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Between alternative and traditional social platforms: the case of gab in exploring the narratives on the pandemic and vaccines

The phenomenon of deplatforming intended as the removal of social media accounts because of breaking rules on mainstream platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram recently increased due to new terms and conditions of use of digital media, and new alternative social media platforms...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Acampa, Suania, Crescentini, Noemi, Padricelli, Giuseppe Michele
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10390321/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37534329
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2023.1143263
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author Acampa, Suania
Crescentini, Noemi
Padricelli, Giuseppe Michele
author_facet Acampa, Suania
Crescentini, Noemi
Padricelli, Giuseppe Michele
author_sort Acampa, Suania
collection PubMed
description The phenomenon of deplatforming intended as the removal of social media accounts because of breaking rules on mainstream platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram recently increased due to new terms and conditions of use of digital media, and new alternative social media platforms emerged and presented themselves as protectors of freedom expression. In this way, it becomes interesting to understand better the context of these platforms' so-called web suburbs that consist in those digital places that ≪host what we can generally call “subcultures,” including fandoms, religious sects, political extremists, and subcultures≫. Since April 2020, Gab can be considered the most widespread alternative platform in Western countries, with twenty million users daily, born as Twitter and Facebook alternative social media. The alternative social media platforms are intended as other connection services between users, which is halfway between a social media and a discussion forum born to boycott the censorship actions of the main social media platforms (Meta Group, Twitter, etc.) and celebrate free speech even on controversial positions. How are sensitive topics, such as the one that concerns the skepticism related to the approvals of vaccines during the pandemic, addressed on the alternative social media platform compared to how they are dealt with on the mainstream social media platforms? This explorative work wonders about the users' points of view on vaccine concerns and the relevant differences between Gab and Facebook in addressing this topic. The empirical part of this work has been set starting from the dataset composed of Gab and Facebook content posted between March 2020 and July 2021. The posts were extracted with web scraping techniques (for Gab) and proprietary data tools (for Facebook), querying the keywords: vaccine, vaccines, anti-vax (no-vax), Covid, Covid-19, coronavirus. The collection procedure considered the different platforms' structure and their different organization of the interaction spaces. The population consisted of 8000 English writers' posts, from which 2000 posts with the highest interaction value were extracted. The dataset was analyzed using Topic Modeling, Factor, and Classification Analysis techniques. Our work's methodological output deals with comparing these social media platforms, bearing in mind their ontological objects and their algorithms' role. From the analysis emerged the differences and similarities of the social media platforms in terms of the type of content published, rates of involvement, sources of information, and directions of the considered speech. These differences have been duly highlighted by three clusters related to discourse orientation and communication approach: Conflict of views, Emotional externalization, Recommendation and practices. In addition to the type of communication and information circulating on a powerful platform such as Gab, the results help us understand the different narratives promoted on the two social media platforms and their role in the possible promotion of the same sentiment, opinions, and ideological polarization.
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spelling pubmed-103903212023-08-02 Between alternative and traditional social platforms: the case of gab in exploring the narratives on the pandemic and vaccines Acampa, Suania Crescentini, Noemi Padricelli, Giuseppe Michele Front Sociol Sociology The phenomenon of deplatforming intended as the removal of social media accounts because of breaking rules on mainstream platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram recently increased due to new terms and conditions of use of digital media, and new alternative social media platforms emerged and presented themselves as protectors of freedom expression. In this way, it becomes interesting to understand better the context of these platforms' so-called web suburbs that consist in those digital places that ≪host what we can generally call “subcultures,” including fandoms, religious sects, political extremists, and subcultures≫. Since April 2020, Gab can be considered the most widespread alternative platform in Western countries, with twenty million users daily, born as Twitter and Facebook alternative social media. The alternative social media platforms are intended as other connection services between users, which is halfway between a social media and a discussion forum born to boycott the censorship actions of the main social media platforms (Meta Group, Twitter, etc.) and celebrate free speech even on controversial positions. How are sensitive topics, such as the one that concerns the skepticism related to the approvals of vaccines during the pandemic, addressed on the alternative social media platform compared to how they are dealt with on the mainstream social media platforms? This explorative work wonders about the users' points of view on vaccine concerns and the relevant differences between Gab and Facebook in addressing this topic. The empirical part of this work has been set starting from the dataset composed of Gab and Facebook content posted between March 2020 and July 2021. The posts were extracted with web scraping techniques (for Gab) and proprietary data tools (for Facebook), querying the keywords: vaccine, vaccines, anti-vax (no-vax), Covid, Covid-19, coronavirus. The collection procedure considered the different platforms' structure and their different organization of the interaction spaces. The population consisted of 8000 English writers' posts, from which 2000 posts with the highest interaction value were extracted. The dataset was analyzed using Topic Modeling, Factor, and Classification Analysis techniques. Our work's methodological output deals with comparing these social media platforms, bearing in mind their ontological objects and their algorithms' role. From the analysis emerged the differences and similarities of the social media platforms in terms of the type of content published, rates of involvement, sources of information, and directions of the considered speech. These differences have been duly highlighted by three clusters related to discourse orientation and communication approach: Conflict of views, Emotional externalization, Recommendation and practices. In addition to the type of communication and information circulating on a powerful platform such as Gab, the results help us understand the different narratives promoted on the two social media platforms and their role in the possible promotion of the same sentiment, opinions, and ideological polarization. Frontiers Media S.A. 2023-07-17 /pmc/articles/PMC10390321/ /pubmed/37534329 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2023.1143263 Text en Copyright © 2023 Acampa, Crescentini and Padricelli. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Sociology
Acampa, Suania
Crescentini, Noemi
Padricelli, Giuseppe Michele
Between alternative and traditional social platforms: the case of gab in exploring the narratives on the pandemic and vaccines
title Between alternative and traditional social platforms: the case of gab in exploring the narratives on the pandemic and vaccines
title_full Between alternative and traditional social platforms: the case of gab in exploring the narratives on the pandemic and vaccines
title_fullStr Between alternative and traditional social platforms: the case of gab in exploring the narratives on the pandemic and vaccines
title_full_unstemmed Between alternative and traditional social platforms: the case of gab in exploring the narratives on the pandemic and vaccines
title_short Between alternative and traditional social platforms: the case of gab in exploring the narratives on the pandemic and vaccines
title_sort between alternative and traditional social platforms: the case of gab in exploring the narratives on the pandemic and vaccines
topic Sociology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10390321/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37534329
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2023.1143263
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