Communication Dysfunctions and Social Threats Associated with Digital Social Platforms

Dear Colleagues,

The new digital platforms have had numerous positive implications, but they have also generated new social threats, in addition to having aggravated some that already existed. Within digital environments, it is in social media where new communication dysfunctions seem to have a greater presence and more serious consequences, due to immediacy, anonymity, global reach, and the larger scale of communication processes. This new situation could seem positive because it favors participation and the free and immediate transmission of information, something that could improve democratic processes. However, social networks seem to be contributing especially to the deterioration of the quality and veracity of information, as well as empathic and pro-social behaviors, and, with it, social peace and democratic quality. In fact, some authors consider that social media are becoming less social every day (Bartlett et al., 2014). Undoubtedly, there are many accounts that misuse these new platforms, taking advantage of their potential to spread hoaxes and/or toxic speech on a large scale, to promote confrontation and intolerance, or even to directly harass and/or threaten other individuals or minorities groups. Behind some of these accounts, there are automated bots (Shao et al., 2016), which manage to make their speeches go viral. However, the vast majority belong to real people who have antisocial and potentially criminal behaviours, often hiding behind fake accounts and acting like trolls. 

All this has made some traditional social threats associated with communication processes now acquire a greater scope and a more worrying dimension (Miró Llinares, 2016). The main ones and more studied would be misinformation and fake news, hate speech and ideological and political polarization. However, these are not the only problems that take place in these social media, but in recent years new and even more worrying practices have proliferated that threaten the dignity and integrity of individuals and constitute a serious attack on coexistence. Some of these would be cyber-harassment, cyber-stalking, cyberbullying, sexting, sextortion or grooming, but they are not the only ones. 

It is clear then that, even having innumerable positive implications for society, social media have allowed the proliferation and aggravation of many social problems that seriously threaten social peace. For this reason, it is necessary to rethink the use made of these platforms and develop new methods that help us identify, study and monitor these behaviors, as well as new strategies and solutions to control and counteract them.  

This call seeks contributions that address these lines of action, from studies that analyze and describe the risks and threats related to social platforms and the main victims and affected groups to those that explore and review the main causes and implications, and, especially, those that raise new social and methodological strategies to combat them or lessen their most negative consequences. 

References

Bartlett, Jamie, Jeremy Reffin, Noelle Rumball, and Sarah Williamson. 2014. Anti social media. Online available: http://cilvektiesibas.org.lv/site/record/docs/2014/03/19/DEMOS_Anti-social_Media.pdf (accessed on 31 Jan 2023).

Shao, Chengcheng, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Alessandro Flammini, and Filippo Menczer. 2016. Hoaxy: A platform for tracking online misinformation. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web, pp. 745–50. https://doi.org/10.1145/2872518.2890098.

Llinares, Fernando Miró. 2016. Taxonomía de la comunicación violenta y el discurso del odio en Internet. IDP. Revista de Internet, Derecho y Política 22: 82–107.

Dr. Javier Jiménez Amores
Guest Editor

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