2018 #SMSociety CFP: Networked Influence and Virality — REVISITED

*INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SOCIAL MEDIA AND SOCIETY**COPENHAGEN, DENMARK
(JULY 18**–**20, 2018)*

*IMPORTANT DATES:*

   - Full & WIP Papers Due: Jan. 29, 2018
   - Panels, Workshops, & Posters Due: Mar. 19, 2018

*SUBMISSION DETAILS:*

See online at *http://socialmediaandsociety.org/submit/
<http://socialmediaandsociety.org/submit/>*

*THEME: Networked Influence and Virality — REVISITED*


Join us on July 18–20, 2018 for the 9th annual International Conference on
Social Media and Society (#SMSociety). The conference is an
interdisciplinary gathering of social media researchers, practitioners, and
analysts from around the world. The 2018 conference is hosted by the Centre
for Business Data Analytics at the Copenhagen Business School.

In 2012, in the wake of Occupy and the Arab Spring, the #SMSociety
community explored networked influence and virality, and saw social media
and viral events as a democratizing force. Fast forward five years and we
find ourselves in quite a different, some would argue, darker social media
landscape where those same democratizing forces are now being exploited in
ways we could not foresee. With the rapid change on social media platforms
and their affordances, the heightened emphasis on mobile and visual
communication, the rise of bots, and the increased participation of state
actors, we believe it is time to revisit the ideas of *Networked Influence
and Virality* once more!

Powered by networked influence and made possible by privately owned social
media platforms, we are said to be in a sharing economy. We are now owning
less and sharing more, giving and receiving crowdsourced content, adapting,
innovating, remaking, and re-sharing original and remixed materials. New
attitudes, practices, and legal precedents about ownership, rights, and
information evaluation are emerging with the growing use of social media.
The joys of sharing and connecting through social media—as amateur music
videos inspire responses and the sharing of cute animal videos brings joy
to millions—are tempered with concerns about the manipulation and
exploitation of social media platforms. Hateful, anti-social speech,
coordinated misinformation campaigns (i.e. “fake news”) and “false flag”
operation by actors unknown now dominate the news cycle and compete for an
opportunity to “go viral.”

Considering the rapid changes in social media environments, use, and users,
the conference organizers invite scholarly and original submissions that
relate to the 2018 theme of “Networked Influence and Virality.” We welcome
both quantitative and qualitative work which crosses interdisciplinary
boundaries and expands our understanding of the current and future trends
in social media research, especially those that explore some of the
questions and issues raised below:

   - How do ideas spread online? What are the outcomes of the viral spread
   of news, memes, content, and creative production?
   - Who are the new influencers and power players in the information
   landscape of social media?
   - How important are bots in this landscape? How do bots act as social
   actors? In what ways are they transforming social media?
   - Algorithmic filtering is now the norm on all major social media
   platforms; how has their implementation changed the user experience?
   - What are the impacts of misinformation and propaganda on elections,
   commerce, and the attention economy?
   - Is faster, frictionless communication still an ideal to strive for or
   have we gone too far? Do we need to reintroduce some frictions back to
   social media platforms?
   - How do corporate interests, activities, sales, and profit motivations
   drive or otherwise affect sharing practices?
   - What are the characteristics of contemporary social media practices
   that drive the need for new laws, sharing conventions, censorship, rights
   to be heard and to be forgotten?
   - Do social media users understand, or are they even aware of, the
   ethical considerations related to sharing, and re-mixing content on social
   media?
   - How do users evaluate information received through social media?
   - How does viral culture affect policy, power dynamics, corporations,
   activists, and personal interests?
   - What new methodologies, tools, and frameworks can researchers bring to
   bear in studying the flow of information on social media?
   - How do sharing, memes, and viral events contribute to theory-building
   about our society?

*ABOUT THE CONFERENCE:*

>From its inception, the International Conference on Social Media & Society
Conference (#SMSociety) has focused on the best practices for studying the
impact and implications of social media on society. Our invited academic
and industry keynotes have highlighted the shifting questions and concerns
for the social media research community. From introducing media
multiplexity and networked individualism with Caroline Haythornthwaite and
Barry Wellman in 2010 and 2011, to measuring influence with Gilad Lotan and
Sharad Goel in 2012 and 2013, to defining social media research as a field
with Keith Hampton in 2014, to identifying our commitments as social media
researchers in policy making with Bill Dutton in 2015, to exploring the
future of social media technologies with John Weigelt in 2015, to
highlighting the challenges of social media data mining in the context of
big data with Susan Halford and Helen Kennedy in 2016; and more recently
discussing the dark side of social media with Lee Rainie and Ron Deibert in
2017.

Organized by the *Social Media Lab <http://socialmedialab.ca/>* at Ted
Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University, the conference provides
participants with opportunities to exchange ideas, present original
research, learn about recent and ongoing studies, and network with peers.
The conference’s intensive three-day program features workshops, full
papers, work-in-progress papers, panels, and posters. The wide-ranging
topics in social media showcase research from scholars working in many
fields including Communication, Computer Science, Education, Journalism,
Information Science, Management, Political Science, Sociology, Social Work,
etc.

<http://socialmediaandsociety.org/submit/>*PUBLISHING OPPORTUNITIES:*

Full and WIP (short) papers presented at the Conference will be published
in the conference proceedings by ACM International Conference Proceeding
Series (ICPS) and will be available in the ACM Digital Library. All
conference presenters will be invited to submit their work as a full paper
to the special issue of the Social Media + Society journal (published by
SAGE).

*TOPICS OF INTEREST:*

*Social Media Impact on Society*
• Political Mobilization & Engagement
• Extremism & Terrorism
• Politics of Hate and Oppression
• Social Media & Health

*Social Media & the News*
Social Media & Business (Marketing, PR, HR, Risk Management, etc.)
• Social Media & Academia (Alternative Metrics, Learning Analytics, etc.)
• Social Media & Public Administration

*Online/Offline Communities*
• Trust & Credibility in Social Media
• Online Community Detection
• Influential User Detection
• Identity

*Theories & Methods*
• Qualitative & Quantitative Approaches
• Opinion Mining & Sentiment Analysis
• Social Network Analysis
• Theoretical Models for Studying, Analysing and Understanding Social Media

*Social Media & Small Data*
• Case Studies of Online Communities Formed on Social Media
• Case Studies of Offline Communities that Rely on Social Media
• Sampling Issues
• Value of Small Data

*Social Media & Big Data*
• Social Media Data Mining
• Social Media Analytics
• Visualization of Social Media Data
• Scalability Issues & Social Media Data
• Ethics of Big Data/Algorithms

*Social Media & Mobile*
• App-ification of Society
• Privacy & Security Issues in the Mobile World
• Apps for the Social Good
• Networking Apps

*ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:*
Anatoliy Gruzd, Ryerson University, Canada – Conference Chair
Ravi Vatrapu, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark  –  Host Chair
Philip Mai, Ryerson University, Canada – Conference Chair
Jenna Jacobson, Ryerson University, Canada – Conference Chair
Hazel Kwon, Arizona State University, USA – WIP Chair
Jeff Hemsley, Syracuse University, USA – WIP Chair
Anabel Quan-Haase, Western University, Canada – Panel Chair
Luke Sloan, Cardiff University, UK – Panel Chair
Jaigris Hodson, Royal Roads University, Canada – Poster Chair

*ADVISORY BOARD:*

William H. Dutton, Michigan State University, USA
Susan Halford, University of Southampton, UK
Zizi Papacharissi, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
Barry Wellman, INSNA Founder, The Netlab Network, Canada