and he can choose to shut down a competitor by acquiring, blocking or copying it.
We are a nation with a tradition of reining in monopolies, no matter how well intentioned the leaders of these companies may be. Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American.
It is time to break up Facebook.
America was built on the idea that power should not be concentrated in any one person, because we are all fallible. That’s why the founders created a system of checks and balances.
More legislation followed in the 20th century, creating legal and regulatory structures to promote competition and hold the biggest companies accountable.
Starting in the 1970s, a small but dedicated group of economists, lawyers and policymakers sowed the seeds of our cynicism. Over the next 40 years, they financed a network of think tanks, journals, social clubs, academic centers and media outlets to teach an emerging generation that private interests should take precedence over public ones. Their gospel was simple: “Free” markets are dynamic and productive, while government is bureaucratic and ineffective.
From our earliest days, Mark used the word “domination” to describe our ambitions, with no hint of irony or humility.
Facebook’s monopoly is also visible in its usage statistics.About 70 percent of American adults use social media, and a vast majority are on Facebook products. Over two-thirds use the core site, a third use Instagram, and a fifth use WhatsApp. By contrast, fewer than a third report using Pinterest, LinkedIn or Snapchat. What started out as lighthearted entertainment has become the primary way that people of all ages communicate online.
The F.T.C.’s biggest mistake was to allow Facebook to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp. In 2012, the newer platforms were nipping at Facebook’s heels because they had been built for the smartphone, where Facebook was still struggling to gain traction. Mark responded by buying them, and the F.T.C. approved.
The News Feed algorithm reportedly prioritized videos created through Facebook over videos from competitors, like YouTube and Vimeo. In 2012, Twitter introduced a video network called Vine that featured six-second videos. That same day, Facebook blocked Vine from hosting a tool that let its users search for their Facebook friends while on the new network.The decision hobbled Vine, which shut down four years later.
unlike Vine, Snapchat wasn’t interfacing with the Facebook ecosystem; there was no obvious way to handicap the company or shut it out. So Facebook simply copied it. (opyright law does not extend to the abstract concept itself.)
As markets become more concentrated, the number of new start-up businesses declines. This holds true in other high-tech areas dominated by single companies, like search (controlled by Google) and e-commerce (taken over by Amazon). Meanwhile, there has been plenty of innovation in areas where there is no monopolistic domination, such as in workplace productivity (Slack, Trello, Asana), urban transportation (Lyft, Uber, Lime, Bird) and cryptocurrency exchanges (Ripple, Coinbase, Circle).
The choice is mine, but it doesn’t feel like a choice. Facebook seeps into every corner of our lives to capture as much of our attention and data as possible and, without any alternative, we make the trade.
Just last month, Facebook seemingly tried to bury news that it had stored tens of millions of user passwords in plain text format, which thousands of Facebook employees could see. Competition alone wouldn’t necessarily spur privacy protection — regulation is required to ensure accountability — but Facebook’s lock on the market guarantees that users can’t protest by moving to alternative platforms.
Mark used to insist that Facebook was just a “social utility,” a neutral platform for people to communicate what they wished. Now he recognizes that Facebook is both a platform and a publisher and that it is inevitably making decisions about values. The company’s own lawyers have argued in court that Facebook is a publisher and thus entitled to First Amendment protection.
As if Facebook’s opaque algorithms weren’t enough, last year we learned that Facebook executives had permanently deleted their own messages from the platform, erasing them from the inboxes of recipients; the justification was corporate security concerns.
Mark may never have a boss, but he needs to have some check on his power. The American government needs to do two things: break up Facebook’s monopoly and regulate the company to make it more accountable to the American people.
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We Don’t Need Social Media
The push to regulate or break up Facebook ignores the fact that its services do more harm than good
Hughes joins a growing chorus of former Silicon Valley unicorn riders who’ve recently had second thoughts about the utility or benefit of the surveillance-attention economy their products and platforms have helped create. He is also not the first to suggest that government might need to step in to clean up the mess they made
Nick Srnicek, author of the book Platform Capitalismand a lecturer in digital economy at King’s College London, wrotelast month, “[I]t’s competition — not size — that demands more data, more attention, more engagement and more profits at all costs
Parallel running of two social media from different countries: WeChat and blog for international students
Our work with Chinese students from the Confucius Institute (CI) at St. Cloud State University (SCSU) shed light on an interesting development: in the last several years, the popular Chinese social media platform WeChat dominates the social life of Chinese people, Chinese students in particular.
Based on the WeChat affinity of the Chinese students at the SCSU CI program, the program organizers faced difficulty applying other social media platforms, as part of the curricula of the host country. Namely, blog, as one of the widely used SM platform for creative writing (citation comes here), was contemplated as a SM platform for the Chinese students to journal their experience at the SCSU CI program. Since WeChat behaves rather like Facebook and Snapchat, the lack of opportunity to utilize widely available platform for rather lengthy narration (versus SMS/texting abilitis of Twitter and WeChat) convince the SCSU CI program organizers to seek the buy in by Chinese students into the blog initiative.
Pang (2018) builds a theory based on Ellison (2007) theory of “maintained social capital,” namely the ability of individuals to maintain values of social ties when geographically disconnected. Ping (2018) further narrows her research on Chinese students in Germany using Li and Chen (2014) findings about Ellison’s theory on students in a foreign environment and the necessity for these students to build a new circle of friends in the host country. According to Basilisco an Cha (2015), such environment was provided for Filipino students by using Facebook and Twitter.
Agur, C., Belair-Gagnon, V., & Frish, N. (2018). Mobile sourcing: A case study of journalistic norms and usage of chat apps. Mobile Meida and Communication, 6(1), 53–70. https://doi.org/DOI: 10.1177/2050157917725549
Borgerson, J. L. (2016). Scalable Sociality and 'How the World Changed Social Media': conversation with Daniel Miller. Consumption, Markets & Culture. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2015.1120980
Chen, Y. (2017). WeChat use among Chinese college students: Exploring gratifications and political engagement in China. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 10(1), 25–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/17513057.2016.1235222
Pang, H. (2016). Understanding key factors affecting young people’s WeChat usage: an empirical study from uses and gratifications perspective. International Journal of Web Based Communities, 12(3), 262. https://doi.org/10.1504/IJWBC.2016.077757
Pang, H. (2018). Understanding the effects of WeChat on perceived social capital and psychological well-being among Chinese international college students in Germany. Aslib Journal of Information Management, 70(3), 288–304. https://doi.org/DOI 10.1108/AJIM-01-2018-0003
Run Zhi Zhu, X. L. X. (2015). The Influence of Social Media on Sleep Quality: A Study of Undergraduate Students in Chongqing, China. Journal of Nursing & Care, 04(03). https://doi.org/10.4172/2167-1168.1000253
Wang, Y., Fang, W.-C., Han, J., & Chen, N.-S. (2016). Exploring the affordances of WeChat for facilitating teaching, social and cognitive presence in semi-synchronous language exchange. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology. https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.2640
Wei, H., & Ke, L. (2014). “New Weapons” of Ideological and Political Education in Universities—WeChat. SHS Web of Conferences, 6, 04001. https://doi.org/10.1051/shsconf/20140604001
Apps like WhatsApp, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Viber
Felix Krause described in 2017 that when a user grants an app access to their camera and microphone, the app could do the following:
Access both the front and the back camera.
Record you at any time the app is in the foreground.
Take pictures and videos without telling you.
Upload the pictures and videos without telling you.
Upload the pictures/videos it takes immediately.
Run real-time face recognition to detect facial features or expressions.
Livestream the camera on to the internet.
Detect if the user is on their phone alone, or watching together with a second person.
Upload random frames of the video stream to your web service and run a proper face recognition software which can find existing photos of you on the internet and create a 3D model based on your face.
For instance, here’s a Find my Phone application which a documentary maker installed on a phone, then let someone steal it. After the person stole it, the original owner spied on every moment of the thief’s life through the phone’s camera and microphone.
The government
Edward Snowden revealed an NSA program called Optic Nerves. The operation was a bulk surveillance program under which they captured webcam images every five minutes from Yahoo users’ video chats and then stored them for future use. It is estimated that between 3% and 11% of the images captured contained “undesirable nudity”.
Hackers can also gain access to your device with extraordinary ease via apps, PDF files, multimedia messages and even emojis.
An application called Metasploit on the ethical hacking platform Kali uses an Adobe Reader 9 (which over 60% of users still use) exploit to open a listener (rootkit) on the user’s computer. You alter the PDF with the program, send the user the malicious file, they open it, and hey presto – you have total control over their device remotely.
Once a user opens this PDF file, the hacker can then:
Install whatever software/app they like on the user’s device.
Use a keylogger to grab all of their passwords.
Steal all documents from the device.
Take pictures and stream videos from their camera.
Capture past or live audio from the microphone.
Upload incriminating images/documents to their PC, and notify the police.
And, if it’s not enough that your phone is tracking you – surveillance cameras in shops and streets are tracking you, too
You might even be on this website, InSeCam, which allows ordinary people online to watch surveillance cameras free of charge. It even allows you to search cameras by location, city, time zone, device manufacturer, and specify whether you want to see a kitchen, bar, restaurant or bedroom.
early 2018 is defined by a mix of long-standing trends and newly emerging narratives
Facebook and YouTube dominate this landscape, as notable majorities of U.S. adults use each of these sites. At the same time, younger Americans (especially those ages 18 to 24) stand out for embracing a variety of platforms and using them frequently. Some 78% of 18- to 24-year-olds use Snapchat, and a sizeable majority of these users (71%) visit the platform multiple times per day. Similarly, 71% of Americans in this age group now use Instagram and close to half (45%) are Twitter users
The video-sharing site YouTube – which contains many social elements, even if it is not a traditional social media platform – is now used by nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults and 94% of 18- to 24-year-olds.
a majority of users (59%) say it would not be hard to stop using these sites, including 29% who say it would not be hard at all to give up social media.
Pinterest remains substantially more popular with women (41% of whom say they use the site) than with men (16%).
LinkedIn remains especially popular among college graduates and those in high-income households. Some 50% of Americans with a college degree use LinkedIn, compared with just 9% of those with a high school diploma or less.
The messaging service WhatsApp is popular in Latin America, and this popularity also extends to Latinos in the United States – 49% of Hispanics report that they are WhatsApp users, compared with 14% of whites and 21% of blacks.
“They were taking both sides of the argument this past weekend and pushing them out from their troll farms as much as they could to just raise the noise level in America and make a big issue seem like an even bigger issue as they’re trying to push divisiveness in the country,” as Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., said in the fall.
Tools such as the German Marshall Fund’s “Hamilton 68” dashboard track Russian-linked accounts in real time to show what links, phrases and hashtags are circulating.
The Trump administration detailed the threat — without any specific mention of the 2016 interference — in the new National Security Strategy it released at the end of December.
The Republicans might have been tarnished by the St Petersburg troll factory, but Democratic fantasies about social media were rubbished in the process
The ads in question were memes, manufactured and posted to a number of bluntly named, pseudo-American Facebook accounts in 2016 by workers at a troll farm in St Petersburg, Russia. There were thousands of these ads, it seems, plus parallel efforts on Instagram and Twitter. Between them, they reached over 100 million people.
The memes were big news for a while because they showed what Russian interference in the 2016 election actually looked like, in vivid color. Eventually the story faded, though, in part because it was superseded by other stories, but also, I think, because the Russian ad story was deeply distasteful to both sides of our atrophied political debate.
The ads were clumsily written. They were rife with spelling errors and poor grammar. Their grasp of American history was awful. And over them all hovered a paranoid fear that the powerful were scheming to flip the world upside-down in the most outlandish ways: to turn our country over to the undocumented … to punish the hardworking … to crack down on patriots and Christians … to enact Sharia law right here at home.
The social media platforms aren’t neutral arbiters, selflessly serving the needs of society. As is all too obvious now, they are monopolies that manipulate us in a hundred different ways, selecting our news, steering us towards what we need to buy. The corporate entities behind them wield enormous power in Washington, too, filling Democratic campaign coffers and keeping the revolving door turning for trusted servants. Those who don’t comply get disciplined.
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Russia calls for answers after Chechen leader’s Instagram is blocked
Internet watchdog demands explanation after Ramzan Kadyrov claimed Facebook also suspended him without explanation
Kadyrov has accused the US government of pressuring the social networks to disable his accounts, which he said were blocked on Saturday without explanation. The US imposed travel and financial sanctions on Kadyrov last week over numerous allegations of human rights abuses.
The former rebel fighter, who is now loyal to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, is a fan of social media, particularly Instagram, which he has used in recent years to make barely veiled death threats against Kremlin critics.
Leonid Levin, the head of the Russian parliament’s information technologies and communications committee, suggested the move by Facebook and Instagram was an attack on freedom of speech.
Dzhambulat Umarov, the Chechen press and information minister, described the blocking of Kadyrov’s accounts as a “vile” cyber-attack by the US.
Neither Instagram nor Facebook had commented at the time of publication.
In 2015, Kadyrov urged Chechen men not to let their wives use the WhatsApp messaging service after an online outcry over the forced marriage of a 17-year-old Chechen to a 47-year-old police chief. “Do not write such things. Men, take your women out of WhatsApp,” he said.
WikiLeaks: Here’s how the CIA hacks your phones, TVs and PCs
The organization released thousands of documents it claims show how the US spy agency can crack open devices from Apple, Samsung, Google and Microsoft.
Apple, Google and Motorola declined to comment on WikiLeaks’ claims. Samsung didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“The CIA/Wikileaks story today is about getting malware onto phones, none of the exploits are in Signal or break Signal Protocol encryption,” said Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of Signal. “This story isn’t about Signal or WhatsApp, but to the extent that it is, we see it as confirmation that what we’re doing is working.”
Telegram said on its website that the problem lies with operating systems and not encrypted messaging apps and that naming specific encrypted services is “misleading.” WhatsApp declined to comment.
Email and Social media as we know it will die out. I’m not saying this year or in 5 years, but they will. I honestly think you are going to see Tablets in office spaces more and hybrid mobile devices take over at work.
The Interface of SMS is well, shiny and nice and not so annoying like a binary like Facebook feed, plain Jane like Twitter feed or hyper pseudo-useful like a LinkedIn one. Visual social channels like Pinterest and Instagram have more to offer, a better interface, UX and actual social utility.
SMS produces engagement 6-8 times higher than Email
98% of text messages are read
Only 22% of Email are read
And 12% of Facebook feed posts
By 2016, it’s estimate apps like these below have been used to send 2x as many messages as traditional text messaging form person to person.
