Mediating the Black Pete discussion on Facebook: Slacktivism, flaming wars, and deliberation

Abstract

In this paper we counter the idea that Facebook is a unified medium and stress the need to analyze the distinct qualities of its pages. We do so by exploring the Black Pete discussion on Facebook that ignited when United Nations investigator Verene Shepherd held a plea for the Dutch government to abolish the Saint Nicholas tradition, which features a black-face character, Black Pete. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are employed to interrogate how Facebook mediates this discussion in terms of divergent formatted spaces of participation. Reflecting on our findings against the notions of deliberation, slacktivism and flaming wars, we consider the particular features and potentials of different types of mediation.

How biased is the sample? Reverse engineering the ranking algorithm of Facebook’s Graph application programming interface

“…Facebook's Graph API has been used throughout the domain of social sciences and informatics to gain understanding of how users behave on the platform. Popular research domains that often use Facebook API include social network (Hogan, 2008;Spiliotopoulos et al, 2014), public opinion and election campaigns (Caton et al, 2015;Gulati and Williams, 2013;Larsson, 2015Larsson, , 2016, political activism and participation (Chan et al, 2016;KhosraviNik and Zia, 2015;Langlois et al, 2009;Lee et al, 2015;Tang and Lee, 2013), diffusion of information and misinformation (Bakshy et al, 2015;Bessi et al, 2016;Chan and Fu, 2017;Del Vicario et al, 2016, 2017Sun et al, 2009), online debate (Van Es et al, 2014), and so on. There is a vast amount of studies conducted using Facebook as the data source, this review can only provide a cursory glance at the wealth of literature.…”

Acting in a National Play: Governmental Roles During the Zwarte Piet Contestation

“…26 The social media were quick to follow. Zwarte Piet proved to be an endless source of online debates, which have been dutifully analyzed by scholars studying communication (van Es et al 2014; Hilhors and Hermes 2016). Often, these posts were of a highly offensive nature.…”

Expressing and Challenging Racist Discourse on Facebook: How Social Media Weaken the “Spiral of Silence” Theory

“…During the data collection period (August 1–31, 2016), the CBC News page received around 1.6 million likes and had new content posted an average of two new stories an hour. Another reason for focusing on Facebook is that it provides “various spaces of participation” (van Es, van Geenen, & Boeschoten, p. 9) for users to engage with contentious topics, such as race, creating the opportunity for what Matamoros‐Fernandez (, p. 931) defines as platformed racism—a new form of racism using social media platforms as tools for amplifying racist discourse via content production, as well as by taking advantage of vague policies, poor moderation of content, and arbitrary enforcement of the rules.…”

“…Numerous studies have examined racist discourse on Twitter and Reddit, and a growing number are also studying racist discourse on Facebook (Ben‐David & Matamoros‐Fernandez, ; Matamoros‐Fernandez, ; Rauch & Schanz, ; van Es et al, ). This study draws inspiration from these previous works to examine the hateful narratives and counternarratives that emerge on Facebook.…”