Social media websites can be used for self-representation, to stay informed about and in contact
with others and to distribute content (Kietzmann et al., 2011). Facebook is one of the most
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important businesses worldwide in terms of market capitalization being in the top five of the Fortune 500 (Gandel, 2016). Having around 1.5 billion users resulting into a penetration of almost 23 percent of the world population (Internetworldstats, 2016), Facebook has a tremendous impact on business and society. While Facebook is mainly used to maintain relationships with others (Tosun, 2012), Twitter and other microblogging platforms main characteristic is seen as content and news distributor (Smith et al. 2012). Among such social networking websites, many other forms of social platforms used to engage with others and for entertainment do exist in the Internet such as blogs and online gaming.
This chapter mainly focuses on the literature-based analysis of gender differences among different types of social platforms present on the Internet. Additionally the de-anonymization of users and the usage structure of German politicians on social media websites is investigated.
Article 11: “The Role of Gender in Blogging: Current State of Research and Future Directions”
Blogs are a popular form of online communication enabling individuals to share their thoughts and knowledge. Understanding how the gender of the blog owner influences the perceptions of readers and the way the blog is operated is in the focus of this study. This is important since blogs have reached a tremendous recognition and readership count with 80 million unique visitors a month (Nielsen, 2012). Therefore their influence on society and economy is unprecedented. Using a meta-review in order to summarize existing research results the authors identify 48 articles focusing on related insights in the blogosphere or report gender-based results as part of their study. The authors extract a total of 131 insights. Two coders independently classify those insights into the seven preliminary defined categories writing style, blog content, motivation to blog, bloggers’ characteristics, privacy, readership and type of blog. Findings are mostly in line with Cross and Madson’s (1997) self-construal theory which states that males are more independent striving for approval while females are more interdependent focusing on social aspects. This is also reflected in the insights related to motivation and types of blogs. While men prefer to write about professional topics to gain attention, reputation and to spread information, females prefer topics related to personal issues with a focus on forming social connections and to self-express. While gender is equally distributed among blog operators, males are perceived as more credible and do receive more attention and visibility. Contrary to the self-construal theory males do interact with other bloggers more often and support each other more frequently. The authors are able to identify the categories motivation to blog and privacy as the ones seldom addressed by research, therefore calling for more comprehensive research in those areas.
Article 12: “Men, Women, Microblogging: Where Do We Stand?”
With the rise of Twitter as the 140-character microblogging platform, these kind of short
text-based communication platforms have become famous within the last couple of years. Having
both millions of users, Twitter and Sina Weibo are two of the most used platforms around the
world. The focus of this paper are on identifying gender-based differences and similarities with
respect to the microblogging platforms mentioned above. Via an extensive literature survey
using several scientific scholarly databases the authors are able to identify 60 studies published
27 between 2009 and 2014 which provide a total of 205 insights on gender-relevant findings. While 48 studies focus on Twitter, eleven use Sina Weibo and one paper uses both platforms. This shows a strong preference for the US-based platform. However, during their literature survey the authors only considered English-based studies.
The authors identify five leading themes which they name adoption, content, audience, motivation and presentation. Two coders independently classify each insight into one category.
Most insights are evident for the themes presentation and audience with motivation lacking far behind all other categories, calling for more research in this area. Linking the insights with gender-based theoretical frameworks we show that several aspects of traditional gender roles are still evident on microblogging platforms. Females tend to share more among their personal circle and males are perceived as more credible. However, there is a shift observable that females begin to write more on male-seen topics showing that typical gender boundaries are crossed.
Article 13: “Gender Differences in Online Gaming: A Literature Review”
Online gaming is a phenomenon which has become even more popular with the rise of mobile devices, recording a rising number of users. However, insights on adoption, motivation, social interaction, self-presentation, performance and play patterns with respect to the gender divide remain unclear so far. Doing a literature survey based on several scholarly databases this paper sheds light on how males and females act similar and different with respect to online gaming.
In total, the authors identify 47 papers providing insights on gender-based findings in the area of online gaming, classifying them into the six categories mentioned before. Findings are in line with traditional gender roles. While men are overrepresented in online gaming platforms, women are more likely to use these platforms to socialize with others. Also men do focus more on action game plays whereas women prefer logic-based games. However, with respect to motives to play similar patterns arise with games being a possibility to flee from reality and to have entertainment.
Article 14: “Gender Differences in Online Dating: What Do We Know So Far? A Systematic Literature Review”
Online dating platforms bring together females and males in anticipation to form relationships.
Conducting a meta-review using a keyword-combination and a set of scholarly databases the
authors find 69 relevant articles published between the years 1995 to 2015. Those research
papers contain a total of 345 insights on gender-related findings with respect to the
characteristics, the motivation, partner preferences, self-presentation, interaction and outcome
of users using online dating platforms. Insights on partner preferences are by far the most
common ones, whereas all others are distributed equally. The only exception are findings with
respect to the motivation to use online dating platforms, where research cannot provide a lot of
evidence so far. Results indicate that while males use and interact more on online dating
platforms and are more likely to look for short-term relationships, females are rather motivated
to use online dating platforms for long-term relationships such as in the romantic context or for
friendship. Also for males physical characteristics are more important than for females, which
on the other hand pay more attention to the socio-economic status of a potential partner. In
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terms of misrepresentation of personal characteristics to enhance their characteristics both gender make use of it. The results of this paper can help to develop better matching algorithms for online dating platforms. Further research in this direction can additionally focus on cultural differences.
Article 15: “Twitter and the Political Landscape – A Graph Analysis of German Politicians”
Twitter is one of the most important microblogging platforms having around 300 million monthly active user accounts in 2015 (Statista, 2017g). Among those one third have used the platform for political purposes such as to distribute political content and to encourage others to vote (Duggan and Smith, 2016). Therefore, politicians discovered the huge potential that lies within the use of microblogging platforms to reach potential voters and distribute their political views (Stieglitz et al., 2012). Among the 3,500 active politicians in Germany, around 1,700 of them operate a Twitter account. So far the political use of social media websites by German politicians has been mainly in the focus with elections nearby. Our paper aims at analyzing the interaction and connection between German politicians on Twitter via graph analysis in times where political actions are at a rather low frequency. This helps to understand the usage and interaction among German politicians on Twitter when there is no direct pressure to show presence to others. Relevant data of all Twitter accounts of German politicians is collected over a two-week period in August 2015 to construct three different graphs: the follower graph which represents the follower-followee relationship among German politicians and the mention graph which captures mentions of German politicians by their colleagues. The third graph is the intersection of both of them. While the CDU and the SPD are the parties with the most Twitter accounts, the Pirate party claims the highest number of followers. In general, Twitter is used frequently for interactions shown by several mention of peer politicians even during seasons of low political activity. Looking at the graphs and a set of metrics it becomes evident that the Green Party appears to be most connected while the AfD is the least connected and rather supports herself alone. CDU, SPD, Left Party and FDP appear to be quite homogenous. In general, German politicians seem to have a common approach on how to use Twitter.
Article 16: “Privacy on Reddit? Towards Large-scale User Classification”
Many social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are based upon the registration of users using their real identity. This can pose possible privacy threats since information and demographics stated on those websites can be used without the consent of users such as for marketing purposes or spam-related activities. Reddit is an online communication platform centered around anonymity. Upon registration only username and password are necessary to be able to participate actively on the platform. However, all content on the website is publically available. This paper contributes to the research question if it is possible to de-anonymize users based on their comment history. The characteristics social gender and citizenship are chosen as de-anonymization targets using an automatic approach. Using these characteristics it might be possible to de-anonymize users on this platform. In the first step, a dataset was derived from Reddit based upon 76,767 users who posted around 660,500 comments.
For the classification a supervised approach is selected which needs labeled data. Using regular
expressions as suggested by Rao et al. (2010) and Pennacchiotti and Popescu (2011), users are
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labelled based upon their comment history according to their stated gender and continent they
live in. The authors compare the results of a weighted soft-margin support vector machine
classifier (Osuna et al., 1997) and a supervised latent Dirichlet allocation (McAuliffe and Blei
2007) with features based upon the bag-of-words of the subreddits (i.e. the sub-forums of Reddit
which are specialized on a specific topic, the user commented on). Using area-under-curve
(AUC) as performance measure and a varying number of topics for LDA as parameter the
authors show that in case of gender an AUC of 87.3% (two classes) and in case of citizenship
and AUC of 53.8% (six classes) could be reached. This shows that it is possible to classify users
on an anonymous platform according to social gender and citizenship solely based on the
sub-forums the user is active on.
Im Dokument
Network Science – Applications in Technology, Business and Social Media
(Seite 41-45)