My Blog – Week 3
After the intensive course on Exclusion and Inequality in the second week, I realized that there are many inequalities in society, which refer to the flow of resources, politics, economics, policy, health, labor, geography, time, and data inequality. Therefore, I learn the performance of “inequality” from various examples.
My undergraduate major is Internet and New Media. After the intensive course, I desperately hope to combine undergraduate majors with “Inequality”, which means exploring inequality in the world of the Internet. Now, almost everyone uses social media, so I want to choose social media as a typical representative of the Internet world, and explore how the inequality in this medium is reflected and whether social media itself amplifies or reduces this inequality. In addition, I want to research from a gender perspective.
The initial idea is to investigate and explore the gender inequality caused by social media speech. Moreover, I hope to take Weibo and Twitter as the representative of social media in China and the UK, respectively. Then compare and do the horizontal analysis of the impact of national cultural differences on inequality.
This is my preliminary idea, it would be great if you could give other suggestions about it.
Hi Peiyu,
I think this is a fascinating idea, and a big challenge since you’ll be working in two languages, and so will be comparing language that might function differently in each language in addition to the different ways each platform may treat it. It might help if you narrow down gender inequality to something easier to quantify. For example, trolling online is a common tactic used to silence women and minorities on social media. There’s a book available in Edinburgh’s library that discusses this in the case of women: The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Violence (the chapter that talks about this is: “Cyber-trolling as symbolic violence”). So if there were a way to measure language used against women in this way and then the impact that language had on the women, that could potentially be one way to show what’s going on (although I’m sure there are many others; surveying if people consciously censor themselves when posting this kind of content on these platforms might be another way to show that behavior is being impacted, for example).
Another issue with comparing Weibo and Twitter is that while they both censor speech, they censor it differently. Weibo is more active about “harmonizing” posts (so if a comment made on a popular account seems like it will start up a fight that could upset the overall social environment, censors may pull it down or shadow-ban it by using the platform algorithm to de-amplify the comment). Twitter frequently won’t censor comments unless there are specific physical threats involved, like “I’m going to take my shotgun to your house on Tuesday and blow your brains out”(and how they decide this has been very contentious, people targeted by disinformation campaigns often complain that Twitter doesn’t do enough to protect them from violent threats and cyber-bullying). So the effect of this is, if, say, you’re looking at #Metoo campaigns (women accusing men with power over them of sexual harassment and/or assault), you might get a lot of violent comments in response to the accusations on Twitter, but on Weibo, the accusations and/or the comments may disappear. So that would be an interesting challenge to deal with. And it would be difficult to find a way to show that one way is better than the other; both China and the UK suffer from real world gender-based violence.
A search term I noticed on google scholar that resulted in a lot of academic articles was: “online harassment”