This dissertation examines the identity threats perceived by individuals and organizations in Online Social Networks (OSNs). The research constitutes two major studies. Using the concepts of Value Focused Thinking and the related methodology of Multiple Objectives Decision Analysis, the first research study develops the qualitative and quantitative value models to explain the social identity threats perceived by individuals in Online Social Networks. The qualitative value model defines value hierarchy i.e. the fundamental objectives to prevent social identity threats and taxonomy of user responses, referred to as Social Identity Protection Responses (SIPR), to avert the social identity threats. The quantitative value model describes the utility of the current social networking sites and SIPR to achieve the fundamental objectives for averting social identity threats in OSNs. The second research study examines the threats to the external identity of organizations i.e. Information Security Reputation (ISR) in the aftermath of a data breach. The threat analysis is undertaken by examining the discourses related to the data breach at Home Depot and JPMorgan Chase in the popular microblogging website, Twitter, to identify: 1) the dimensions of information security discussed in the Twitter postings; 2) the attribution of data breach responsibility and the related sentiments expressed in the Twitter postings; and 3) the subsequent diffusion of the tweets that threaten organizational reputation.

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

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, University of the Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Management in Entrepreneurship and New Venture Creation, 2016 / This study was to identify the extent of Generation Y entrepreneurs’ social media usage in terms of weak-tie alliance maintenance and creation and also alliance creation. A sample group of entrepreneurs in the Johannesburg were chosen by using social media as a channel. By using the researcher’s social capital and also the different characteristics that are unique to these SNSs (social network sites), such as Twitter advertising, a sample group was created. A digital survey was distributed to the selected entrepreneurs by using an online platform. By using hypothesis testing and a multiple regression model, it was identified that entrepreneurs tend to favour maintaining weak-ties over creating weak-ties using SNSs, and alliance creation on SNSs does not seem too common, but it was highlighted that when entrepreneurs do create alliances, they tend to favour weakties that they have created on SNSs. The overall picture is that entrepreneurs have an inclination not to use SNSs to create weak-ties and alliances, this could come down to a number of factors such as trust and education, and there could also perhaps be no SNS that supports alliance creation to the extent that entrepreneurs need. / XL2018

A research report submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the field of Digital Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2016 / Facebook has become a part of over a billion people’s daily lives, but the mechanisms used by Facebook to keep people using its service may be playing off negative personality traits, one such being narcissism. Studies up to now have not looked at the design of the interface in relation to narcissism and whether or not Facebook is actively exploiting narcissism for its own ends. This study will analyse whether Facebook is deliberately designing an interface that exploits people’s narcissism by reviewing the current research on Facebook and narcissism and then doing a case study that will compare the 2008 interface with the 2015 interface. It will analyse how narcissism is involved in the persuasion strategies employed in each interface by using these four persuasion goals: 1. Create personal profile page 2. Invite friends 3. Respond to other’s contributions 4. Return to the site often The study will compare the features that use design for behavioural change and show whether or not Facebook is continuously designing features that exploit people’s narcissism. / GR2017

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, University of Witwatersrand in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Management in Strategic Marketing, Wits Business School, Johannesburg 2016 / The proliferation of social platforms in the digital and online space has given voice to millions of social media users and carved careers otherwise unheard of a few years ago, in the form of expert technology reviewers who enjoy mass online following and sponsorship from brands seeking to leverage millions of followers who log in daily. Social media has enabled access to information otherwise previously restricted to user guides and product manuals. Using the theory of planned behaviour, the study examines the effect that online consumer reviews have on product knowledge, social influence, trust, source credibility, brand image and purchase intent among urban South Africans falling in the Generation Y cohort. The methodology involved a self-administered online questionnaire adapted from past studies. A total of 255 questionnaires were collected from the identified sample. The study tested ten hypotheses using Structural Equation Modelling along with SPSS 22 software used for descriptive statistics and IBM Amos 22. Results indicate that all ten hypotheses have significant influence on purchase intent. All hypotheses displayed equally significant relationships per testing as findings revealed that online consumer reviews have a positive effect on product knowledge, trust, social influence, source credibility and brand image. Findings also revealed a significant relationship between product knowledge, trust, social influence, source credibility, brand image, and purchase intent. The study contributes to the literature and theoretical knowledge on online consumer reviews in the local South African context, and can be applied to similar developing markets. The theoretical implications in the study contributes to both limited, and existing research, literature, and knowledge on the effects that online consumer reviews have on the purchase intent of South African consumers. The study broadens knowledge in the ever growing influence of online consumer reviews and the significant theoretical contributions of the study will benefit academia and scholars. Managerial implications highlight that managers cannot afford to ignore the influence of online consumer reviews on intent to purchase, and that even though these reviews are not under the direct influence of organisations, marketers can indirectly influence these by ensuring quality products that meet both the brand and product promises. Recommendations, iii limitations of the study, and future research on the subject of online consumer reviews are also discussed. Keywords: Online consumer reviews, social influence, brand image, product knowledge, purchase intent, source credibility / GR2018

A dissertation in fulfilment for Master of Arts in Media Studies Faculty of Humanities School of Language, Literature and Media Studies (SLLM) University of the Witwatersrand 2016 / This research study essentially sets out to explore the practices of young, ordinary, South African women who take and post selfies on social media platforms, like Instagram. The general commentary surrounding selfies is typically negative, and tends to frame the selfietaker as a narcissistic, self-absorbed individual. Therefore, this study is interested in understanding what this very particular smartphone-enabled photographic technique means to this group of women, and in doing so, aims to determine whether or not there are underlying significances to such practices. This research study adopts a vast framework of literature in order to conceptualize and contextualize selfies in contemporary culture, by drawing on the rich history of self-portraiture and snapshots as well as concepts of mediation and the representation of the self online; in addition to describing the role that mobile technologies and social media platforms have played in contributing to cementing selfies as a cultural hallmark in today’s society. This study is additionally grounded upon three dominant theoretical themes, namely: narcissism, self-exploration, and self-regulation; and Christopher Lasch, Michel Foucault, Angela McRobbie and Rosalind Gill’s theoretical contributions are predominantly referred to in an attempt to explain such principles adequately. Through the responses that were yielded by interviewing 14 young, ordinary, South African women, this research study essentially established that the practices of selfie-taking do in fact play a significant role in the lives of these young women, from empowering them and teaching them to learn to love and accept themselves again, to inspiring personal growth, capturing special moments and memories, and allowing them to feel accepted and as though they belong and have a fixed placed in society. Therefore, this study argues that selfies are not necessarily only about narcissism and self-obsession, but rather more about the notion of self-love and acceptance (for this group of participants at least). / MT2017

Com a popularidade e o crescimento das Redes Sociais Online, o interesse pelo entendimento de como seus usuários interagem entre si também tem crescido, configurando assim um cenário rico no qual são criadas oportunidades para melhorar o design de interfaces, compreender a organização de movimentos sociais, o marketing viral e a distribuição de conteúdos multimídia, dentre outros. Na investigação dessas oportunidades de pesquisa, um modelo de representação da atividade dos usuários amplamente empregado é baseado na construção de um grafo. Embora as atividades dos usuários em uma Rede Social Online sejam variadas, assim como as possibilidades de interação entre usuários, a construção de um grafo normalmente considera uma interação específica, que é então analisada a partir da interpretação de medidas baseadas em grafos ou de medidas estatísticas. Técnicas de mineração de dados podem ser empregadas de forma alternativa e complementar ao modelo baseado em grafos, possibilitando a extração e a avaliação de padrões das atividades de usuários. Entretanto, tanto na análise baseada em grafos quanto na utilização de técnicas de mineração de dados, a literatura reporta trabalhos em que são implicitamente representados elementos associados com a atividade dos usuários como ações executadas, mídias compartilhadas, aplicações e tipos de dispositivos utilizados. Nesse cenário, existe uma demanda por um modelo descritivo que permita a representação explícita dos elementos associados com as atividades dos usuários representação essa que possa ser utilizada na extração e na avaliação das interações entre usuários. Para atender essa demanda, nesta tese é apresentada uma técnica e um método para representar, extrair e avaliar interações entre usuários de Redes Sociais Online. São também reportados resultados de experimentos da aplicação da técnica e do método a partir de dados obtidos de uma Rede Social Online / The interest in understanding user interactions is increasing with the popularity of Online Social Networks. This scenario leads to rich opportunities to improve the design of interfaces, to understand the organization of social movements, to model the dynamics of viral marketing and to characterize the distribution of multimedia content, among others. In the investigation of these research opportunities, a widely used representation of users activities is based on graphs as underlying data models. Graph data models usually consider a specific interaction, which is analyzed based on the interpretation of statistical measures and graph-based measures. On the other hand, user activities and possibilities of interaction in social networks are multifaceted, so that singleinteraction graph-based approaches might prove to be unfeasible to properly model the problem. In order to deal with these limitations, data mining techniques may be employed as an alternative to graph-based modeling approaches, by enabling extraction and evaluation of users activities as patterns. However, both in the use of the model graph-based as in the use of data mining techniques, the literature reports an implicit representation of elements associated with the users activities such as executed actions, shared media, used applications and devices. In this scenario, there is a demand for a descriptive model which allows explicit representation of the elements associated with users activities - this representation can be used in the extraction and evaluation of interactions among users. To meet this demand, this thesis presents a technique and a method to represent, to extract and to evaluate interactions among users of Online Social Networks. Results of experimentation of applying the technique and method based on data obtained from an Online Social Network are also reported

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Submitted by William Justo Figueiro (williamjf) on 2015-07-09T22:04:06Z No. of bitstreams: 1 23b.pdf: 3564220 bytes, checksum: bf2f71ac58d7eb1680030290c8e41eab (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-07-09T22:04:06Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 23b.pdf: 3564220 bytes, checksum: bf2f71ac58d7eb1680030290c8e41eab (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-04-14 / Nenhuma / A presente dissertação trabalha a midiatização do espaço de liderança. Construindo o imaginário e desenhando a ambiência deste processo, conceitua o indivíduo midiatizado e sua conquista de fala. A construção da imagem do líder empresarial com as melhores práticas e as competências emocionais apontadas pelos autores dessa área auxilia na reflexão do exercício de detectar os aspectos comunicacionais da liderança empresarial e de sua interação nas redes sociais online. Iniciando por exercícios preliminares para o amadurecimento do objeto, a ida a campo é uma constante do processo de pesquisa. Por meio de uma contextualização, a dissertação faz um estudo de caso com um líder empresarial, a Dra. Débora Frizzo, diretora operacional do Gupo Ftec Faculdades nas unidades de Caxias do Sul e Bento Gonçalves. Através de entrevistas e observações da rotina e das postagens realizadas na rede social online Facebook, feitas com a líder Débora Frizzo e com oito colaboradores da mesma empresa sob sua liderança, os dados são colhidos para análise. Como resultado da observação e do tensionamento à luz das teorias resgatadas e construídas, nota-se uma transposição das relações afetivas entre líderes e liderados para o espaço digital, bem como uma performatização do papel de liderança. As técnicas empregadas na interação entre os pares e as distâncias no processo de apropriação e rituais de socialidade fazem parte, também, da conclusão desta pesquisa. / The present dissertation works with leadership space and its mediatization. In this process, we have designed the ambience and conceptualized the mediatized person. The authors in this area help us to identify the image of business leader with best practices and emotional competencies, and it helps to understand the exercise of detecting the communication aspects in business leadership and their interaction in online social networks. Starting with preliminary exercises for the maturation of the object, we come to inside the reality constantly steps in the research process. In this way, we elaborate a case study with a business leader, Dr. Deborah Frizzo, operational director of FTEC Colleges, units of Caxias do Sul and Bento Gonçalves. Our data have been collected in interviews and observations of routine and the posts made on social networking site Facebook, and with interview and observation of the other eight employees in the same company under her leadership. As result of the observation and the reflective thoughts through light of the rescued and constructed theories, we noticed a transposition of affective relationships between leaders and led to the digital space as well as a performatic paper. The techniques employed in the interaction between the pairs and the distances in the appropriation process and rituals of socializing are part, too, of this research.

Social phenomena have been studied extensively in small scales by social scientists. With the increasing popularity of Web 2.0 and online social networks/media, a large amount of data on social phenomena have become available. In this dissertation we study online social phenomena such as social influence in social networks in various contexts. This dissertation has two major components: 1. Identifying and characterizing online social phenomena 2. Leveraging online social phenomena for economic and commercial purposes. We begin the dissertation by developing multi-level revenue sharing schemes for viral marketing on social networks. Viral marketing leverages social influence among users of the social network. For our proposed models, we develop results on the computational complexity, individual rationality, and potential reach of employing the Shapley value as a revenue sharing scheme. Our results indicate that under the multi-level tree-based propagation model, the Shapley value is a promising scheme for revenue sharing, whereas under other models there are computational or incentive compatibility issues that remain open. We continue with another application of social influence: social advertising. Social advertising is a new paradigm that is utilized by online social networks. Social advertising is based in the premise that social influence can be leveraged to place ads more efficiently. The goal of our work is to understand how social ads can affect click-through rates in social networks. We propose a formal model for social ads in the context of display advertising. In our model, ads are shown to users one after the other. The probability of a user clicking an ad depends on the users who have clicked this ad so far. This information is presented to users as a social cue, thus the click probability is a function of this cue. We introduce the social display optimization problem: suppose an advertiser has a contract with a publisher for showing some number (say B) impressions of an ad. What strategy should the publisher use to show these ads so as to maximize the expected number of clicks? We show hardness results for this problem and in light of the general hardness results, we develop heuristic algorithms and compare them to natural baseline ones. We then study distributed content curation on the Web. In recent years readers have turned to the social web to consume content. In other words, they rely on their social network to curate content for them as opposed to the more traditional way of relying on news editors for this purpose -- this is an implicit consequence of social influence as well. We study how efficient this is for users with limited budgets of attention. We model distributed content curation as a reader-publisher game and show various results. Our results imply that in the complete information setting, when publishers maximize their utility selfishly, distributed content curation reaches an equilibrium which is efficient, that is, the social welfare is a constant factor of that under an optimal centralized curation. Next, we initiate the study of an exchange market problem without money that is a natural generalization of the well-studied kidney exchange problem. From the practical point of view, the problem is motivated by barter websites on the Internet, e.g., swap.com, and u-exchange.com. In this problem, the users of the social network wish to exchange items with each other. A mechanism specifies for each user a set of items that she gives away, and a set of items that she receives. Consider a set of agents where each agent has some items to offer, and wishes to receive some items from other agents. Each agent would like to receive as many items as possible from the items that she wishes, that is, her utility is equal to the number of items that she receives and wishes. However, she will have a large dis-utility if she gives away more items than what she receives, because she considers such a trade to be unfair. To ensure voluntary participation (also known as individual rationality), we require the mechanism to avoid this. We consider different variants of this problem: with and without a constraint on the length of the exchange cycles and show different results including their truthfulness and individual rationality. In the other main component of this thesis, we study and characterize two other social phenomena: 1. friends vs. the crowd and 2. altruism vs. reciprocity in social networks. More specifically, we study how a social network user's actions are influenced by her friends vs. the crowd's opinion. For example, in social rating websites where both ratings from friends and average ratings from everyone is available, we study how similar one's ratings are to each other. In the next part, we aim to analyze the motivations behind users' actions on online social media over an extended period of time. We look specifically at users' likes, comments and favorite markings on their friends' posts and photos. Most theories of why people exhibit prosocial behavior isolate two distinct motivations: Altruism and reciprocity. In our work, we focus on identifying the underlying motivations behind users' prosocial giving on social media. In particular, our goal is to identify if the motivation is altruism or reciprocity. For that purpose, we study two datasets of sequence of users' actions on social media: a dataset of wall posts by users of Facebook.com, and another dataset of favorite markings by users of Flickr.com. We study the sequence of users' actions in these datasets and provide several observations on patterns related to their prosocial giving behavior.