The Internet and social media have significantly affected democracies around the world. Yet, little is known about their direct impact on political elites. My dissertation posits that the expansion of the internet and social media has increased elite ideological extremism through two channels: i) A growth in voter radicalism, affecting politicians who respond to their constituencies, and ii) a higher reward to extreme politicians on social media. In particular, politicians' higher exposure to a very politicized set of voters and the positive reception of their negative messages on social media results in an increase in their ideological extremism. I test these hypotheses in Chile, conducting four types of analyses. I start by characterizing the profile of the social media and Facebook users in Chile at different periods, corroborating that they are people with sharper ideological preferences than the rest of the voters. Then, I examine whether Chilean members of the Chamber of Deputies pay more attention to Facebook when an increasing share of their constituencies have access to 3G mobile internet. Empirically, I estimate a two-way fixed effect model, regressing measures of Facebook activity ---likes, shares, and total interactions--- on 3G mobile internet coverage using a panel data of Chilean legislators. Here, I found a substantive effect of 3G mobile internet on Facebook activity among politicians, implying that when citizens have more access to the internet, legislators spend much more time interacting on Facebook. Moreover, I analyze if either district-level access to the internet or large levels of Facebook activity enhances the level of ideological extremism among political elites. The use of behavioral outcomes outside the digital world is crucial to understanding the impact of social media on democracies, as such outcomes can have real-world consequences. I decided to use roll-call voting data from the Chilean congress, which allowed me to generate a measure of ideological extremism on the left-right scale. I regressed the measure on several measures of Facebook activity and/or 3G coverage, using two-way fixed effects models and an instrumental variable specification, leveraging the variation in 3G mobile internet as an instrument. In these analyses, I consistently found that higher levels of Facebook interactions increase ideological extremism among Chilean politicians, especially in the initial years of Facebook penetration. This dissertation contributes to the literature in three ways. First, it is one of the few academic endeavors investigating how social media affect political elites in domains outside the digital world. Second, this work speaks to the old discussion about whether politicians lead or follow the public, in this case, regarding extremism. My results show an elite-driven move to extremism due to exposure to social media, regardless of the position of voters. Third, this analysis contributes to the understanding of polarization and democratic backsliding in the global south. Indeed, in the last years, Latin American countries such as Colombia, Peru, Brazil, and Chile have experienced increasing levels of elite polarization, as evidenced by the type of candidates disputing the presidential elections. Social media penetration is a plausible driving force behind this phenomenon, as it encourages politicians to spend time chasing "likes," which, as I demonstrate, could eventually have consequences for the functioning of democracy.

This dissertation examines the way that demands for more control over the collection, processing, and sharing of personal data are being managed by both government and industry leaders with strategies that appear to comply with regulations, but that fail to do so. These are “by-design” strategies used by individuals to unilaterally manage their data with automated tools. I take a multimethod approach that combines autoethnography, reverse engineering techniques, and data analysis to assess the implementation of by-design services implemented by Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram in compliance with current European Union regulations for access and portability. I also employ archival research, discourse analysis, interviews, and participant observation. I argue that self-led, by-design approaches do not answer the demands for more control over personal data. The regulatory and technical resources put in place for individuals to control their data are not effective because they turn over decisions about execution to an industry with no interest in sharing that data or being regulated. If policymakers continue to pursue by-design approaches, they will need to learn how to test the techniques, and the execution of the techniques, provided by industry. They will need to assess the impact on data that is made available. So that results can be evaluated, by-design tools like the ones I assessed must be accompanied by clear and detailed details about design choices and procedures. In this vein, I offer directions for critical scrutiny, including standards and measuring the impact of APIs. I conclude that self-managed, by-design approaches are not the source of the problem. But they are a symptom of the need for critical scrutiny over the execution of tools like the ones offered by Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Ultimately, I found that portability and access are legally and technically fraught. However, despite the shortcomings of by-design approaches, personal data can be more effectively regulated in Europe than in the United States as the result of current regulations.

Social media sites have been perceived as a "common digital town square" in which opinions are exchanged at an unprecedented scale and speed. People not only share their own opinions on controversial issues but also consume news and assimilate opinions shared by friends in their social circles. The process by which individuals update their opinions in a social network is called opinion dynamics. This dissertation focuses on the negative consequences that arise from opinion dynamics, namely unfairness, polarization, and radicalization. We leverage techniques from social network modeling, graph theory, and supervised machine learning to formalize the notions of fairness in opinion dynamics over social networks, diagnose which and when algorithms exacerbate unfairness in networks, and design mitigation algorithms to counter radicalization. In the first project, we formalize two aspects of fairness in opinion dynamics, namely procedural fairness and distributive fairness. Through theoretical analysis and simulations on real-world social networks, we show how the combined effect of homophilous and reinforcing dynamics plays a special role in both types of fairness. In the second project, we study radicalization pathways that lead users from moderate to more extreme content and propose algorithms to mitigate radicalization. In particular, we study and propose the concept of gateway entities, i.e., non-problematic entities that are nevertheless associated with a higher likelihood of future engagement with radicalized content. We show, via a real-world application on Facebook groups, that a simple definition of gateway entities can be leveraged to reduce exposure to radicalized content without adversely impacting user engagement metrics. Through offline experiments, we show that survival analysis-based methods are effective at identifying individuals at risk. In the third project, we study the interplay between algorithms over social networks and fairness in opinion dynamics. We propose a framework that allows us to study the joint effects of algorithms over social networks and the opinion dynamic process. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that people-recommender algorithms do not exacerbate procedure unfairness but have a significant impact on distributive fairness, and polarization reduction algorithms have no significant impact on fairness. We close by discussing the limitations of our work and directions for future research.

A Research project submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MA by course work and Research Report in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies, Faculty of Humanities University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg March 2016 / The Nkandlagate scandal, in which the South African President, Jacob Zuma allegedly spent an estimated R246 million of taxpayers’ money on the renovation of his Nkandla residence, created huge public outcry. This reached yet another height in 2015 when Zuma’s administration declared that the President was not going to pay back the money as demanded by the South African publics. The publics of South Africa used social media platforms to express themselves over the decision. Studies have shown that social media platforms provide an opportunity for political mobilisation of publics and their participation in democracy. Using critical discourse analysis, this study seeks to investigate how South African publics engaged in the social media platform, particularly Facebook, over Nkandlagate. The research focuses on the discussions by two political parties’ Facebook pages: an opposition party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), and the ruling African National Congress (ANC). The analysis involves posts and comments made by South African publics on each of the Facebook pages to establish how South Africans made use of Facebook to express themselves over Nkandlagate, how the two parties covered Nkandlagate and what kind of discourse emerged from the parties’ posts. The concepts used in this research include the networked public sphere, democracy, watchdog and collective will/opinion. Three dimensions of critical discourse analysis were used for data analysis in this study: description (text genres), interpretation (discursive type) and explanation (social practice.) The insights of South African publics social practices were recognised. This research argues that to a large extent, social media has provided South African publics with access to Facebook a public sphere through which democracy – particularly in terms of freedom of speech – is exercised. However, there is a lack of democratic interaction in that although there was interactive engagement amongst publics, there was a lack of interactive engagement between politicians and publics. / MT2017

In this dissertation, I explore and continue to ponder the work of intercultural teacher education in Chile in a context of ongoing and varied violence over territory. I analyzed how teacher educators talk about their work and looked at how the programs address or not, the context of violence and Mapuche resistance. In addition, how the programs present themselves in different documents to see what questions arise from this exploration of teacher education discourse.I asked: 1. In what ways do teacher educators talk about intercultural education? 2. In what ways do program documents, in two teacher education programs discuss intercultural education? I am not trying to provide answers on how to improve teacher education, rather to provoke, inform, generate, and open questions about teacher education in settler contexts. In Chile, the struggles over land for the Mapuche are ongoing and a constant focus of governments and industry that continually label and persecute this struggle as acts of terrorism. This conflict is part of the everyday lives of students and teachers across the area where the Mapuche claim ancestral land. In teacher education there is an increasing amount of scholarship around land education (Calderon, 2014), and place-based education that focuses on bringing, alternately, place, land and water, and territory into the conversations of teacher education. In the various articles and debates about this focus, there are critiques of the ways in which earlier scholarship engaged with place without considering how it came to be occupied through settler violence, as well as with the lack of reflection of indigenous communities in that same land. In my research, I build on this work to examine the work of intercultural teacher education through two theoretical frameworks, settler colonialism, and Foucauldian theory of power/knowledge and discourse to think through this context. I used a case study methodology and interviewed nine teacher educators from two different programs in intercultural teacher education. One program is one of two fully intercultural programs and the other a branch from one of the two most prestigious universities in Chile. I also collected documents and kept a multimodal researcher journal with photos, descriptions, feelings, memos, and other items like news, op-eds, Facebook posts from Mapuche communities. I analyzed my data through three conceptual frames, place, education sovereignty, and personhood. In my analysis of place, I considered the context of intercultural education and examined how public and government-sponsored areas communicate an ideal of peaceful coexistence between two cultures, and how, while I was there, and before, and since, this discourse is interrupted and resisted by Mapuche communities. I also analyze the architecture of the programs and the ways on which teacher educators talk about place in their work to look at the ways in land, territory, and place are in tension in the work of intercultural teacher education in this specific context. On education sovereignty, I examined my interviews and documents from the lens of indigenous education sovereignty and from the concept of sovereignty as necropolitics. In the ways in which teacher educators talk about their work there are differences regarding the ways in which they frame why they teach their students what they teach them and for what purpose. The Mapuche teacher educators, across programs, express ideas of understanding their context and history of dispossession and the work of intercultural education as survivance, through reculturation, language, and self-determination. In my analysis of personhood and the ways teacher educators talk about teaching their students, I looked at how the focus on identity relates to ideas of diversity and inclusion that are related to the concerns some Non-Mapuche professors have about indigenous radicalism or supremacy. I traced these ways of talking about their work to the notion of culture as a way of classifying otherness to their pedagogical approaches to teaching diversity by looking at the Mapuche communities as those who are the most different. I explored their ways of talking about their work through the lens of productive inclusion, and how their concern over the inclusion of newly-arrived, migrant families can be deployed to erase the reculturation, self-determination of indigenous intercultural education. This research will contribute to the literature in Chile regarding intercultural teacher education as well to broader conversations about including settler colonial perspectives in teacher education in general. I hope that it will also help teacher educators and new teachers have an increased sense of the assumptions of intercultural education discourse in their processes of education as well as inform discussions regarding what these discourses do in initial teacher education.

Social networking sites and virtual spaces have flourished in the past few years. The author explores the impact of such social networking services on the local community at a small liberal arts college. The author investigates modern trends in community theory. Defining community has become more difficult in modern society, where community is no longer easily distinguished by geographical boundaries. From the background of modern community theory the author explores the designation of virtual spaces as “virtual communities.” Literature and research about virtual spaces indicates that they can provide many of the values thought be to inherent to community membership. The strong localized community on campus makes students hesitant in calling Facebook a “virtual community,” despite its strong integration with the face-to-face community itself. Facebook is seen as simply a tool. This thesis incorporates research on one specific case study: through mathematical and ethnographic research of Facebook.com, the author evaluates the opinions of students in considering virtual spaces as communities.

Social networking sites and virtual spaces have flourished in the past few years. The author explores the impact of such social networking services on the local community at a small liberal arts college. The author investigates modern trends in community theory. Defining community has become more difficult in modern society, where community is no longer easily distinguished by geographical boundaries. From the background of modern community theory the author explores the designation of virtual spaces as “virtual communities.” Literature and research about virtual spaces indicates that they can provide many of the values thought be to inherent to community membership. The strong localized community on campus makes students hesitant in calling Facebook a “virtual community,” despite its strong integration with the face-to-face community itself. Facebook is seen as simply a tool. This thesis incorporates research on one specific case study: through mathematical and ethnographic research of Facebook.com, the author evaluates the opinions of students in considering virtual spaces as communities.

This dissertation examines the forms of media that are most productive for the formation of social and political movements at their earliest stages. The problem it confronts is a contemporary one: the dominant forms of social media on the internet do not allow for the slow and focused deliberation this is demanded for radical ideas that are attempting to undermine a status quo to begin to take root. Movements rise and fall very quickly, following the metabolism of sites like Facebook and Twitter, without having the long-term impact they seek. By first looking historically at a series of pre-digital case studies – starting with letters before the scientific revolution and moving through petitions, small newspapers, samizdat and all the way to zines in the 1990s – aspects of more effective incubatory media will present themselves. Each chapter in this first half of the book zeroes in on the affordances of these particular forms of communication that made them so useful. After having looked at pre-digital communication, the dissertation will then turn to contemporary case studies and the challenges posed by social media for activists of all stripes looking to incubate their ideas on these platforms. Starting with the Arab Spring in Egypt, which offers a cautionary tale of a movement overtaken by the social media metabolism and moving through the 2010s toward Black Lives Matter, there is a progression of awareness about what tools the internet can provide for communication and which prove most productive for offering sustainability to a movement. The conclusion is one gained from the juxtaposition of the historical and the contemporary, which builds to an awareness of what affordances are required for a radical idea to avoid burning out.

It is not uncommon for graphic scenes of violence and death to infiltrate our timelinesfrom retweets, reposts, and shares. I often question how much control do we really have over the images that enter our feed? In what ways are we affected and influenced by these images? How do we relate to these images and video clips that are played and replayed before us? In what ways are these images evoking or are related to past scenes of racist violence? In what ways are these racially violent moments captured in photos and videos and shared online speaking to a Black consciousness? This project comparatively researches and examines the relationship between past modes and methods of Black trauma curation in the past, to contemporary modes of dissemination on social media in order to argue that contemporary uses of spaces such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter serve as an extension of previous scrapbooking methods. By comparing The Emmet Till Generation and their curation of trauma via scrapbooks which were used to galvanize social movements, and impact organizing efforts of the youth, The Trayvon Generation today uses social media in a similar fashion; to bear witness, to organize, and to curate digital memorials for the dead. Witnessing is further extended and complicated on digital platforms, providing an abundance of visual evidence that has proven to be vital in leading tp prosecutions and arrests of violent state officials, and perpetrators of extrajudicial violence. These live or recorded moments of witnessing are used not only as evidence, but to inform the public. However, we have always known that it’s always happening somewhere, even if we aren’t around to witness it. With that said, what are the effects of having the duty, and the responsibility to bear witness? Paying particular attention to Black youth, this project examines their presence and usage of social media spaces. By analyzing young Black people’s use of social media platforms in relation to Darnella Frazier’s strategic use Facebook, this project examines how Black youth and witnessing is currently driving a cultural shift in entertainment media that highlights witnessing death as a significant milestone for Black youth that marks the transition between childhood and adulthood. It is also impacting entertainment media that is not marketed towards Black people, further highlighting Black witnessing of racialized violence at the intersection of technology as both a contemporary and future issue through its inclusion in contemporary media.Witnessing for Black people is framed as being both necessary and traumatic. This project concludes with an in depth examination of speculative media to reveal the implications of both the present and the future intersections of race relations, state violence and technology. Through analyses of interviews, image circulation and dissemination, magazine articles, social media platforms, visual and speculative media, this dissertation works to address and attempts to answer the aforementioned questions.

The primary objective of this analysis is to uncover the tools of Facebook identity construction. Because Facebook users have the ability to control the images and information associated with their profiles, reactionary scholars typically classify Facebook identity as a symptom of cultural narcissism. However, I seek to displace the fixation on the newness of the medium in order to interrogate the possibility of a society that has internalized surveillance. Using Michel Foucault’s theories on panopticism and heterotopia, I examine the role photographs play in the construction of an individual on Facebook, and the ways in which user photographs are positioned into social memory construction.