Peru has the second-highest diversity of birds in the world, but little is known about the interactions between birds and plastic waste. To fill this knowledge gap, we searched the scientific literature, collected information from social networks such as Facebook and databases such as Macaulay Library and iNaturalist and solicited records through messaging with researchers and bird enthusiasts. We found 119 bird interactions with plastic debris involving 39 species from 20 families, with the red-legged cormorant Phalacrocorax gaimardi and the neotropical cormorant Phalacrocorax brasilianus being the most affected species. By type of interaction category, plastic waste in nests was the most abundant, followed by entanglement, capture and handling and ingestion. Ropes, nets and soft plastics such as bags were the most frequently reported types of waste. As our methodology has limitations, it is probable that other species that also interact with plastic waste have not been reported, so we recommend further study.

Despite the increasing centrality of Internet memes for everyday political circulations and practices, their emergent implications as low-cultural artefacts of global politics have received little theoretical attention. In this article, I develop a critical theory of memes to provide a conceptual apparatus to understand the global political implications and possibilities of this pop-cultural phenomenon. I argue that, in order to attend to the emergent implications of memes and consider their differentiations from other pop-cultural phenomena, we need to unpack the spatial logic through which memes emerge and circulate. Analysing this spatial logic through the concept of the ‘memescape’ and deploying Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notions of striated and smooth spaces, this article articulates the spatial logic of the memescape as comprising rhizomatic, decentralised circulations of digital content; nomadic, playful, and humorous disruptions of once-stable signs; and affective congregations of a multiplicity of subjects. Through two examples exploring how these smooth spatial tendencies produce divergent political potentials in the resistant memes of Indigenous digital communities and reactionary memes of the Alt-Right, I conclude that the global politics of the memescape is open-ended and undetermined which requires careful and nuanced political and ethical attention to actualise its futures for emancipatory horizons.

Although mayors can have important impacts on citizens’ daily lives, local politics remains understudied, especially compared with national and regional politics. This study focuses on Canadian mayors’ digital political gender performance—or self-presentation—on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and the context in which this gendered performance arises. Overall, results confirm that mayors’ gendered performances are on a continuum rather than binary. Results from a visual content analysis of nine Canadian mayors’ social media accounts show that, broadly speaking, women mayors gravitate toward congruent, mixed gendered performances and avoidance strategies, whereas men mayors also display mixed performance of their gender, while more freely exploring congruent and incongruent approaches to gendered stereotypes. Additionally, semistructured interviews with these mayors show that women mayors still work under added constraints because of their gender, which translates into comments on their appearance, attitude, and lifestyle choices; increased aggression and lack of respect; and a generally greater mental load.

Interest groups often post about their judicial advocacy on social media. We argue that they do so for two main reasons. First, providing information about the courts on social media builds the group’s credibility as a source of information with policymakers, media and the public. Second, social media provides a way to claim credit for litigation activity and outcomes, which can increase membership and aid in fundraising. Using original datasets of millions of tweets and Facebook posts by interest groups, we provide evidence that interest groups use social media for public education and to credit claim for their litigation activity.

Critics of virtue reliabilism allege that the view cannot account for testimonial knowledge, as the acquisition of such knowledge is creditable to the testifier, not the recipient's cognitive abilities. I defend virtue reliabilism by attending to empirical work concerning human abilities to detect sincerity, certainty, and seriousness through bodily cues and properties of utterances. Then, I consider forms of testimony involving books, newspapers, and online social networks. I argue that, while discriminatory abilities directed at bodily cues and properties of utterances are impotent in the face of such testimony, alternative abilities facilitate the acquisition of knowledge from these sources.

Racism in social media is ubiquitous, persisting online in ways unique to the internet while also reverberating from the world offline. When will racist frames activate in social media networks? This article argues that social media users engage with racist content when they perceive a threat to the in-group status, selecting frames that serve as markers to separate the in-group identity from the out-group identity. Racialized frames serve as these markers, and the perceived threats to the in-group status make racist content cognitively congruent. Evidence of this behavior is provided by examining Twitter activity during the indígena protests in Ecuador in October 2019. A novel, multistep machine-learning process detects racist tweets, and an interrupted time series analysis shows how events that can be perceived as threats to the in-group activate racist content in some social media communities.

Faster internet speeds and ever-present mobile phones present a new challenge to psychiatric wards – the ability for patients to live stream their in-patient stays. What are the benefits and the risks to the patient streaming and the ward as a whole? This article is to help start a conversation about this unique problem and how health professionals might go about addressing it.

This Presidential Lecture explores the ways in which African orality provides the means for a sentimental education in an era of crisis. Quayson notes how the essentially polysemic character of the genres of orality have influenced the ways he understands both literature and the African city, two areas of keen interest. After tracing the texture of Accra’s trotro (passenger vehicle) slogans and the continuity of sentimental education from orality to social media, Quayson concludes by calling for a new interdisciplinary paradigm that would explore the polysemy of African orality alongside the hypertextual algorithms behind today’s social media and the internet.

Networks are a subject of growing research interest. Yet union networks, particularly networks of delegates, and ways to build them, are still poorly understood. This is a study of the meaning that workplace union delegates assign to networks of support. It explores the characteristics of effective delegate and union networks and influences upon them. Effective networks are a combination of strong and weak ties, such that delegates sometimes do not recognise they are part of a network. Our three-stage research methodology involved delegate focus groups, a paper-based self-completion questionnaire of recently trained delegates (N=473) and a follow-up telephone survey (N=145). It found that organisers were key to creation of internal workplace networks (although they did not necessarily establish them) and in providing a bridge for delegates with external networks. They were the key support person for many delegates. Networks took a variety of forms. Only a minority were formalised. A majority were mainly internal to the workplace. Social media were rarely used, with little intention of using them more, and were, we suspect, underutilised.

Online, social media communication is often ambiguous, and it can encourage speed and inattentiveness. We investigated whether Actively Open Minded Thinking (AOT), a dispositional willingness to seek out new or potentially threatening information, may help users avoid these pitfalls. In Study 1, we determined that correctly assessing social media authors’ traits was positively predicted by raters’ AOT. In Study 2, we used data-driven methods to devise a three-dimensional picture of online behaviors of people high or low in AOT, finding that AOT is associated with thoughtful, nuanced, idiosyncratic actions and with resisting the typically fast pace of online interactions. AOT may be an important factor in accurate, socially responsible online behavior.

The rapid spread of COVID-19 has emphasized the need for effective health communications to coordinate individual behavior and mitigate disease transmission. Facing a pandemic, individuals may be driven to adopt public health recommendations based on both self-interested desires to protect oneself and prosocial desires to protect others. Although messages can be framed around either, existing research from the social sciences has offered mixed evidence regarding their relative efficacy. Informing this dialogue, in the current study we report on the findings of a field experiment (N = 25,580) conducted March 21–22 on Facebook during the critical initial weeks of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States. We observed that ad messages using a distant prosocial frame (“protect your community”) were in fact significantly less effective than those using a self-focused frame (“protect yourself”) in eliciting clickthroughs to official CDC recommendations. However, ad messages with a close prosocial frame (“protect your loved ones”) were equally effective as the self-focused frame. These findings catalog the differential efficacy of ad messaging strategies during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic.

There has been considerable work recently in the natural language community and elsewhere on Responsible AI. Much of this work focuses on fairness and biases (henceforth Risks 1.0), following the 2016 best seller: Weapons of Math Destruction. Two books published in 2022, The Chaos Machine and Like, Comment, Subscribe, raise additional risks to public health/safety/security such as genocide, insurrection, polarized politics, vaccinations (henceforth, Risks 2.0). These books suggest that the use of machine learning to maximize engagement in social media has created a Frankenstein Monster that is exploiting human weaknesses with persuasive technology, the illusory truth effect, Pavlovian conditioning, and Skinner’s intermittent variable reinforcement. Just as we cannot expect tobacco companies to sell fewer cigarettes and prioritize public health ahead of profits, so too, it may be asking too much of companies (and countries) to stop trafficking in misinformation given that it is so effective and so insanely profitable (at least in the short term). Eventually, we believe the current chaos will end, like the lawlessness in Wild West, because chaos is bad for business. As computer scientists, this paper will summarize criticisms from other fields and focus on implications for computer science; we will not attempt to contribute to those other fields. There is quite a bit of work in computer science on these risks, especially on Risks 1.0 (bias and fairness), but more work is needed, especially on Risks 2.0 (addictive, dangerous, and deadly).