My dissertation explores how authenticity is a site of negotiation for lifestyle bloggers, their anti-fans, and their corporate sponsors. Lifestyle blogs, blogs written by women about their everyday lives, have garnered a fandom by utilizing social media, establishing (or what seems to be) intimate relationships with readers and other bloggers, and creating an authentic online persona. Falling under the category of micro-celebrity, these bloggers must maintain a balance between aspirational and authentic narratives of their lives so to maintain sponsorships and readers. I study the forums of an anti-fan site, Get Off My Internets, dedicated to critiquing a popular healthy living blogger from April 2016 – October 2018. Such research provides insights into how online readers define authenticity and how discourse communities implement snark and internet research into creating a fuller narrative of the blogger’s life. I argue studying sites of anti-fandom can address pedagogical goals to create users that are rhetorically savvy (in terms of mitigating risk) and empathetic to others.

As nuclear power remains an ongoing controversy in contemporary society, it is crucial to understand how laypeople make sense of nuclear power by considering influences at both the cognitive and the social level. Using the lens of social representation theory, this thesis employed automatic content analysis and core-periphery analysis to reveal the content, structure, formation, and dynamic shifts of laypeople's social representations concerning nuclear power as they were expressed in tweets and comments posted on Chinese social media platform Weibo from 2011 to 2018. This thesis found that laypeople in China regarded nuclear power predominantly as an energy source, and they focused on general knowledge regarding national development of nuclear power and related energy policies, which remained unchanged over the eight years. Additionally, they perceived risks of nuclear power to occur at an individual level while benefits occurring at a social level, and they showed a reluctant acceptance of nuclear power. Alternatively, laypeople also made sense of nuclear power by addressing its controversial nature, such as plant siting and nuclear accident causation, but these ideas varied according to the specific social contexts. To form these representations, laypeople anchored nuclear power within social/historical events, a preexisting knowledge system, and personal experience, objectifying nuclear power through familiar objects and verbal metaphors. Moreover, they created and shared these representations by transforming abstract scientific knowledge about nuclear power into common-sense information and by adopting consensual discourse like heterogeneous arguments, affective expression, and stories about nuclear power. These findings provide implications for understanding laypeople's everyday knowledge of nuclear power and for designing effective communication strategies in line with laypeople's actual understanding for popularizing science and communicating risk in terms of nuclear power.

L’ambush marketing se produit dans les évènements sportifs majeurs comme la Coupe du Monde FIFA et les Jeux Olympiques. Le Guide au public 2019 de la FIFA vise à minimiser la prévalence de l’ambush marketing lors de cet évènement, en indiquant le contenu que les athlètes et les non-sponsors peuvent publier sur leurs comptes Instagram en lien avec la Coupe du Monde FIFA 2019. Le but de cette étude consistait à examiner les tentatives et les tactiques de l’ambush marketing utilisées par les athlètes et les non-sponsors via les médias sociaux, spécifiquement Instagram pendant la Coupe du Monde féminine de football 2019 en France. Méthodes de recherche En utilisant l'analyse de contenu, cette étude a examiné 424 captures d’écran captées sur Instagram des athlètes et des non-sponsors pendant une période de 9 semaines qui couvrait une période de 2 semaines avant, 5 semaines pendant et 2 semaines après la Coupe du Monde féminine de la FIFA 2019. Nous avons utilisé le logiciel (ReCal inter-coder), pour vérifier la fiabilité et la concordance des résultats. La fiabilité inter-codeur a d'abord été calculée en utilisant un pourcentage de concordance de 80,12%. Ensuite, pour tester la coïncidence, les nombres kappa et la variable de score la plus basse était de 70%, ce qui correspondait au seuil fixé pour continuer l’analyse du contenu. Résultats et constatations Malgré le faible pourcentage d’incidence, les athlètes et les non-sponsors ont été engagés dans les activités d’ambush marketing. Au total, 29 cas d’ambush marketing ont été identifiés, 8 par les athlètes et 21 par des non-sponsors. De ces 29 cas, 17 ont été réalisés par photos et 12 par vidéos. Implications - Les athlètes ont joué un rôle dans l’ambush marketing (intentionnellement ou non); - Les règlements du Guide au public 2019 de la FIFA n’ont pas été respectés par certaines athlètes et non-sponsors. - Instagram en tant que plateforme de médias sociaux est utilisée pour les activités d’ambush marketing par des athlètes et des non-sponsors. - La directive publique de la FIFA doit être adaptée et mise à jour sur l'utilisation des hashtags et d'émojis sur Instagram. - La FIFA doit éduquer les athlètes et les fédérations si elle prévoit continuer à établir les règlements détaillés dans ce guide au public pour les athlètes et les non-sponsors.

Workplace unfairness has been known as one of the influential elements towards workplace behavior. In the last decade, the rise and popularity of social media may have change people's perception of unfairness as well as their affect which may have an effect on their behavioral outcomes. Although research of unfairness on workplace behavior has been examined, little attention has been paid to the effect of social media exposure. Drawing on construal level theory, this research examined the effects of interactional unfairness on employees' behavioral outcomes through negative affect, as well as moderating effect of social media exposure on interactional unfairness and negative affect. Two studies were conducted in China and the United States respectively to enhance the generalization. In Study 1, a two-wave survey of employees and one-wave survey of supervisors were conducted in China and Hong Kong. Hypotheses were tested in hierarchical linear modelling with 147 matched dyad relationships in the sample. In Study 2, a two-wave survey was conducted in the United States. 262 full time employees from a variety of occupations completed an online questionnaire. The results showed negative correlation on social media exposure and construal level. In addition, age was positively significant to construal level and organizational citizenship behavior, and negatively significant to turnover intention on both studies, and negatively significant to negative affect on Study 2. Additional implications for research and practice will be discussed

Magister Theologiae - MTh / South Africa has one of the highest rape statistics in the world, and there are increasing reports of women who have been violated and abused in religious institutions, specifically by clergy. Research on clergy sexual abuse has been limited to research methods that rely on court transcripts or interviews and focus group discussions. Studies that seek to understand social and religious attitudes about sexual abuse often rely on surveys and other conventional forms of research. Drawing on the court testimony of Cheryl Zondi, who was sexually abused by her pastor, Timothy Omotoso, this study aimed to explore how social media provides a site for exploring the ways in which patriarchal religious understandings of gender and power are supported or challenged through a narrative of sexual abuse.

No description available.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Health advocacy is a social phenomenon in which individuals and collectives attempt to raise awareness and change opinions and policies about health-related causes. Mental health advocacy is health advocacy to advance treatment, rights, and recognition of people living with a mental health condition. The Internet is reshaping how mental health advocacy is performed on a global scale, by facilitating and broadening the reach of advocacy activities, but also giving more room for opposing mental health advocacy. Another factor contributing to mental health advocacy lies in the cultural underpinnings of mental health in different societies; East Asian countries like South Korea have higher stigma attached to mental health compared to Western countries like the US. This study examines interactions about schizophrenia, a specific mental health diagnosis, on public social media (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) in two different languages, English and Korean, to determine how mental health advocacy and its opposition are expressed on social media. After delineation of a set of keywords for retrieval of content about schizophrenia, three months’ worth of social media posts were collected; a subset of these posts was then analyzed qualitatively using constant comparing with a proposed model describing online mental heath advocacy based on existing literature. Various expressions of light mental health advocacy, such as sharing facts about schizophrenia, and strong advocacy, showcasing offline engagement, were found in English posts; many of these expressions were however absent from the analyzed Korean posts that heavily featured jokes, insults, and criticisms. These findings were used to train machine learning classifiers to detect advocacy and counter-advocacy. The classifiers confirmed the predominance of counter-advocacy in Korean posts compared to important advocacy prevalence in English posts. These findings informed culturally sensitive recommendations for social media uses by mental health advocates and implications for international social media studies in human-computer interaction.

Ever-developing media and innovative propaganda strategies continually change the ways that political authorities exercise their manipulation of the public, which always causes great concern among scholars in the field of political communication. To respond to the lively debate on the roles new modes of communication can play in the processes of politics in modern society based on the experience of China and also to help scholars adapt to the changing context of China today, we chose one representative trend in the latest political propaganda of the Communist Party of China (CPC) on social media--"cuteness-coated propaganda"--of which we study the impacts on political support among Chinese youth and the mechanisms involved. After conceptualizing and theorizing the cuteness-coated propaganda of the CPC, we design and conduct two studies. In Study One, we firstly recruit 199 participants offline for a pair of between-subjects 2 (selling cuteness or not) × 2 (soft content or hard content) factorial design experiments. In Experiment 1, the cuteness is presented in the form of video, and in Experiment 2, it is presented in the form of pictures. In Study Two, we recruit 386 participants online to join in the online survey-embedded experiments, in which the cuteness is presented in the form of text in Experiment 3 and the form of pictures in Experiment 4. We find that in our research context when the CPC propagandizes with soft-oriented content using the selling-cuteness strategy in video form on Weibo, it improves the specific political support of Chinese youth by increasing their positive emotions or closing the psychological distance between themselves and the propagandist. This finding suggests that the "Double-Soft Model" of political propaganda (utilizing a soft propaganda strategy to publicize soft content) proposed in our thesis can be a very persuasive way of influencing young people's specific political support. However, when the selling-cuteness with soft content is presented in picture form or textual form, it is unable to influence the specific support because it cannot evoke significantly increased positive emotions or psychological closeness. Meanwhile, neither general political support nor national pride is influenced by the selling-cuteness strategy no matter in which form it is presented, which is consistent with the findings of previous scholars. Our research represents a pioneering study of cuteness-coated political propaganda on social media, both theoretically and empirically.

En fonction des connexions entre utilisateurs de ces réseaux, certains contenus peuvent bénéficier d’une large audience et tout d’un coup se transformer en tendance. Comprendre comment du contenu peut se transformer en tendance est donc crucial pour pouvoir expliquer la propagation des opinions ainsi que pour établir des stratégies de marketing sociale. Les précédentes études se sont concentrées sur les caractéristiques du contenu pouvant se transformer en tendance et sur la structure du réseau d’individus dans les médias sociaux. Ce travail complète ces études en explorant les facteurs humains derrières la génération du contenu tendance. Nous nous appuyons sur cette analyse pour définir de nouveaux outils de personnalisation permettant aux individus de repérer le contenu qui les intéresse dans les médias sociaux. Les contributions de ce travail sont les suivantes:une analyse approfondie des individus créant du contenu tendance dans les médias sociaux ce qui permet de découvrir leurs caractéristiques distinctives; un nouveau moyen d’identifier le contenu tendance en s’appuyant sur la capacité des individus spéciaux qui le créent; un mécanisme d’élaboration de système de recommandation afin de personnaliser le contenu tendance.; et des techniques d’amélioration de la qualité des recommandations allant au-delà de la seule évaluation de la précision. Nos études montrent le rôle vital de certains utilisateurs spéciaux dans la création de contenu tendance dans les médias sociaux. Ces utilisateurs avec leur sagesse permettent aux autres individus de découvrir du contenu tendance à leur goût. / Fluctuating along user connections, some content succeeds at capturing the attention of a large amount of users and suddenly becomes trending. Understanding trending content and its dynamics is crucial to the explanation of opinion spreading, and to the design of social marketing strategies. While previous research has mostly focused on trending content and on the network structure of individuals in social media, this work complements these studies by exploring in depth the human factors behind the generation of this content. We build upon this analysis to investigate new personalization tools helping individuals to discover interesting social media content. This work contributes to the literature on the following aspects: an in depth analysis on individuals who create trending content in social media that uncovers their distinguishing characteristics; a novel means to identify trending content by relying on the ability of special individuals who create them; a mechanism to build a recommender system to personalize trending content; and techniques to improve the quality of recommendations beyond the core theme of accuracy. Our studies underline the vital role of special users in the creation of trending content in social media. Thanks to such special users and their ``wisdom'', individuals may discover the trending content distilled to their tastes. Our work brings insights in two main research directions - trending content in social media and recommender systems.

This dissertation consists of three studies that examine online communications during crisis events. The first study identified and examined the information sources that provided official information online during the 2014 Carlton Complex Wildfire. Specifically, after the wildfire, a set of webpages and social media accounts were discovered that were named after the wildfire—called Crisis Named Resources (or CNRs). CNRs shared the highest percentage of wildfire-relevant information. Because CNRs are named after a crisis event, they are easier to find and appear to be dedicated and/or official sources around an event. They can, however, be created and deleted in a short time, and the creators of CNRs are often unknown, which raises questions of trust and credibility regarding the information CNRs provide. To better understand the role of CNRs in crisis response, the second study examined CNRs that were named after the 2016 Fort McMurray Wildfire. Findings showed that many CNRs were created around the wildfire, most of which either became inactive or were closed after the wildfire containment. These CNRs shared wildfire-relevant information and served a variety of purposes from information dissemination to offers of help to expressions of solidarity. Additionally, even though most CNR owners remained anonymous, these resources received good reviews and were followed by many people. These observations about CNRs laid the foundation for the third study that sought to determine the factors that influence the trustworthiness of these resources. The third study involved 17 interviews and 105 surveys with members of the public and experts in Crisis Informatics, Communication Studies, and Emergency Management. Participants were asked to evaluate the trustworthiness of CNRs that were named after the 2017 Hurricane Irma. Findings indicate that participants evaluated the trustworthiness of CNRs based on their perceptions of CNR content, information source(s), owner, and profile.