Vol. 4 : No. 4 : 2022

December 2022

About the issue

In the first article of this issue, “Social Media Counterpublics and the Chief Big Foot Memorial Ride”, Ryan T. Goeckner combines qualitative and quantitative approaches to analyse images and engagements stemming from the 2018 Lakota memorial and resistance ride. The focus of the analysis is on the construction of a counterpublic around the ride and on the visual social media strategies by which Indigenous social movements can spread their message to a wider audience. In the next article, “Protesting is not everything: Analysing Twitter use during electoral events in non-democratic contexts”, Hossein Kermani and Fatemeh Rasouli present the result of an analysis of the Iranian Twittersphere during the 2017 presidential election. The authors use framing theory to show that Twitter, in this context, had a very limited impact when it came to protesting the regime.

The third contribution to this issue — “Social [Media] Distancing: On Digital Espionage, Ethnographic Method, and Ethics ‘In the Field’” by Jennifer Cearns — takes a methodological stance and looks at the role of digital ethnography considering social distancing restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Cearns draws on extensive online and offline fieldwork, discusses the interplay between physical proximity and social distance, and problematises the role of digital methods at this nexus. The author introduces the notion of digital distance and argues that it can offer an ethical way of doing ethnographic research with vulnerable communities.

The next contribution is “Humans of Instagram: Exploring Influencer Identity Discourses on Instagram” by Maanya Tewatia and Sramana Majumdar. These authors have carried out in-depth interviews with Instagram influencers and show — through a discourse analysis — how their identities are enabled by the language of the platform. The article critically discusses how the platform as such plays a key part in creating and shaping identities and how the influencers engage in different negotiations, conflicts, resolutions, and performances. The fourth article in this issue is “Hive Mind Online: Collective Sensing in Times of Disinformation”, and was written by Shuyuan Mary Ho, Jeffrey Nickerson, and Qian Zhanga. They introduce the concept of ‘collective sensing’ as a mechanism for detecting disinformation in group communication. Using simulations and multilevel modelling, the authors show how patterns in group communication become more expressive and concentrated following acts of deception. The results indicate that groups can sense deception collectively in relation to disinformation and that collective sensing can be used as a detection method.

The fifth and final article in this issue of JDSR is “The Pepe the Frog Image-Meme in Hong Kong: Visual Recurrences and Gender Fluidity on the LIHKG Forum” by Katrien Jacobs, Degel Cheunga, Vasileios Maltezos, and Cecilia Wonga. This contribution offers a case study analysis of how the digital image-meme of Pepe the Frog was used during the 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill and Law Movement in Hong Kong. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study shows how the meme was imported and adapted by activists to make political statements about gender and democracy in relation to Hong Kong politics. Interestingly — as Pepe was previously used by the xenophobic and misogynistic alt-right in the US — the meme was renegotiated in the Hong Kong context by activists that were largely younger women pushing gender-fluid and emancipatory messages.