Dr. Fan Liang has 2 very recent journal article announcements. The paper, titled The Effects of Flagging Propaganda Sources on News Sharing: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Twitter, was published in The International Journal of Press/Politics.
Abstract
While research on flagging misinformation and disinformation has received much attention, we know very little about how the flagging of propaganda sources could affect news sharing on social media. Using a quasi-experimental design, we test the effect of source flagging on people’s actual sharing behaviors. By analyzing tweets (N = 49,126) posted by 30 China’s media accounts before and after Twitter’s practice of labeling state-affiliated media, we reveal the corrective role that flagging plays in preventing people’s sharing of information from propaganda sources. The findings suggest that the corrective effect occurs immediately after these accounts are labeled as state-affiliated media and it leads to a long-term reduction in news sharing, particularly for political content. The results contribute to the understanding of how flagging efforts affect user engagement in real-world conversations and highlight that the effect of corrective measures takes place in a dynamic process.
The other paper, titled The making of “good” citizens: China’s Social Credit Systems and infrastructures of social quantification, was published in Policy & Internet.
Abstract
This article examines citizen scoring in China’s Social Credit Systems (SCSs). Focusing on 50 municipal cases that potentially cover 210 million population, we analyze how state actors quantify social and economic life into measurable and comparable metrics and discuss the implications of SCSs through the lens of social quantification. Our results illustrate that the SCSs are envisioned and designed as social quantification practices including two facets: a normative apparatus encouraging “good” citizens and social morality, and a regulative apparatus disciplining “deviant” behaviors and enforcing social management. We argue that the SCSs illustrate the significant shift in which state actors increasingly become data processors whereas citizens are reconfigured as datafied subjects that can be measured, compared, and governed. We suggest that the SCSs function as infrastructures of social quantification for enforcing social management, constructing differences, and nudging people towards desired behaviors defined by the state.
