Generic conventions in YouTube reponse videos drives online harassment campaigns
Over the last decade YouTube “response videos” in which a user offers counterarguments to a video uploaded by another user have become popular among political creators. While creators often frame response videos as debates, those targeted assert that they function as vehicles for harassment from the creator and their networked audience. Platform policies, which base moderation decisions on individual pieces of content rather than the relationship between videos and audience behavior, may therefore fail to address networked harassment. We analyze the relationship between amplification and harassment through qualitative content analysis of 15 response videos. We argue that response videos often provide a blueprint for harassment that shows both why the target is wrong and why harassment would be justified. Creators use argumentative tactics to portray themselves as defenders of enlightened public discourse and their targets as irrational and immoral. This positioning is misleading, given that creators interpellate the viewer as part of a networked audience with shared moral values that the target violates. Our analysis also finds that networked audiences act on that blueprint through the social affordances of YouTube, which we frame as harassment affordances. We argue that YouTube’s current policies are insufficient for addressing harassment that relies on amplification and networked audiences.
Media systems are embedded in democracy and thus implicated in the current decline of democracy
In the interdisciplinary field of misinformation and disinformation studies, there has been no consistent answer to the question of ‘what can and should platforms be responsible for in the context of democratic decay’ (i.e., a context in which democratic institutions, structures, norms, and governance are eroding)? In this paper, Kreiss and Barrett take up this question in light of several relevant literatures on democracies in transition towards more authoritarian or ‘hybrid’ regimes, or more broadly, literatures examining the deterioration of core democratic processes, institutions, and governance mechanisms.
Our review of this literature reveals that we lack good theoretical and empirical understandings of media systems in relation to democratic decay, especially the roles played by platforms. To address this, the authors conceptually outline several indirect effects of platforms on democratic decay, focusing on their roles in shaping public opinion and political institutions. In doing so they bring two academic literatures together: 1) work on democratic decay that often fails to consider media and platforms, and 2) work on platforms that often focuses narrowly on public opinion and attitudes, overlooking institutional democratic processes
What does it mean to be Asian? And what does it mean to do Asian American collective politics?
This article examines the tensions, communal processes, and narrative frameworks behind producing collective racial politics across differences. As digital media objects, the Asian American Feminist Collective’s zine Asian American Feminist Antibodies: Care in the Time of Coronavirus and corresponding #FeministAntibodies Tweetchat responds directly to and anticipates a social media and information environment that has racialized COVID-19 in the language of Asian-ness. Writing from an autoethnographical perspective and using collaborative methods of qualitative discourse analysis as feminist scholars, media-makers, and interlocuters, this article looks toward the technological infrastructures, social economies, and material forms of Asian American digital media-making in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.