Looking forward to reading Tero Karppi’s new book. I chaired a panel he spoke at in Aarhus this summer. Exciting stuff! Recommended reading.
Tag: Facebook
Why can’t social media delete race hate?
Interesting (and concerning) interview with YouTube spokesperson yesterday on BBC Radio. Seems some far right race hate material is still online a year after notification unlike IS type propaganda and “radicalization” videos that are taken down in a matter of hours – Opening up questions about what markers are used in machine learning technologies, as well as human decision making processes. Seems that the default argument by Zuckerberg et al that these AI technologies will solve the problems of hate groups on social media (and fake news) is perhaps not stacking up.
YouTube: Not removing far-right video ‘missed the mark’
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/44939032/youtube-not-removing-far-right-video-missed-the-mark
More opinion in The Guardian today on Facebook, and why, after Charlottesville, big tech can’t delete white supremacists?
The Collective Effect
Two very interesting closing comments at the end of the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie’s appearance before the digital, culture, media and sport committee in the House of Commons.
- People in charge of investigating and regulating data need to understand how relational databases, machine leaning etc. work. At present, they don’t! (Christopher Wylie)
- There’s been too much focus on the individual level of psychological profiling. It’s not about using psychographics to influence how individuals vote, it’s about a “collective effect,” like the spreading of rumours. They are easier to generate. The impulse to share information. Only Facebook can look into that! But they seem to have a blind spot on it (Paul-Olivier Dehaye).
Self-Censorship on Facebook
More data science research from Facebook – this time looking at posts that are self-censored before being shared, so in the private domain (no such thing on social media, it seems) before posting to friends or public. Not, it says, looking directly at content, but rather correlating time lapses in posting with demographic, behavioural and social features of 3.9 million users e.g. “political affiliation”, “deleted posts”, “friend political entropy”.
Same researcher who did the emotional contagion research. Here’s the abstract.
Self-Censorship on Facebook
Sauvik Das and Adam Kramer
Abstract
We report results from an exploratory analysis examining “last-minute” self-censorship, or content that is filtered after being written, on Facebook. We collected data from 3.9 million users over 17 days and associate self-censorship behavior with features describing users, their social graph, and the interactions between them. Our results indicate that 71% of users exhibited some level of last-minute self-censorship in the time period, and provide specific evidence supporting the theory that a user’s “perceived audience” lies at the heart of the issue: posts are censored more frequently than comments, with status updates and posts directed at groups censored most frequently of all sharing use cases investigated. Furthermore, we find that: people with more boundaries to regulate censor more; males censor more posts than females and censor even more posts with mostly male friends than do females, but censor no more comments than females; people who exercise more control over their audience censor more content; and, users with more politically and age diverse friends censor less, in general.
Full paper to download here: https://research.fb.com/publications/self-censorship-on-facebook/
#Affect and Social Media 3.0: Final Call and Registration Now Open
Announcing the final call for academic presentations and artworks for #Affect and Social Media 3.0. A one day conference and sensorium art show at UEL on Thursday 25th May 2017 at the University of East London’s Dockland Campus.
Confirmed keynote speaker: Prof Jessica Ringrose (UCL)
We are also pleased to announce that registration for this event is now open.
Both the call and link to registration are here: https://www.uel.ac.uk/Events/2017/05/Affect-and-Social-Media-3
Please note that everyone attending must register in advance. Thanks!
£3 for external students
£5 for external workers
Free for UEL staff and students
Free for nonhumans, posthumans etc.
Best wishes to all,
Tony
Affect and Social Media Symposium #2 – cfp
Affect and Social Media Symposium #2 – cfp
Wednesday 23rd March 2016
1-8pm
University of East London, Docklands Campus, Room EB. G.06
Call for 15min Presentations/Position Papers
Following on from the success of last year’s Affect and Social Media research symposium, the emotionUX lab in the School of Arts and Digital Industries at UEL, and in collaboration this year with Cass School of Education and Communities at UEL, will be hosting a second event continuing to explore the relation between social media, affect, feelings and emotions.
Numerous studies from various fields have described interactions with social media in terms of emotional, affective and feely experiences. It is claimed that habitual access to Facebook can have a negative impact on mood and subjective well-being (Kross et al, 2013). Likewise, emotional states experienced on social media can be transferred to others through emotional contagion, ‘leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness’ (Kramer, 2014). Similarly, positive emotions, like joy, are regarded as more likely to spread than negative ones (Berger and Milkman, 2010).
This year’s call for 15min presentations/position papers asks contributors to explore emotional, affective and feely experiences with social media. More specifically, we ask contributors to investigate how social media ‘work[s] in concert with bodies in the production of emotional and affective activity’ (Ellis and Tucker, 2015: 177).
We welcome proposals on a wide variety of themes that cross disciplinary boundaries. For example…
Addiction and social media
Affective contagion
Affect theory relating to social media
Care, emotions and social media
Methodologies relating to emotion, affect and social media
Consumption, emotions and affect on social media
Education, emotions and social media
Emotional and affective contagions
Emotional social media design (theory and practice)
Ethical considerations
Felt experiences on social media
Social gaming and emotions
HCI and emotion
Learning, emotion and social media
Marketing, emotion and social media
Networked emotions
Online emotional ethnographies
Pervasive computing and emotion
Emotions and privacy
Emotions and security
Sharing emotions
Emotions and trust
The politics of emotional user experiences
Please send a title, brief outline (100words) and institutional affiliation to t.d.sampson@uel.ac.uk and E.Theodotou@uel.ac.uk
| Activities | Deadlines |
| Abstract Submission | 15th December 2015 |
| Acceptance notification | 15th January 2016 |
| Registration for presenters | Details to follow |
| Registration for all participants | Details to follow |
Fees and registration
(Refreshments, after symposium drinks and nibbles and attendance certificate included in all registration types)
| Type | Fee |
| Presenters | Free |
| UEL students/academics | Free |
| External students | £3 |
| External academics/participants | £5 |
Please keep an eye out for follow up emails regarding registration
Updates will also appear on the Virality blog and EmotionUX news page
https://viralcontagion.wordpress.com/
http://emotionuxlab.co.uk/news/
Call for papers: Social Media and Affect Research Seminar
Call for papers
Social Media and Affect Research Seminar
The EmotionUX lab
School of Arts and Digital Industries
Docklands Campus
University of East London
27th Feb 2015
Following on from the controversy surrounding the apparent manipulation of emotions on Facebook widely reported in the media, the emotionUX lab in the School of Arts and Digital Industries at UEL invite you to a one day research seminar exploring the relation between social media, affect, feelings and emotions. We welcome proposals for 15min position papers. Themes that might be addressed include…
Addiction
Affect
Concepts and methodologies
Consumption – use
Contagion
Emotional design (theory and practice)
Emotions
Ethics
Feelings
Felt experiences
Funology
Games
Gamification
HCI
Marketing
Networks
Online emotional ethnographies
Pervasive
Privacy
Security
Sharing
Trust
User experience
Please send a title and brief outline (100words) to t.d.sampson@uel.ac.uk and copied to u1026574@uel.ac.uk before September 1st 2014.
Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks
Here’s a link to and copy of (see below) the controversial research on emotional contagion on Facebook currently being reported in the Guardian.
Significance
We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues.
Abstract
Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. Emotional contagion is well established in laboratory experiments, with people transferring positive and negative emotions to others. Data from a large real-world social network, collected over a 20-y period suggests that longer-lasting moods (e.g., depression, happiness) can be transferred through networks [Fowler JH, Christakis NA (2008) BMJ 337:a2338], although the results are controversial. In an experiment with people who use Facebook, we test whether emotional contagion occurs outside of in-person interaction between individuals by reducing the amount of emotional content in the News Feed. When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks. This work also suggests that, in contrast to prevailing assumptions, in-person interaction and nonverbal cues are not strictly necessary for emotional contagion, and that the observation of others’ positive experiences constitutes a positive experience for people.
Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading them to experience the same emotions as those around them. Emotional contagion is well established in laboratory experiments (1), in which people transfer positive and negative moods and emotions to others. Similarly, data from a large, real-world social network collected over a 20-y period suggests that longer-lasting moods (e.g., depression, happiness) can be transferred through networks as well (2, 3).
The interpretation of this network effect as contagion of mood has come under scrutiny due to the study’s correlational nature, including concerns over misspecification of contextual variables or failure to account for shared experiences (4, 5), raising important questions regarding contagion processes in networks. An experimental approach can address this scrutiny directly; however, methods used in controlled experiments have been criticized for examining emotions after social interactions. Interacting with a happy person is pleasant (and an unhappy person, unpleasant). As such, contagion may result from experiencing an interaction rather than exposure to a partner’s emotion. Prior studies have also failed to address whether nonverbal cues are necessary for contagion to occur, or if verbal cues alone suffice. Evidence that positive and negative moods are correlated in networks (2, 3) suggests that this is possible, but the causal question of whether contagion processes occur for emotions in massive social networks remains elusive in the absence of experimental evidence. Further, others have suggested that in online social networks, exposure to the happiness of others may actually be depressing to us, producing an “alone together” social comparison effect (6).
Three studies have laid the groundwork for testing these processes via Facebook, the largest online social network. This research demonstrated that (i) emotional contagion occurs via text-based computer-mediated communication (7); (ii) contagion of psychological and physiological qualities has been suggested based on correlational data for social networks generally (7, 8); and (iii) people’s emotional expressions on Facebook predict friends’ emotional expressions, even days later (7) (although some shared experiences may in fact last several days). To date, however, there is no experimental evidence that emotions or moods are contagious in the absence of direct interaction between experiencer and target.
On Facebook, people frequently express emotions, which are later seen by their friends via Facebook’s “News Feed” product (8). Because people’s friends frequently produce much more content than one person can view, the News Feed filters posts, stories, and activities undertaken by friends. News Feed is the primary manner by which people see content that friends share. Which content is shown or omitted in the News Feed is determined via a ranking algorithm that Facebook continually develops and tests in the interest of showing viewers the content they will find most relevant and engaging. One such test is reported in this study: A test of whether posts with emotional content are more engaging.
The experiment manipulated the extent to which people (N = 689,003) were exposed to emotional expressions in their News Feed. This tested whether exposure to emotions led people to change their own posting behaviors, in particular whether exposure to emotional content led people to post content that was consistent with the exposure—thereby testing whether exposure to verbal affective expressions leads to similar verbal expressions, a form of emotional contagion. People who viewed Facebook in English were qualified for selection into the experiment. Two parallel experiments were conducted for positive and negative emotion: One in which exposure to friends’ positive emotional content in their News Feed was reduced, and one in which exposure to negative emotional content in their News Feed was reduced. In these conditions, when a person loaded their News Feed, posts that contained emotional content of the relevant emotional valence, each emotional post had between a 10% and 90% chance (based on their User ID) of being omitted from their News Feed for that specific viewing. It is important to note that this content was always available by viewing a friend’s content directly by going to that friend’s “wall” or “timeline,” rather than via the News Feed. Further, the omitted content may have appeared on prior or subsequent views of the News Feed. Finally, the experiment did not affect any direct messages sent from one user to another.
Posts were determined to be positive or negative if they contained at least one positive or negative word, as defined by Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software (LIWC2007) (9) word counting system, which correlates with self-reported and physiological measures of well-being, and has been used in prior research on emotional expression (7, 8, 10). LIWC was adapted to run on the Hadoop Map/Reduce system (11) and in the News Feed filtering system, such that no text was seen by the researchers. As such, it was consistent with Facebook’s Data Use Policy, to which all users agree prior to creating an account on Facebook, constituting informed consent for this research. Both experiments had a control condition, in which a similar proportion of posts in their News Feed were omitted entirely at random (i.e., without respect to emotional content). Separate control conditions were necessary as 22.4% of posts contained negative words, whereas 46.8% of posts contained positive words. So for a person for whom 10% of posts containing positive content were omitted, an appropriate control would withhold 10% of 46.8% (i.e., 4.68%) of posts at random, compared with omitting only 2.24% of the News Feed in the negativity-reduced control.
The experiments took place for 1 wk (January 11–18, 2012). Participants were randomly selected based on their User ID, resulting in a total of ∼155,000 participants per condition who posted at least one status update during the experimental period.
For each experiment, two dependent variables were examined pertaining to emotionality expressed in people’s own status updates: the percentage of all words produced by a given person that was either positive or negative during the experimental period (as in ref. 7). In total, over 3 million posts were analyzed, containing over 122 million words, 4 million of which were positive (3.6%) and 1.8 million negative (1.6%).
If affective states are contagious via verbal expressions on Facebook (our operationalization of emotional contagion), people in the positivity-reduced condition should be less positive compared with their control, and people in the negativity-reduced condition should be less negative. As a secondary measure, we tested for cross-emotional contagion in which the opposite emotion should be inversely affected: People in the positivity-reduced condition should express increased negativity, whereas people in the negativity-reduced condition should express increased positivity. Emotional expression was modeled, on a per-person basis, as the percentage of words produced by that person during the experimental period that were either positive or negative. Positivity and negativity were evaluated separately given evidence that they are not simply opposite ends of the same spectrum (8, 10). Indeed, negative and positive word use scarcely correlated [r = −0.04, t(620,587) = −38.01, P < 0.001].
We examined these data by comparing each emotion condition to its control. After establishing that our experimental groups did not differ in emotional expression during the week before the experiment (all t < 1.5; all P > 0.13), we examined overall posting rate via a Poisson regression, using the percent of posts omitted as a regression weight. Omitting emotional content reduced the amount of words the person subsequently produced, both when positivity was reduced (z = −4.78, P < 0.001) and when negativity was reduced (z = −7.219, P < 0.001). This effect occurred both when negative words were omitted (99.7% as many words were produced) and when positive words were omitted (96.7%). An interaction was also observed, showing that the effect was stronger when positive words were omitted (z = −77.9, P < 0.001).
As such, direct examination of the frequency of positive and negative words would be inappropriate: It would be confounded with the change in overall words produced. To test our hypothesis regarding emotional contagion, we conducted weighted linear regressions, predicting the percentage of words that were positive or negative from a dummy code for condition (experimental versus control), weighted by the likelihood of that person having an emotional post omitted from their News Feed on a given viewing, such that people who had more content omitted were given higher weight in the regression. When positive posts were reduced in the News Feed, the percentage of positive words in people’s status updates decreased by B = −0.1% compared with control [t(310,044) = −5.63, P < 0.001, Cohen’s d = 0.02], whereas the percentage of words that were negative increased by B = 0.04% (t = 2.71, P = 0.007, d = 0.001). Conversely, when negative posts were reduced, the percent of words that were negative decreased by B = −0.07% [t(310,541) = −5.51, P < 0.001, d = 0.02] and the percentage of words that were positive, conversely, increased by B = 0.06% (t = 2.19, P < 0.003, d = 0.008).
The results show emotional contagion. As Fig. 1 illustrates, for people who had positive content reduced in their News Feed, a larger percentage of words in people’s status updates were negative and a smaller percentage were positive. When negativity was reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results suggest that the emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks (3, 7, 8), and providing support for previously contested claims that emotions spread via contagion through a network.
Fig. 1.
Mean number of positive (Upper) and negative (Lower) emotion words (percent) generated people, by condition. Bars represent standard errors.
These results highlight several features of emotional contagion. First, because News Feed content is not “directed” toward anyone, contagion could not be just the result of some specific interaction with a happy or sad partner. Although prior research examined whether an emotion can be contracted via a direct interaction (1, 7), we show that simply failing to “overhear” a friend’s emotional expression via Facebook is enough to buffer one from its effects. Second, although nonverbal behavior is well established as one medium for contagion, these data suggest that contagion does not require nonverbal behavior (7, 8): Textual content alone appears to be a sufficient channel. This is not a simple case of mimicry, either; the cross-emotional encouragement effect (e.g., reducing negative posts led to an increase in positive posts) cannot be explained by mimicry alone, although mimicry may well have been part of the emotion-consistent effect. Further, we note the similarity of effect sizes when positivity and negativity were reduced. This absence of negativity bias suggests that our results cannot be attributed solely to the content of the post: If a person is sharing good news or bad news (thus explaining his/her emotional state), friends’ response to the news (independent of the sharer’s emotional state) should be stronger when bad news is shown rather than good (or as commonly noted, “if it bleeds, it leads;” ref. 12) if the results were being driven by reactions to news. In contrast, a response to a friend’s emotion expression (rather than news) should be proportional to exposure. A post hoc test comparing effect sizes (comparing correlation coefficients using Fisher’s method) showed no difference despite our large sample size (z = −0.36, P = 0.72).
We also observed a withdrawal effect: People who were exposed to fewer emotional posts (of either valence) in their News Feed were less expressive overall on the following days, addressing the question about how emotional expression affects social engagement online. This observation, and the fact that people were more emotionally positive in response to positive emotion updates from their friends, stands in contrast to theories that suggest viewing positive posts by friends on Facebook may somehow affect us negatively, for example, via social comparison (6, 13). In fact, this is the result when people are exposed to less positive content, rather than more. This effect also showed no negativity bias in post hoc tests (z = −0.09, P = 0.93).
Although these data provide, to our knowledge, some of the first experimental evidence to support the controversial claims that emotions can spread throughout a network, the effect sizes from the manipulations are small (as small as d = 0.001). These effects nonetheless matter given that the manipulation of the independent variable (presence of emotion in the News Feed) was minimal whereas the dependent variable (people’s emotional expressions) is difficult to influence given the range of daily experiences that influence mood (10). More importantly, given the massive scale of social networks such as Facebook, even small effects can have large aggregated consequences (14, 15): For example, the well-documented connection between emotions and physical well-being suggests the importance of these findings for public health. Online messages influence our experience of emotions, which may affect a variety of offline behaviors. And after all, an effect size of d = 0.001 at Facebook’s scale is not negligible: In early 2013, this would have corresponded to hundreds of thousands of emotion expressions in status updates per day.
Acknowledgments
We thank the Facebook News Feed team, especially Daniel Schafer, for encouragement and support; the Facebook Core Data Science team, especially Cameron Marlow, Moira Burke, and Eytan Bakshy; plus Michael Macy and Mathew Aldridge for their feedback. Data processing systems, per-user aggregates, and anonymized results available upon request.
Footnotes
- 1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: akramer@fb.com.
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Author contributions: A.D.I.K., J.E.G., and J.T.H. designed research; A.D.I.K. performed research; A.D.I.K. analyzed data; and A.D.I.K., J.E.G., and J.T.H. wrote the paper.
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The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
References
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Viral Facebook party turns into a riot…
Following on from recent posts on the English Riots and the response to anti-Islam video across the Middle East here’s another example of the intriguing overlap between network culture and crowd contagion.
As reported in The Independent… See also BBC video.
Teen’s ‘Facebook party’ turns into riot in Netherlands.
Thousands of revelers descended on a small Dutch town sparking a riot after a party invitation posted on Facebook went viral, authorities said today.
Prosecutor Hessel Schuth said 34 people were arrested last night and in the early hours of this morning and would be prosecuted for public order offenses. Several people were injured, but none were believed to be seriously hurt.
“Scum ran amok in our town,” said Rob Bats, mayor of Haren, 185 kilometers (115 miles) north of Amsterdam.
“An innocent invitation on Facebook for a party led to serious rioting, destruction, plundering, arson and injuries in the middle of Haren,” he said.
Bats said an initial analysis showed a core group of rioters “were very violent and well-prepared and deliberately sought confrontation” with hundreds of police who had been dispatched to the town amid fears of trouble.
Dutch media reported that the party originally was planned as a small celebration by a 16-year-old girl but her invitation went viral when she posted it on Facebook.
Some of the people arriving in Haren on Friday wore T-shirts emblazoned with “Project X Haren,” a reference to the film Project X that portrayed an out-of-control party.
On Saturday, another Facebook group sprang up called Project Clean-X Haren, urging people to help clear up the debris littering the town’s streets.
AP
Again from the BBC
Revellers could be seen wearing T-shirts marked “Project X Haren” after Project X – a film released earlier this year about a party that grows out of control.
Such T-shirts had been selling on the internet for 23 euros (£18; $30) apiece. Some featured a crude logo of a man on all fours drinking from a bottle, AFP notes.
Obama looks to go viral (again) – Election campaign will be organized like FarmVille…
Join, Connect and Build your Neighbourhood
Interesting attempt by the Obama team to once again tap into the potential virality of the web using a new addition to myBarackObama.com called Dashboard.
Quoted in the Guardian today, Eli Pariser (former Moveon.org and now CEO of the new sharing site Upworthy) says, “If Dashboard works as billed, it will import into politics the kind of feedback loops we are familiar with from Facebook and online games.”
As Ed Pilkington and Amanda Michel writing for the Guardian suggest:
“The hope is that it will become the election equivalent of the Facebook games CityVille and FarmVille, where online participants cooperate with their social networks to run a city or manage a farm. In this case, Dashboard’s creators hope to bring the power of the social networking right to the doorstep of the American voter.”
In an article for soon to be published special edition of the Scandinavian Journal Distinktion I have used the work of Gabriel Tarde to look at Obama’s campaign in 2008. Here Tarde offers an interesting take on persuasion theory in which populations are not merely swayed by fear or security needs alone. Religious and political institutions nourish their congregations by way of ‘unheard-of expenditures of love and of unsatisfied love at that’ (Tarde 1903, 202). I have already discussed the catching refrain of Obama-love in this context (Sampson 2011). This was an invention that appropriated the desire of voters taking flight from the fearsome GW Bush administration and transforming it into the refrain of hope and change. Much has been made about the role of social media in this capture of desire. Facebook certainly helped to spread activism through joyful encounters encouraging disaffected voters to pass on their devotion for this new idol. Activists readily and spontaneously engaged in fundraisers, parties and gatherings, ‘without any formal leadership from Obama headquarters’ (Sullivan 2008). Obama was indeed the new master of a Facebook Politics enabling his campaign of empathy to reach out far beyond the US. The emotionally charged and intimate Flickr pictures of his family poised in front of the television on the eve of his election spread through global media networks like a firestorm, painting a mood, and stirring up a worldwide love contagion.
What is important to stress here is not a dualistic relation between the fear mongering of GW Bush and Obama-love, but a mode of political persuasion that traverses the entire affective valence from the repeated TV images of the horror of 9/11 to these initial joyful encounters with Obama.
See the Guardian ariticle “Obama’s team of tech gurus to unleash ‘Holy Grail’ of digital campaigning” and link to Dashboard
VIRALITY 