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ENG 111: Social Media Impact

  • Starting Points
  • Book Reviews vs. Articles

Definitions

Putting it together.

  • Citations This link opens in a new window

bibliography + annotations = annotated bibliography  

Bibliography

A bibliography is a list of the sources you used for an essay or research project. The bibliography is also known as the "works cited" or reference list.  

An annotation can be a summary or evaluation of a source. Keep in mind that you will need to write an annotation that includes the information required by your instructor. Always check the assignment to make sure that you are including the correct information in your annotation.  

Annotated Bibliography

An annotated bibliography is a list of citations where each citation is followed by a brief paragraph (annotation) that analyzes the cited source. The purpose of the annotation will vary depending on what your instructor is requiring for the assignment. Typically, the annotation serves to inform the reader of the relevance, accuracy, and quality of the source.  

  • MLA Annotated Bibliography Examples UNC-CH Writing Center

Part 1: Citation

The citation comes first. For this part, you are simply listing the information about the source using MLA format.

  • MLA Citation Examples Provides examples of how to cite articles from various databases subscribed to by PCC Library.

Part 2: Annotation

The second part is the annotation. The annotation is basically "notes" that you are writing about the source. The length of the annotation will vary depending on the instruction given in your assignment.

In order to create an annotation, you might start by answering the following questions about the source (article, book, website, etc.). However, make sure that you refer to your assignment and follow the instructions provided by your teacher.

  • What is this source about?
  • What arguments does the author make?
  • How does the author support those arguments?

Evaluation:

  • Are the author's arguments convincing?
  • What are the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments?

How or why you used the source:

  • How does this source help you?
  • How is this source useful for your research?
  • How does it compare with the other sources that you are using?
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APA Citation Guide (7th Edition): Social Media

  • Audiovisual Media
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On sites where items are posted under usernames but not necessarily proper names, enter the username where you would normally put the author's name. Author, in this case, will be the main creator(s) for the item you are citing.

Creator information may often be found under a section called "About" for some types of social media, however this is not always standard.

Most items will provide a date they were posted. The standard format for the date is Year, Month Day.

If only part of the date is provided, post what you have such as the year and skip the rest of the date.

If no date is provided, use the initials n.d. where you would normally put the date.

Author, A. A. or Name of Group [@username]. (Date). Content of the post up to the first 20 words . [Tweet]. Site Name. URL

Univ. of Nevada Reno [@unevadareno].  (2020, April 29). Mental health is very important to maintain and should not be neglected during quarantine . [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/unevadareno/status/1255600248187224070

Note : If the tweet includes images, videos, or links to other sources, indicate that information in brackets after the content description. Also, attempt to replicate emojis if possible.

Twitter Profile

Author, A. A. or Name of Group [@username]. (n.d.). Tweets [Twitter profile]. Retrieved Month Date, Year, from URL

Univ. of Nevada Reno [@unevadareno]. (n.d.). Tweets [Twitter profile]. Retrieved June 23, 2020 from https://twitter.com/unevadareno

Note : Provide a retrieval date because the contents of the page can change over time.

Author, A. A. or Username if real name is not provided. (Year, Month Day). Title of post. Publisher . URL

Dobbs, D. (2012, June 13). Fun in cities: Feature, not bug. Wired . http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/fun-in-cities-feature-not-bug/

Facebook Post

Author, A. A. or Name of Group. (Year, Month Day). Content of the post up to the first 20 words [Type of post]. Site Name. URL

National Institute of Mental Health. (2018, November 28). Suicide affects all ages, genders, races, and ethnicities.  [Infographic]. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/nimhgov/photos/a.208040836977/10157971523866978 

This format can be used for posts to other social media services, including Tumblr, LinkedIn, etc.

If a status update includes images, videos, or thumbnail links to outside sources or content from another Facebook post, indicate that in square brackets.

Replicate emojis if possible.

Facebook Page

Author, A. A. or Name of Group. (n.d.). Home [Facebook page]. Site name. Retrieved Month Day, Year, from URL

Little River Canyon National Preserve. (n.d.). Home [Facebook page]. Facebook. Retrieved June 22, 2020 from https://www.facebook.com/lirinps/

This format can be used or adapted for references to other platform or profile pages, including YouTube,  Instagram ,  Tumblr , LinkedIn, etc.

Use the page title in the reference (e.g., "Timeline," "Home," "Photos," "About").

Include the notation "Facebook page" in square brackets.

Instagram Photo or Video

Author, A. A. or Name of Group [@username]. (Year, Month Day). Content of the post up to the first 20 words [Type of post]. Site Name. URL

NPR [@NPR]. (2020, June 13). Why can't everyone just vote by mail? Ahead of what was supposed to be the highest turnout election in history  [Video]. Instagram. https://instagram.com/p/CBY7uCYANj1/ 

Host, A. A. (Host). (Year, Month Day). Title of episode (No. if provided) [Audio podcast episode]. In Name of podcast . Publisher. URL

Barbaro, M. (Host). (2020, July 20). The life and legacy of John Lewis [Audio podcast episode]. In The Daily . The New York Times. https://www.nytimes/2020/07/20/podcasts/the-daily/john-lewis.html

YouTube Video or Other Streaming Video

Author, A. A. [Username]. (Year, Month Day).  Title of video  [Video]. Streaming Service. URL

Nye, B. [ TheRealBillNye ]. (2009, April 8).  Bill Nye the science guy on energy  [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ASLLiuejAo&feature=youtu.be

Note : The person or group who uploaded the video is credited as the author for retrievability, even if they did not create the work. If the author's name is the same as the username, you can omit the [Username].

Online Forum or Discussion Posting

Author, A. A. or Name of Group [Username]. (Year, Month Day).  Title of post  [Online forum post]. Publisher. URL

Fryxell, B. [celloben]. (2020, June 26). I am a cellist working to help bring classical music into the 21st century. Ask me anything!  [Online Forum post]. Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/hgagre/iama_cellist_working_to_help_bring_classical/

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Annotated Bibliography

Research using social media content.

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Social Media

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Phiosophy Documentation Center

  • 14.1 Compiling Sources for an Annotated Bibliography
  • 1 Unit Introduction
  • Introduction
  • 1.1 "Reading" to Understand and Respond
  • 1.2 Social Media Trailblazer: Selena Gomez
  • 1.3 Glance at Critical Response: Rhetoric and Critical Thinking
  • 1.4 Annotated Student Sample: Social Media Post and Responses on Voter Suppression
  • 1.5 Writing Process: Thinking Critically About a “Text”
  • 1.6 Evaluation: Intention vs. Execution
  • 1.7 Spotlight on … Academia
  • 1.8 Portfolio: Tracing Writing Development
  • Further Reading
  • Works Cited
  • 2.1 Seeds of Self
  • 2.2 Identity Trailblazer: Cathy Park Hong
  • 2.3 Glance at the Issues: Oppression and Reclamation
  • 2.4 Annotated Sample Reading from The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois
  • 2.5 Writing Process: Thinking Critically about How Identity Is Constructed Through Writing
  • 2.6 Evaluation: Antiracism and Inclusivity
  • 2.7 Spotlight on … Variations of English
  • 2.8 Portfolio: Decolonizing Self
  • 3.1 Identity and Expression
  • 3.2 Literacy Narrative Trailblazer: Tara Westover
  • 3.3 Glance at Genre: The Literacy Narrative
  • 3.4 Annotated Sample Reading: from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
  • 3.5 Writing Process: Tracing the Beginnings of Literacy
  • 3.6 Editing Focus: Sentence Structure
  • 3.7 Evaluation: Self-Evaluating
  • 3.8 Spotlight on … The Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN)
  • 3.9 Portfolio: A Literacy Artifact
  • Works Consulted
  • 2 Unit Introduction
  • 4.1 Exploring the Past to Understand the Present
  • 4.2 Memoir Trailblazer: Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • 4.3 Glance at Genre: Conflict, Detail, and Revelation
  • 4.4 Annotated Sample Reading: from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain
  • 4.5 Writing Process: Making the Personal Public
  • 4.6 Editing Focus: More on Characterization and Point of View
  • 4.7 Evaluation: Structure and Organization
  • 4.8 Spotlight on … Multilingual Writers
  • 4.9 Portfolio: Filtered Memories
  • 5.1 Profiles as Inspiration
  • 5.2 Profile Trailblazer: Veronica Chambers
  • 5.3 Glance at Genre: Subject, Angle, Background, and Description
  • 5.4 Annotated Sample Reading: “Remembering John Lewis” by Carla D. Hayden
  • 5.5 Writing Process: Focusing on the Angle of Your Subject
  • 5.6 Editing Focus: Verb Tense Consistency
  • 5.7 Evaluation: Text as Personal Introduction
  • 5.8 Spotlight on … Profiling a Cultural Artifact
  • 5.9 Portfolio: Subject as a Reflection of Self
  • 6.1 Proposing Change: Thinking Critically About Problems and Solutions
  • 6.2 Proposal Trailblazer: Atul Gawande
  • 6.3 Glance at Genre: Features of Proposals
  • 6.4 Annotated Student Sample: “Slowing Climate Change” by Shawn Krukowski
  • 6.5 Writing Process: Creating a Proposal
  • 6.6 Editing Focus: Subject-Verb Agreement
  • 6.7 Evaluation: Conventions, Clarity, and Coherence
  • 6.8 Spotlight on … Technical Writing as a Career
  • 6.9 Portfolio: Reflecting on Problems and Solutions
  • 7.1 Thumbs Up or Down?
  • 7.2 Review Trailblazer: Michiko Kakutani
  • 7.3 Glance at Genre: Criteria, Evidence, Evaluation
  • 7.4 Annotated Student Sample: "Black Representation in Film" by Caelia Marshall
  • 7.5 Writing Process: Thinking Critically About Entertainment
  • 7.6 Editing Focus: Quotations
  • 7.7 Evaluation: Effect on Audience
  • 7.8 Spotlight on … Language and Culture
  • 7.9 Portfolio: What the Arts Say About You
  • 8.1 Information and Critical Thinking
  • 8.2 Analytical Report Trailblazer: Barbara Ehrenreich
  • 8.3 Glance at Genre: Informal and Formal Analytical Reports
  • 8.4 Annotated Student Sample: "U.S. Response to COVID-19" by Trevor Garcia
  • 8.5 Writing Process: Creating an Analytical Report
  • 8.6 Editing Focus: Commas with Nonessential and Essential Information
  • 8.7 Evaluation: Reviewing the Final Draft
  • 8.8 Spotlight on … Discipline-Specific and Technical Language
  • 8.9 Portfolio: Evidence and Objectivity
  • 9.1 Breaking the Whole into Its Parts
  • 9.2 Rhetorical Analysis Trailblazer: Jamil Smith
  • 9.3 Glance at Genre: Rhetorical Strategies
  • 9.4 Annotated Student Sample: “Rhetorical Analysis: Evicted by Matthew Desmond” by Eliana Evans
  • 9.5 Writing Process: Thinking Critically about Rhetoric
  • 9.6 Editing Focus: Mixed Sentence Constructions
  • 9.7 Evaluation: Rhetorical Analysis
  • 9.8 Spotlight on … Business and Law
  • 9.9 Portfolio: How Thinking Critically about Rhetoric Affects Intellectual Growth
  • 10.1 Making a Case: Defining a Position Argument
  • 10.2 Position Argument Trailblazer: Charles Blow
  • 10.3 Glance at Genre: Thesis, Reasoning, and Evidence
  • 10.4 Annotated Sample Reading: "Remarks at the University of Michigan" by Lyndon B. Johnson
  • 10.5 Writing Process: Creating a Position Argument
  • 10.6 Editing Focus: Paragraphs and Transitions
  • 10.7 Evaluation: Varied Appeals
  • 10.8 Spotlight on … Citation
  • 10.9 Portfolio: Growth in the Development of Argument
  • 11.1 Developing Your Sense of Logic
  • 11.2 Reasoning Trailblazer: Paul D. N. Hebert
  • 11.3 Glance at Genre: Reasoning Strategies and Signal Words
  • 11.4 Annotated Sample Reading: from Book VII of The Republic by Plato
  • 11.5 Writing Process: Reasoning Supported by Evidence
  • 12.1 Introducing Research and Research Evidence
  • 12.2 Argumentative Research Trailblazer: Samin Nosrat
  • 12.3 Glance at Genre: Introducing Research as Evidence
  • 12.4 Annotated Student Sample: "Healthy Diets from Sustainable Sources Can Save the Earth" by Lily Tran
  • 12.5 Writing Process: Integrating Research
  • 12.6 Editing Focus: Integrating Sources and Quotations
  • 12.7 Evaluation: Effectiveness of Research Paper
  • 12.8 Spotlight on … Bias in Language and Research
  • 12.9 Portfolio: Why Facts Matter in Research Argumentation
  • 13.1 The Research Process: Where to Look for Existing Sources
  • 13.2 The Research Process: How to Create Sources
  • 13.3 Glance at the Research Process: Key Skills
  • 13.4 Annotated Student Sample: Research Log
  • 13.5 Research Process: Making Notes, Synthesizing Information, and Keeping a Research Log
  • 13.6 Spotlight on … Ethical Research
  • 14.2 Glance at Form: Citation Style, Purpose, and Formatting
  • 14.3 Annotated Student Sample: “Healthy Diets from Sustainable Sources Can Save the Earth” by Lily Tran
  • 14.4 Writing Process: Informing and Analyzing
  • 15.1 Tracing a Broad Issue in the Individual
  • 15.2 Case Study Trailblazer: Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
  • 15.3 Glance at Genre: Observation, Description, and Analysis
  • 15.4 Annotated Sample Reading: Case Study on Louis Victor "Tan" Leborgne
  • 15.5 Writing Process: Thinking Critically About How People and Language Interact
  • 15.6 Editing Focus: Words Often Confused
  • 15.7 Evaluation: Presentation and Analysis of Case Study
  • 15.8 Spotlight on … Applied Linguistics
  • 15.9 Portfolio: Your Own Uses of Language
  • 3 Unit Introduction
  • 16.1 An Author’s Choices: What Text Says and How It Says It
  • 16.2 Textual Analysis Trailblazer: bell hooks
  • 16.3 Glance at Genre: Print or Textual Analysis
  • 16.4 Annotated Student Sample: "Artists at Work" by Gwyn Garrison
  • 16.5 Writing Process: Thinking Critically About Text
  • 16.6 Editing Focus: Literary Works Live in the Present
  • 16.7 Evaluation: Self-Directed Assessment
  • 16.8 Spotlight on … Humanities
  • 16.9 Portfolio: The Academic and the Personal
  • 17.1 “Reading” Images
  • 17.2 Image Trailblazer: Sara Ludy
  • 17.3 Glance at Genre: Relationship Between Image and Rhetoric
  • 17.4 Annotated Student Sample: “Hints of the Homoerotic” by Leo Davis
  • 17.5 Writing Process: Thinking Critically and Writing Persuasively About Images
  • 17.6 Editing Focus: Descriptive Diction
  • 17.7 Evaluation: Relationship Between Analysis and Image
  • 17.8 Spotlight on … Video and Film
  • 17.9 Portfolio: Interplay Between Text and Image
  • 18.1 Mixing Genres and Modes
  • 18.2 Multimodal Trailblazer: Torika Bolatagici
  • 18.3 Glance at Genre: Genre, Audience, Purpose, Organization
  • 18.4 Annotated Sample Reading: “Celebrating a Win-Win” by Alexandra Dapolito Dunn
  • 18.5 Writing Process: Create a Multimodal Advocacy Project
  • 18.6 Evaluation: Transitions
  • 18.7 Spotlight on . . . Technology
  • 18.8 Portfolio: Multimodalism
  • 19.1 Writing, Speaking, and Activism
  • 19.2 Podcast Trailblazer: Alice Wong
  • 19.3 Glance at Genre: Language Performance and Visuals
  • 19.4 Annotated Student Sample: “Are New DOT Regulations Discriminatory?” by Zain A. Kumar
  • 19.5 Writing Process: Writing to Speak
  • 19.6 Evaluation: Bridging Writing and Speaking
  • 19.7 Spotlight on … Delivery/Public Speaking
  • 19.8 Portfolio: Everyday Rhetoric, Rhetoric Every Day
  • 20.1 Thinking Critically about Your Semester
  • 20.2 Reflection Trailblazer: Sandra Cisneros
  • 20.3 Glance at Genre: Purpose and Structure
  • 20.4 Annotated Sample Reading: “Don’t Expect Congrats” by Dale Trumbore
  • 20.5 Writing Process: Looking Back, Looking Forward
  • 20.6 Editing Focus: Pronouns
  • 20.7 Evaluation: Evaluating Self-Reflection
  • 20.8 Spotlight on … Pronouns in Context

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

  • Integrate your ideas with ideas from related sources.
  • Locate, compile, and evaluate primary, secondary, and tertiary research materials related to your topic.

A bibliography is a list of the sources you use when doing research for a project or composition. Named for the Greek terms biblion , meaning “book,” and graphos , meaning “something written,” bibliographies today compile more than just books. Often they include academic journal articles, periodicals, websites, and multimedia texts such as videos. A bibliography alone, at the end of a research work, also may be labeled “References” or “Works Cited,” depending on the citation style you are using. The bibliography lists information about each source, including author, title, publisher, and publication date. Each set of source information, or each individual entry, listed in the bibliography or noted within the body of the composition is called a citation .

Bibliographies include formal documentation entries that serve several purposes:

  • They help you organize your own research on a topic and narrow your topic, thesis, or argument.
  • They help you build knowledge.
  • They strengthen your arguments by offering proof that your research comes from trustworthy sources.
  • They enable readers to do more research on the topic.
  • They create a community of researchers, thus adding to the ongoing conversation on the research topic.
  • They give credit to authors and sources from which you draw and support your ideas.

Annotated bibliography expand on typical bibliographies by including information beyond the basic citation information and commentary on the source. Although they present each formal documentation entry as it would appear in a source list such as a works cited page, an annotated bibliography includes two types of additional information. First, following the documentation entry is a short description of the work, including information about its authors and how it was or can be used in a research project. Second is an evaluation of the work’s validity, reliability, and/or bias. The purpose of the annotation is to summarize, assess, and reflect on the source. Annotations can be both explanatory and analytical, helping readers understand the research you used to formulate your argument. An annotated bibliography can also help you demonstrate that you have read the sources you will potentially cite in your work. It is a tool to assist in the gathering of these sources and serves as a repository. You won’t necessarily use all the sources cited in your annotated bibliography in your final work, but gathering, evaluating, and documenting these sources is an integral part of the research process.

Compiling Sources

Research projects and compositions, particularly argumentative or position texts, require you to collect sources, devise a thesis, and then support that thesis through analysis of the evidence, including sources, you have compiled. With access to the Internet and an academic library, you will rarely encounter a shortage of sources for any given topic or argument. The real challenge may be sorting through all the available sources and determining which will be useful.

The first step in completing an annotated bibliography is to locate and compile sources to use in your research project. At the beginning, you do not need to be highly selective in this process, as you may not ultimately use every source. Therefore, gather any materials—including books, websites, professional journals, periodicals, and documents—that you think may contain valuable ideas about your topic. But where do you find sources that relate to your argument? And how do you choose which sources to use? This section will help you answer those questions and choose sources that will both enhance and challenge your claim, allowing you to confront contradictory evidence and synthesize ideas, or combine ideas from various sources, to produce a well-constructed original argument. See Research Process: Accessing and Recording Information for more information about sources and synthesizing information.

Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Sources

In your research, you likely will use three types of sources: primary, secondary, and tertiary. During any research project, your use of these sources will depend on your topic, your thesis, and, ultimately, how you intend to use them. In all likelihood, you will need to seek out all three.

Primary Sources

Primary sources allow you to create your own analysis with the appropriate rhetorical approach. In the humanities disciplines, primary sources include original documents, data, images, and other compositions that provide a firsthand account of an event or a time in history. Typically, primary sources are created close in time to the event or period they represent and may include journal or diary entries, newspaper articles, government records, photographs, artworks, maps, speeches, films, and interviews. In scientific disciplines, primary sources provide information such as scientific discoveries, raw data, experimental and research results, and clinical trial findings. They may include published studies, scientific journal articles, and proceedings of meeting or conferences.

Primary sources also can include student-conducted interviews and surveys. Other primary sources may be found on websites such as the Library of Congress , the Historical Text Archive , government websites, and article databases. In all academic areas, primary sources are fact based, not interpretive. That is, they may be commenting on or interpreting something else, but they themselves are the source. For example, an article written during the 1840s condemning the practice of enslavement may interpret events occurring then, but it is a primary source document of its time.

Secondary Sources

Secondary sources , unlike primary sources, are interpretive. They often provide a secondhand account of an event or research results, analyze or clarify primary sources and scientific discoveries, or interpret a creative work. These sources are important for supporting or challenging your argument, addressing counterarguments, and synthesizing ideas. Secondary sources in the humanities disciplines include biographies, literary criticism, and reviews of the fine arts, among other sources. In the scientific disciplines, secondary sources encompass analyses of scientific studies or clinical trials, reviews of experimental results, and publications about the significance of studies or experiments. In some instances, the same item can serve as both a primary and a secondary source, depending on how it is used. For example, a journal article in which the author analyzes the impact of a clinical trial would serve as a secondary source. But if you instead count the number of journal articles that feature reports on a particular clinical trial, you might use them as primary sources because they would then serve as data points.

Table 14.1 provides examples of how primary and secondary sources often relate to one another.

Tertiary Sources

In addition to primary and secondary sources, you can use a tertiary source to summarize or digest information from primary and/or secondary sources. Because tertiary sources often condense information, they usually do not provide enough information on their own to support claims. However, they often contain a variety of citations that can help you identify and locate valuable primary and secondary sources. Researchers often use tertiary sources to find general, historical, or background information as well as a broad overview of a topic. Tertiary sources frequently placed in the secondary-source category include reference materials such as encyclopedias, textbooks, manuals, digests, and bibliographies. For more discussion on sources, see The Research Process: Where to Look for Existing Sources .

Authoritative Sources

Not all sources are created equally. You likely know already that you must vet sources—especially those you find on the Internet—for legitimacy, validity, and the presence of bias. For example, you probably know that the website Wikipedia is not considered a trustworthy source because it is open to user editing. This accessibility means the site’s authority cannot be established and, therefore, the source cannot effectively support or refute a claim you are attempting to make, though you can use it at times to point you to reliable sources. While so-called bad sources may be easy to spot, researchers may have more difficulty discriminating between sources that are authoritative and those that pose concerns. In fact, you may encounter a general hierarchy of sources in your compilation. Understanding this hierarchy can help you identify which sources to use and how to use them in your research.

Peer-Reviewed Academic Publications

This first tier of sources—the gold standard of research—includes academic literature, which consists of textbooks, essays, journals, articles, reports, and scholarly books. As scholarly works, these sources usually provide strong evidence for an author’s claims by reflecting rigorous research and scrutiny by experts in the field. These types of sources are most often published, sponsored, or supported by academic institutions, often a university or an academic association such as the Modern Language Association (MLA) . Such associations exist to encourage research and collaboration within their discipline, mostly through publications and conferences. To be published, academic works must pass through a rigorous process called peer review , in which scholars in the field evaluate it anonymously. You can find peer-reviewed academic sources in library catalogs, in article databases, and through Google Scholar online. Sometimes these sources require a subscription to access, but students often receive access through their school.

Academic articles, particularly in the social and other sciences, generally have most or all of the following sections, a structure you might recognize if you have written lab reports in science classes:

  • Abstract . This short summary covers the purpose, methods, and findings of the paper. It may discuss briefly the implications or significance of the research.
  • Introduction . The main part of the paper begins with an introduction that presents the issue or main idea addressed by the research, establishes its importance, and poses the author’s thesis.
  • Review . Next comes an overview of previous academic research related to the topic, including a synthesis that makes a case for why the research is important and necessary.
  • Data and Methods . The main part of the original research begins with a description of the data and methods used, including what data or information the author collected and how the author used it.
  • Results . Data and methods are followed by results, detailing the significant findings from the experiment or research.
  • Conclusion . In the conclusion, the author discusses the results in the context of the bigger picture, explaining the author’s position on how these results relate to the earlier review of literature and their significance in the broad scope of the topic. The author also may propose future research needs or point out unanswered questions.
  • Works Cited or References . The paper ends with a list of all sources the author used in the research, including the review of literature. This often-overlooked portion of the composition is critical in evaluating the credibility of any paper that involves research.

Credible Nonacademic Sources

These sources, including articles, books, and reports, are second in authority only to peer-reviewed academic publications. Credible nonacademic sources are often about current events or discoveries not yet reviewed in academic circles and often provide a wider-ranging outlook on your topic. Peer-reviewed texts tend to be narrow and specific, whereas nonacademic texts from well-researched sources are often more accessible and can offer a broader perspective. These three major categories generally provide quality sources:

  • Information, white papers, and reports from government and international agencies such as the United Nations , the World Health Organization , and the United States government
  • Longer articles and reports from major newspapers, broadcast media, and magazines that are well regarded in academic circles, including the New York Times , the Wall Street Journal , the BBC, and the Economist
  • Nonacademic books written by authors with expertise and credentials, who support their ideas with well-sourced information

To find nonacademic sources, search for .gov or .org sites related to your topic. A word of caution, however: know that sources ending in .org are often advocacy sites and, consequently, inherently biased toward whatever cause they are advocating. You also can look at academic article databases and search articles from major newspapers and magazines, both of which can be found online.

Short Informational Texts from Credible Websites and Periodicals

The next most authoritative sources are shorter newspaper articles or other pieces on credible websites. These articles tend to be limited in scope, as their authors report on a single issue or event. Although they do not often provide in-depth analysis, they can be a source of credible facts to support your argument. Alternatively, they can point you in the direction of more detailed or rigorous sources that will enhance your research by tracing the original texts or sources on which the articles are based. Usually, you can find these sources through Internet searches, but sometimes you may have difficulty determining their credibility.

Judging Credibility

To judge credibility, begin by looking for the author or organization publishing the information. Most periodical compositions contain a short “About the Author” blurb at the beginning or end of the article and often include a link to the author’s credentials or to more information about them. Using this information, you can begin to determine their expertise and, potentially, any agenda the author or organization may have. For example, expect a piece discussing side effects of medical marijuana written by a doctor to present more expertise than the same piece written by a political lobbyist. You also can determine whether bias is present; for example, the organization may promote a particular way of thinking or have an agenda that will influence the content and language of the composition. In general, look for articles written with neutral expertise.

The CRAAP Test

You may find the CRAAP test a helpful and easy-to-remember tool for testing credibility. This checklist provides you with a method for evaluating any source for both reliability and credibility. CRAAP stands for Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose. The CRAAP test, as shown in Table 14.2 , includes questions that can be asked of any source.

Sources with Clear Bias or Unclear Authority

The final type of source encompasses nearly everything else. Although they cannot be considered credible or valid to support your argument or claims, these sources are not necessarily useless. Especially when you are compiling sources at the beginning of a project, those with clear bias or unclear authority can be useful as you explore all facets of a topic, including positions within an argument. These sources also can help you identify topics on which to base your search terms and can even point you toward more credible sources.

Locating Sources

Academic article databases are the best starting places for finding sources. There are too many databases to cover them all in this chapter, but you would be wise to familiarize yourself with those to which you have access through your school or program. For further information on databases, see The Research Process: Where to Look for Existing Sources . In the long run, this knowledge will save you a good deal of time and a possible headache.

You will want to start with your college library website, which includes access to sources paid for by your institution. As a student, you should be able to access these quickly and easily. Another popular and wide-ranging database is Google Scholar . Google Scholar is helpful for finding sources across a wide range of topics. One drawback, however, is that it catalogues nearly all disciplines, so the results can be vast and unfocused. Therefore, when using Google Scholar, be as specific as possible, and add your academic discipline as a keyword. For example, when searching for information on climate change, add the keyword “environment” or “politics” depending on your research angle; otherwise, the results will include all disciplines and potentially bury the articles you seek. Google Scholar also has a feature labeled “Cited by,” which shows you other papers that cite the article in their review of literature relate to the topic. Writing Process: Informing and Analyzing contains more information about focusing your searches. Like clues to a mystery, one search can lead you to a wealth of related articles.

When you are able to identify potential sources by reading their abstracts or using Google Scholar, you may at times land on a publisher’s website that requires you to pay to read the full article. When you find yourself in a situation such as this, record information about the article—author(s), article title, journal title, publication date. It is likely that you will be able to use your school’s database to access the article. For information about other databases, consult The Research Process: Where to Look for Existing Sources .

Just as writing is recursive , requiring you to go back and forth between different stages of the process, you will likely return to your annotated bibliography at different points. You may begin by looking for sources related to your topic, or you may choose or narrow your topic after an initial database search for sources. If your project has a variety of possible topics, you may even start with a current issue of a leading journal in the field, find an article that interests you, and use that article to shape your topic selection. As a bonus, you will have your first reputable source. Later, as you refine your thesis, reasoning, and evidence, you may find yourself returning to your search for sources. Consider this hypothetical situation: You are developing an argument that examines the risk factors of childhood trauma that surface in later life. As you analyze the data from your sources, it occurs to you to find out whether any documented correlation exists between early trauma and resilience. So you return to Google Scholar and your university’s academic database to find more research based on this idea in order to revise your analysis by adding the new viewpoint.

One difficulty may be homing in on the keywords that will lead you to the sources you need. At this point, sources from the last two categories discussed may come into play: short pieces from credible websites and newspapers and other texts with clear bias or unclear authority. Less credible sources may lead you to better ones, particularly if you can identify the keywords used in them and then apply those keywords within academic databases. For more on developing useful keywords, consult The Research Process: Where to Look for Existing Sources .

Boolean Operators

Keyword searches can become frustrating, either yielding so much information that it seems impossible to sort through or narrowing the search so much that you miss important potential sources. One way to remedy this situation is to become familiar with Boolean operators , the basis of mathematical sets and database logic. Rather than searching with natural language only, you can use these operators to focus your search. The three basic Boolean operators are AND , OR , and NOT . Using these operators helps you search by linking necessary information, excluding irrelevant information, and focusing information. For example, if you have some pieces of information from tertiary sources, you may be able to use Boolean operators to find additional useful sources. A search string such as artificial intelligence (title) AND Buiten (author) AND 2019 (year) can yield the exact journal source you need. Here is a brief review of how to use the three operators:

  • Use AND to narrow search results and tell the database to include all search terms in finding sources. If you want to find sources that include all of the search terms entered, use the AND operator. In Figure 14.11 , the darkest blue triangular section in the center of the Venn diagram represents the result set for this search, including all three terms. In many databases, including Google, AND is implied between each word. To exclude AND, use quotation marks. For example, Google would translate the search term ethics artificial intelligence as ethics AND artificial AND intelligence . To make your phrases more specific, use the AND operator combined with quotation marks: “ethics” AND “artificial intelligence” .
  • Use OR to connect two or more similar concepts and broaden your results, telling the search engine that any of your search terms can appear in the results it gives you. The Boolean operator OR is represented by Figure 14.12 . Using the OR operator gives you a very large set of results.
  • Use NOT to exclude results from a search. This operator can help you narrow your search, telling the search engine to ignore names or words you do not want included in your results. For example, if you know you don’t want self-driving cars in your search results, you might search for “artificial intelligence” NOT “self-driving cars” .

Choosing Sources

Choosing sources to include in your annotated bibliography may seem overwhelming. However, if you can find a few good academic articles as a starting point, use them to guide your research. Academic articles are efficient, scrutinized by experts in their fields, and organized in ways that aid readers in identifying key findings that relate to their argument. The following tips will help you choose solid sources to guide your research:

  • Look for relevant scholarly articles. Even the briefest Google search can yield an overwhelming amount of content. Sift through it by looking first through academic databases to find high-quality sources relevant to your research.
  • Read abstracts. As you sift through scholarly articles, you can get a good idea of what each one is about by reading the abstract. It includes the findings and will show you in about 100 words whether the paper holds relevance to your research.
  • Skim. Once you have determined that an article may be useful, skim each section to glean the information you need. Closer and more extensive reading can come later as you develop and support your argument.
  • Avoid getting bogged down in technical information or industry-specific jargon. The benefit of reading peer-reviewed research is that you know the reviewers have determined it to be solidly constructed. Therefore, even if you don’t understand some portions completely, you can still feel confident about using relevant information from the article.
  • Work smarter by using the research provided. Once you have identified an article that is helpful to your research, use it to find more like it. Search for other publications by the authors; researchers often spend much of their careers researching one overarching topic or theme. Use the review of literature to identify related articles that may add to your research. You can also use the article’s bibliography to find additional sources. Or reverse engineer the process: use article databases to find other articles that cite the article in their literature reviews.

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Social Networking, Social Media: An Annotated Bibliography

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The Communication and Complex Emergencies Project is a collaboration between the University of Adelaide’s Applied Communication Collaborative Research Unit (ACCRU) and the Australian Civil-Military Centre (ACMC). The project’s main objectives are to highlight the role of communication, including new and social media, in complex emergencies and in support of humanitarian assistance. The work focuses on ‘what we know’ and in doing so maps out a broad array of knowledge while focusing on the functions, strengths and limitations associated with various forms of media, from social networking and social media to radio, television, print and video. The work has a number of outputs that are designed to support each other, including: •Social Networking, Social Media: an Annotated Bibliography •Social Networking, Social Media: Issues Paper •Communication and Complex Emergencies: Resource Guide.

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What is an Annotated Bibliography?

What is an Annotated Bibliography?  from  Kimbel Library  on  Vimeo .

Annotated Bibliography Template

  • MLA Annotated Bibliography Template

Please note the Word document on this page are TEMPLATE. It has the framework required for an MLA annotated bibliography assigned paper. You should be able to download the template and then fill it with your own information and variable parts.

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  • How to create an MLA style annotated bibliography

MLA Style Annotated Bibliography | Format & Examples

Published on July 13, 2021 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on June 14, 2022.

An annotated bibliography is a special assignment that lists sources in a way similar to the MLA Works Cited list, but providing an annotation for each source giving extra information.

You might be assigned an annotated bibliography as part of the research process for a paper , or as an individual assignment.

MLA provides guidelines for writing and formatting your annotated bibliography. An example of a typical annotation is shown below.

Kenny, Anthony. A New History of Western Philosophy: In Four Parts . Oxford UP, 2010.

You can create and manage your annotated bibliography with Scribbr’s free MLA Citation Generator. Choose your source type, retrieve the details, and click “Add annotation.”

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Instantly correct all language mistakes in your text.

Be assured that you'll submit flawless writing. Upload your document to correct all your mistakes.

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Table of contents

Mla format for annotated bibliographies, length and content of annotations, frequently asked questions about annotated bibliographies.

The list should be titled either “Annotated Bibliography” or “Annotated List of Works Cited.” You may be told which title to use; “bibliography” is normally used for a list that also includes sources you didn’t cite in your paper or that isn’t connected to a paper at all.

Sources are usually organized alphabetically , like in a normal Works Cited list, but can instead be organized chronologically or by subject depending on the purpose of the assignment.

The source information is presented and formatted in the same way as in a normal Works Cited entry:

  • Double-spaced
  • Left-aligned
  • 0.5 inch hanging indent

The annotation follows on the next line, also double-spaced and left-aligned. The whole annotation is indented 1 inch from the left margin to distinguish it from the 0.5 inch hanging indent of the source entry.

  • If the annotation is only one paragraph long, there’s no additional indent for the start of the paragraph.
  • If there are two or more paragraphs, indent the first line of each paragraph , including the first, an additional half-inch (so those lines are indented 1.5 inches in total).

MLA annotated bibliography

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

MLA gives some guidelines for writing the annotations themselves. They cover how concise you need to be and what exactly you should write about your sources.

Phrases or full sentences?

MLA states that it’s acceptable to use concise phrases rather than grammatically complete sentences in your annotations.

While you shouldn’t write this way in your main text, it’s acceptable in annotations because the subject of the phrase is clear from the context. It’s also fine to use full sentences instead, if you prefer.

  • Broad history of Western philosophy from the ancient Greeks to the present day.
  • Kenny presents a broad history of Western philosophy from the ancient Greeks to the present day.

Always use full sentences if your instructor requires you to do so, though.

How many paragraphs?

MLA states that annotations usually aim to be concise and thus are only one paragraph long. However, it’s acceptable to write multiple-paragraph annotations if you need to.

If in doubt, aim to keep your annotations short, but use multiple paragraphs if longer annotations are required for your assignment.

Descriptive, evaluative, or reflective annotations?

MLA states that annotations can describe or evaluate sources, or do both. They shouldn’t go into too much depth quoting or discussing minor details from the source, but aim to write about it in broad terms.

You’ll usually write either descriptive , evaluative , or reflective annotations . If you’re not sure what kind of annotations you need, consult your assignment guidelines or ask your instructor.

An annotated bibliography is an assignment where you collect sources on a specific topic and write an annotation for each source. An annotation is a short text that describes and sometimes evaluates the source.

Any credible sources on your topic can be included in an annotated bibliography . The exact sources you cover will vary depending on the assignment, but you should usually focus on collecting journal articles and scholarly books . When in doubt, utilize the CRAAP test !

Each annotation in an annotated bibliography is usually between 50 and 200 words long. Longer annotations may be divided into paragraphs .

The content of the annotation varies according to your assignment. An annotation can be descriptive, meaning it just describes the source objectively; evaluative, meaning it assesses its usefulness; or reflective, meaning it explains how the source will be used in your own research .

No, in an MLA annotated bibliography , you can write short phrases instead of full sentences to keep your annotations concise. You can still choose to use full sentences instead, though.

Use full sentences in your annotations if your instructor requires you to, and always use full sentences in the main text of your paper .

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

Caulfield, J. (2022, June 14). MLA Style Annotated Bibliography | Format & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved February 12, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/mla/mla-annotated-bibliography/

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Annotated Bibliography of Social Media

  • Author: arsalan
  • Posted on: 30 Oct 2018
  • Paper Type: Free Essay
  • Subject: English
  • Wordcount: 1378 words
  • Published: 30th Oct 2018

The usage of social media by employees should be regulated because it can reduce an organization’s productivity, increase the level of gossip and create conflicts at place workplace, reduces interpersonal relationships in a workplace and, therefore, it is likely to affect employees performance.

Annotated Bibliography 

Adzovie, D. E., Isaac, E. N., & Janet, A. K. (2017). Influence of Facebook usage on employee 

Productivity: A case of the University of Cape coast staff. African Journal of Business Management, 11 (7), 2-35 .

The article discusses the influence of facebook usage on employee’s productivity. It highlighted that the rise of social media how organizations utilize social media to build employees in order to improve performance. It illustrated that social media has provided platform for engagement where employees can positively utilize to improve productivity. It suggests that social media usage at workplace should be regulated or control for it not to interfere with employee’s performance. It went further to illustrate that without control, it can reduce employee’s engagement which is likely to affect general organization’s performance. The authors are assistant professors of Journalism and Mass communications at the University of Cape and have written several academic journals on social media usage and its effect to marketing. However, the article is relevant to the thesis and the research since it provides detailed information on how social media affect employee’s performance, which is a major point for this research.

Aguenza, B. B., Amer, H. A.-K., & Ahmad, P. M. (2012). Social Media and Productivity in the 

Workplace: Challenges and Constraints. Interdisciplinary Journal of Research in Business, 12 (5), 12-30.

The article discusses the impact of social media on productivity, challenges, and constraints, which employees undergo at work. It concludes that social media can negatively affect productivity since employees spend too much of their times on social media rather than on their daily assignments. It makes employees to leaves a lot of jobs pending and therefore, reduces the rate of job delivery which directly affects an organization performance. It affects organization’s profit and market share if not utilized appropriate. The article went further to state minority social media activities at workplace is a challenge and therefore, it can addressed effectively through policy formulation. The authors of the article are lecturers at the University Al Faisal University and hold PhD in different field of study. The authors have also published several journals on business and communication therefore; the article has weight and can be used to complete the research. The article is relevant to the thesis and can be used to complete the research since it provides detailed information on the effect of social media on employee’s productivity. It highlights the problem of social media and how it should be addressed.

Broughton, A., Tom, H., Ben, H., & Annette, C. (2010). Workplaces and Social Networking: 

The Implications for Employment Relations. Institute for Employment Studies, 2-30.

The article focuses on the implication of social media to employee engagement at work. It states that social media creates a gap among employees hence reduces the level of employees’ engagement. It illustrates that employees are busy on social media charting and reading of updates instead of network and consulting on issues affecting an organization. The authors of the article are experts in the field of communication and consultants in communication and social media marketing. They have conducted several researches and made publications as well. The article is relevant to the thesis and provides detailed material which can be used to complete the research. It analysis impact of social media usage at workplace and implication which are needed to complete the research and they are also relevant to the thesis.

Ferreira, A., & Plessis, d. T. (2013). Effect of online social networking employee productivity. 

​ Peer Reviewed Article, 4 (1), 1-30.

The article discusses the effect of social media on employees’ productivity. It argues that social media reduces productivity since it makes employees lazy and reluctant which makes several employees not to focus on the goals of an organization. It went further to state that the fact that employees spend a lot of time on social media affect productivity since assignments will not be completed on time as required and it can affect and organization negatively. The authors are experts in the field of technology and communication. Ferreira is a lecturer at the University of Johannesburg and head of Centre for Information and Knowledge Management at the same University, while Plessis is also lecturer at head of Department of Information and Knowledge Management at the University of Johannesburg. It is relevant since it highlighted the impact of social media on organization’s productivity and also provides details information how social media can be utilize effective which is needed to complete the research.

Haddud, A., John, D., & Preetinder, P. G. (2016). Exploring the Impact of Internal Social Media

Usage of Employee. Journal of Social Media for Organizations, 3 (1), 1-45.

The article discusses how social media can be used to empower employees and make good use of it for productivity. It looked at the personal effect of social media to employees’ behavior and how such behavior can affect an organization. The article presented that social media is addictive and because of that employees can easily violate cyber security hence putting an organization network infrastructure in jeopardy. It also discusses the role of social media in fostering employees’ engagement which can increase organization’s productivity. The authors are known writers and have published several journals on social media and communication techniques. Haddud has Masters in communication and technology while Preetinder has a PhD. in technology management and they have also done other publications which are being used in different fields. The article is relevant to thesis since it discusses the role of social media in foster employees’ engagement which is required to complete the research.

Leftheriotis, L., & Giannakos, M. N. (2014). Using social media for work: Losing your time or 

Improving your work. The computer in Human Behavior, 12 (2), 2-38.

The article discusses how social media is used at work to meet certain expectations. It argues that social media can be used to improve organization performance through proper usage and implementation of strict policy to avoid being misused by employees. The authors are experts in social media and lecturers at Ionian University, in Greece and Norwegian University of Science and Technology respectively. It is relevant to the thesis since it highlighted both negative and positive impact of social media on employees.

Siddique, T. (2015). Use of Social Networking Sites at Workplace in Bangladesh: Employees’ 

​ Perspective. Global Disclosure of Economics and Business, 4 (2), 2-25.

The article analyzes the impact of social media usage in Bangladesh and its effect the general behavior of employees. It provides an overview of what should be done to limit the misusage of social media at a workplace. The author of the article, Siddique is an assistant professor at the Islamic University in the department of journalism and communication and therefore, he understands the impact of social media on employees. The article is relevant to the thesis because it provides detailed information about the impact of social media and what should be done to turn it into productivity.

Sidek, S. (2017). Social Media Impact on Employees Productivity at Workplace. Asia Journal of 

​ Information technology, 6 (2), 32-38.

The article discusses how social media helps in improving productivity and impact on employees’ performance. It illustrated proper usage of social media through marketing and network to sell an organization’s goals or products is likely to increase customers’ hence high sales return. It narrated that social media can be used by an organization as the best media of communication since it is affordable and efficient and therefore, it is likely to improve an organization’s performance in the market. The author has a Ph.D. and a lecturer at the University Teknikal in Malaysia and also the head of Center for language and Human Development. It is relevant because it analyzes the impact of social media on employees’ productivity and its effects to sales return which is needed to complete the research.

Adzovie, D. E., Isaac, E. N., & Janet, A. K. (2017). Influence of Facebook usage on employee

productivity: A case of the University of Cape coast staff.  African Journal of Business Management, 11  (7), 2-35.

Aguenza, B. B., Amer, H. A.-K., & Ahmad, P. M. (2012). Social Media and Productivity in the

Workplace: Challenges and Constraints.  Interdisciplinary Journal of Research in Business, 12  (5), 12-30.

Broughton, A., Tom, H., Ben, H., & Annette, C. (2010). Workplaces and Social Networking:

The Implications for Employment Relations.  Institute for Employment Studies , 2-30.

Ferreira, A., & Plessis, d. T. (2013). Effect of online social networking employee productivity.

Peer Reviewed Article, 4  (1), 1-30.

Usage of Employee.  Journal of Social Media for Organizations, 3  (1), 1-45.

Leftheriotis, L., & Giannakos, M. N. (2014). Using social media for work: Losing your time or

improving your work.  The computer in Human Behavior, 12  (2), 2-38.

Siddique, T. (2015). Use of Social Networking Sites at Workplace in Bangladesh: Employees’

Perspective.  Global Disclosure of Economics and Business, 4  (2), 2-25.

Sidek, S. (2017). Social Media Impact on Employees Productivity at Workplace.  Asia Journal of 

Information technology, 6  (2), 32-38.

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How to Prepare an Annotated Bibliography: The Annotated Bibliography

  • The Annotated Bibliography
  • Fair Use of this Guide

Explanation, Process, Directions, and Examples

What is an annotated bibliography.

An annotated bibliography is a list of citations to books, articles, and documents. Each citation is followed by a brief (usually about 150 words) descriptive and evaluative paragraph, the annotation. The purpose of the annotation is to inform the reader of the relevance, accuracy, and quality of the sources cited.

Annotations vs. Abstracts

Abstracts are the purely descriptive summaries often found at the beginning of scholarly journal articles or in periodical indexes. Annotations are descriptive and critical; they may describe the author's point of view, authority, or clarity and appropriateness of expression.

The Process

Creating an annotated bibliography calls for the application of a variety of intellectual skills: concise exposition, succinct analysis, and informed library research.

First, locate and record citations to books, periodicals, and documents that may contain useful information and ideas on your topic. Briefly examine and review the actual items. Then choose those works that provide a variety of perspectives on your topic.

Cite the book, article, or document using the appropriate style.

Write a concise annotation that summarizes the central theme and scope of the book or article. Include one or more sentences that (a) evaluate the authority or background of the author, (b) comment on the intended audience, (c) compare or contrast this work with another you have cited, or (d) explain how this work illuminates your bibliography topic.

Critically Appraising the Book, Article, or Document

For guidance in critically appraising and analyzing the sources for your bibliography, see How to Critically Analyze Information Sources . For information on the author's background and views, ask at the reference desk for help finding appropriate biographical reference materials and book review sources.

Choosing the Correct Citation Style

Check with your instructor to find out which style is preferred for your class. Online citation guides for both the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the American Psychological Association (APA) styles are linked from the Library's Citation Management page .

Sample Annotated Bibliography Entries

The following example uses APA style ( Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association , 7th edition, 2019) for the journal citation:

Waite, L., Goldschneider, F., & Witsberger, C. (1986). Nonfamily living and the erosion of traditional family orientations among young adults. American Sociological Review, 51 (4), 541-554. The authors, researchers at the Rand Corporation and Brown University, use data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Young Women and Young Men to test their hypothesis that nonfamily living by young adults alters their attitudes, values, plans, and expectations, moving them away from their belief in traditional sex roles. They find their hypothesis strongly supported in young females, while the effects were fewer in studies of young males. Increasing the time away from parents before marrying increased individualism, self-sufficiency, and changes in attitudes about families. In contrast, an earlier study by Williams cited below shows no significant gender differences in sex role attitudes as a result of nonfamily living.

This example uses MLA style ( MLA Handbook , 9th edition, 2021) for the journal citation. For additional annotation guidance from MLA, see 5.132: Annotated Bibliographies .

Waite, Linda J., et al. "Nonfamily Living and the Erosion of Traditional Family Orientations Among Young Adults." American Sociological Review, vol. 51, no. 4, 1986, pp. 541-554. The authors, researchers at the Rand Corporation and Brown University, use data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Young Women and Young Men to test their hypothesis that nonfamily living by young adults alters their attitudes, values, plans, and expectations, moving them away from their belief in traditional sex roles. They find their hypothesis strongly supported in young females, while the effects were fewer in studies of young males. Increasing the time away from parents before marrying increased individualism, self-sufficiency, and changes in attitudes about families. In contrast, an earlier study by Williams cited below shows no significant gender differences in sex role attitudes as a result of nonfamily living.

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Social media use and self-concept mla annotated bibliography sample.

Lesley J. Vos

The following annotated bibliography sample serves as a guide for crafting your own academic or research references. It goes over essential components that detail the main insights, methodologies, and contributions of each source. Adapting this framework to reflect the specific nature and themes of your research will enhance it even more. Remember, the objective is to summarize the sources in a way that demonstrates their relevance and importance to your chosen topic.

• Ellison, Nicole B., et al. “The Benefits of Facebook ‘Friends:’ Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 12, no. 4, 2007, pp. 1143-1168.

Ellison and her team investigate how social network sites, particularly Facebook, influence social capital among college students. Aimed at educators and sociologists, the study argues that online interactions can have a positive impact on users’ well-being and satisfaction.

• Gonzales, Amy L., and Jeffrey T. Hancock. “Mirror, Mirror on my Facebook Wall: Effects of Exposure to Facebook on Self-Esteem.” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, vol. 14, no. 1-2, 2011, pp. 79-83.

Focusing on self-esteem, Gonzales and Hancock examine how prolonged exposure to Facebook influences users’ perceptions of themselves. Writing for a general audience, they contend that Facebook can serve as a reflective mirror, often enhancing one’s self-view.

• Turkle, Sherry. “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.” Basic Books, 2011.

Turkle explores the paradoxical nature of connectivity in the digital age, suggesting that while we are more connected than ever, we also feel more isolated. Aimed at a broad readership, the book delves into the implications of heavy social media use on individual identity and relationships.

• Valkenburg, Patti M., et al. “Social Consequences of the Internet for Adolescents: A Decade of Research.” Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 18, no. 1, 2009, pp. 1-5.

Valkenburg and colleagues review a decade of research on the impacts of the Internet, particularly social media, on adolescent self-concept. Designed for educators and parents, the study emphasizes the dual role of the Internet in shaping adolescents’ self-perception and social relationships.

• Chua, Theresa H., and Dion H. Chang. “Follow Me and Like My Beautiful Selfies: Singapore Teenage Girls’ Engagement in Self-Presentation and Peer Comparison on Social Media.” Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 55, 2016, pp. 190-197.

Chua and Chang shed light on the culture of selfies among Singaporean teenage girls, highlighting the intricacies of self-presentation and peer comparison on social platforms. The study, aimed at sociologists and educators, underscores the significant influence of social media on self-concept in adolescence.

• Manago, Adriana M., et al. “Facebook Involvement, Objectified Body Consciousness, Body Shame, and Sexual Assertiveness in College Women and Men.” Sex Roles, vol. 72, no. 1-2, 2015, pp. 1-14.

The authors delve into the relationship between Facebook use, body consciousness, and sexual assertiveness. Intended for a scholarly audience, their findings reveal the complex interplay between online presentations of self and offline perceptions.

• Forest, Amanda L., and Joanne V. Wood. “When Social Networking Is Not Working: Individuals with Low Self-Esteem Recognize but Do Not Reap the Benefits of Self-Disclosure on Facebook.” Psychological Science, vol. 23, no. 3, 2012, pp. 295-302.

Forest and Wood discuss the paradoxical effects of Facebook for those with low self-esteem. Writing for psychologists and general readers, they argue that while social media provides a platform for self-disclosure, not everyone benefits from it equally.

• Kross, Ethan, et al. “Facebook Use Predicts Declines in Subjective Well-Being in Young Adults.” PloS one, vol. 8, no. 8, 2013, e69841.

Kross and his team explore how prolonged Facebook usage correlates with well-being in young adults. Targeted at a general audience, their findings caution about the potential pitfalls of excessive social media consumption on self-perception and overall happiness.

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Learning Objectives

  • Gain an awareness and understanding of various contexts for their chosen field of study and its associated professions
  • Evaluate relevant information based on selected validity criteria

An annotated bibliography is a list of resources for a particular subject (the bibliography) that includes descriptive and evaluative information (the annotations). Each bibliographic entry provides the information needed for someone to locate the resource. The annotation briefly explains the purpose of the resource, for whom it would be useful, and how valid it is. In other words, some nice person has compiled a list of resources around a particular topic and applied validity criteria to them to save other people time. Now, just imagine that you’re in the position of needing to find resources with relevant, credible information in order to move forward on a project. You reach out to your resident expert for help, and he e-mails you a list of links. That’s it–just a list of links. Wouldn’t you rather have a list of resources that explains what they are and evaluates their usefulness?

The following reading provides a good overview of annotated bibliographies: Annotated Bibliographies.

The Annotated Bibliography in CRIT 602

The purpose of your annotated bibliography will be to provide related resources to others with the same critical inquiry question that you are pursuing. It will evaluate three different types of sources: Professional Organizations, Social Media, and Information Resources. In other words, these three different types of sources are three different contexts in which you find information about your field of study.

If you need help formatting your bibliography or how to evaluate your sources, the University of Maryland Library has a useful website .

First, you will perform a search using appropriate search terms for your critical inquiry question in each context (organization, social media, information resources).  Second, you will evaluate your sources.  To help with this, ask yourself the following questions: How relevant to the question at hand are these resources? Are they current? Are they credible enough for you to base important decisions on? Do these websites you’ve found pass the test for C urrency, R elevance, A uthority, A ccuracy, and P urpose? Is the information credible, and does it contribute to your understanding of the larger context for your field of study and its associated professions? Answers to these questions should be included in your annotated bibliography for each source.

The Purpose of Writing an Annotated Bibliography

You may ask: what is the point if I’m never going to actually write one in a job situation?

The annotated bibliography has many academic uses- primarily as a way for the instructor to gauge your ability to locate and evaluate sources, write objectively about information, use information legally and ethically, and think critically about your topic and evidence needed. Here is a excerpt from Lumen Learning which explains the purpose of an annotated bibliography in greater detail:

When teachers ask students to write annotated bibliographies, they are doing it for different reasons:

  • Having students write an annotated bibliography is an efficient way to make sure that a student has done sufficient research on a topic they are going to write about. If a professor receives an annotated bibliography from a student, she can quickly scan the bibliography, check the number of sources the student collected, and see if there are any sources listed that might lack credibility or might not provide the information the student actually needs.
  • Also, an annotated bibliography helps a professor ascertain whether the student has actually read the sources. It would be relatively easy for a student to collect a list of sources or a pile of articles and show them to the professor. But to write an annotation on each one, the student actually has to read them.
  • Finally, an annotated bibliography helps to show a professor whether a student has understood and appropriately evaluated each of the sources, which are critical skills for doing effective research.

Why Should I Write an Annotated Bibliography?

You should write the annotated bibliography for a variety of reasons:

  • It helps you evaluate the credibility and authority of your sources so that you can use the highest quality sources in your writing
  • To understand and be fully informed about a topic before making judgments and writing about it
  • To distinguish between your views and biases on a topic and what the research actually shows
  • To assess what research you’ve got so that you can figure out whether you need to go out and find more.

Evaluating Credibility and Being Better Informed

To write about any subject matter, a person needs to be informed about it. But in school, students all too often jump into the writing of their papers before they’ve done research. Then, only after writing whatever it is they can come up with on their own do they eventually add in some stuff from sources they were told to find, merely using those sources to prove or back up what they already wrote. The result of this is that some students write some really weak essays. Moreover, students may only look at sources that convey perspectives they already agree with, never bothering to form a fresh perspective by listening to the voices coming from all sides of an issue. In short, the ideas and opinions they express in their essays end up being uninformed and uneducated .

By writing an annotated bibliography, you are taking time to select sources on their own merits, assessing their relevance and credibility on your topic, before you attempt to make use of them. Moreover, research should be used by students to become more genuinely knowledgeable about the subject matter they research. Not until one is more knowledgeable about their topic should they begin to develop a thesis, a perspective, on that topic to write about. Thus, writing an annotated bibliography is a way to ensure that you have become sufficiently knowledgeable about your topic before you try to write about it; it is a way to make sure you are writing from a stance of expertise on the subject matter, which is a much more authoritative and persuasive stance from which to write.

Distinguishing Between Our Own Opinion and Sources of Knowledge

Other times, students might do their research first, but they never take the time to separate their views and perspectives from those of the sources they are writing about. They may, then, confuse what ideas and information came from other sources and what came from their own experiences. As a result of this, students may distort what the original sources say or, worse, use information from other sources without giving proper credit to those sources (both of these things, if intentional, constitute acts of plagiarism! So, you can see how serious this could be).

By writing an annotation on each source, you grow to understand each source on its own terms, taking stock of and judging what useful information and ideas it provides, and distinguishing the ideas, information, and perspectives expressed in those sources from those of your own. All this helps you to use those sources better and to properly give credit to the ideas, information, and perspectives that are not your own. It also helps you assess what information you may be missing so that you can go out and find more information if you need it.

-From Paschke-Johannes, Jeff. The Purpose of an Annotated Bibliography . Ivy Tech Community College.

Why am I not being asked to use only peer-reviewed sources?

CRIT 602 Readings and Resources Copyright © 2019 by Granite State College (USNH) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Social Media: Annotated Bibliography

Akram, Waseem, and Rekesh Kumar. “A Study on Positive and Negative Effects of Social Media on Society.” International Journal of Computer Sciences and Engineering , vol. 5, no. 10, 2017, pp. 347-354. 

The article includes a brief review of the most popular social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Tumblr, and others. Waseem and Kumar discuss that these services’ impact is beneficial in terms of communicational improvement and technology development and severe due to the consequent mental health and social issues. Besides, social media’s positive and negative sides are identified for business, education, society, and younger generations. The authors argue that web platforms and applications will inevitably change people’s lives, and legislative measures should be performed to decrease violence and protect children and teenagers from online abuse.

The two quotes suitable for the research are: “Social media diversifies teen’s social skills, which in turn helps them navigate successfully through modern society” (Akram and Kumar 353). “According to a report distributed by PewCenter.org, the greater part of the youngsters have progressed toward becoming casualties of the digital bulling over the past” (Akram and Kumar 352).

Allcott, Hunt, et al. “The Welfare Effects of Social Media.” American Economic Review , vol. 110, no. 3, 2020, pp. 629-76.

The review of social media’s effects is focused on its political aspects as the authors discuss how Facebook affects voting metrics and the users’ welfare. Hunt et al. offer evidence for Facebook’s effect on individual and social welfare measures. The experiment described in the article is based on surveys that appeared during the presidential election period, and the results showed the Facebook is beneficial in the users’ decision-making. The participants also had a 4-week detox from using the platform, and it significantly improved their well-being.

The two quotes suitable for the research are: “two-thirds of people agreed at least somewhat that “if people spent less time on Facebook, they would soon realize that they don’t miss it” (Allcott et al. 669). “Social media may create ideological “echo chambers” among like-minded friend groups, thereby increasing political polarization” (Allcott et al. 630).

Brooks, Bianca Vivion. I Used to Fear Being a Nobody. Then I Left Social Media. The New York Times, 2019.

The New York Times reporter experimented with leaving social media platforms to explore how a private life can change without constant online interaction. In the article, the influence of Twitter on personal traits and choices is described from a negative perspective. Modern society does not recognize an event as significant if it does not provide a reason to make a post. The author argues that giving social media up is difficult because people got used to sharing their lives’ occasions.

The quotes to apply in the research: “We feel we need as many people as possible to witness our lives, so as not to be left out of a story that is being written too fast by people much more significant than ourselves” (Brooks). “The idea that the happenings of our lives would be constrained to our immediate families, friends, and real-life communities is akin to social death in a world measured by followers, views, likes, and shares” (Brooks).

Donovan, Joan. “How Social Media’s Obsession with Scale Supercharged Disinformation.” Harvard Business Review, 2021.

The Harvard Business Review article discusses the strongly severe impact of fake information spread online. The author bases their thesis on the example of Russian influence on the U.S. election in 2016 and argues that social media platforms should not implement personal advertising algorithms. Then, the “QAnon” online community’s description is applied to discuss how the conspiracy theories wrongly perceived by society led to real criminal cases. Donovan concludes that establishing moderation and regulation policies for the social media platforms is crucial for the users’ real safety.

The quotes to implement in the research: “billions of advertising dollars were lost to fake impressions and clicks as more and more bad actors leveraged openness as a financial opportunity” (Donovan). “Social media moves the fringe to the mainstream, by connecting people with similar interests, tech companies must come up with a plan for content curation and community moderation that reflects a more human scale” (Donovan).

O’Reilly, Michelle, et al. “Is Social Media Bad for Mental Health and Wellbeing? Exploring The Perspectives of Adolescents.” Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, vol. 23, no. 4, 2018, pp. 601-613. 

O’Reilly et al. analyzed the adolescents’ frequent usage of social media from the mental health perspective by establishing a study in the U.K. The participants aged 11-18 revealed that they find social media overuse dangerous for their mental health because it threatens their self-esteem, leads to anxiety, causes addiction, and is a place for cyberbullying. The research results argue that the approaches to use the platforms properly need to be studied at schools. Thematic analysis conducted by the authors submitted the adolescents’ awareness about the drawbacks of social media misuse; however, they lack self-control practices.

Quotes applicable for the research: “young people frequently report turning to sites such a Facebook and Twitter to escape from the external pressures threatening their mental health” (O’Reilly et al. 602). “The participants reported that social media exposes people to bullying and trolling, and thereby negatively impacts on mental health” (O’Reilly et al. 611).

Stier, Sebastian, et al. “Election Campaigning on Social Media: Politicians, Audiences, and The Mediation of Political Communication on Facebook and Twitter.” Political Communication, vol. 35, no. 1, 2018, 50-74. 

The article explores the social media impact on society based on Facebook and Twitter’s political communication and provides evidence of how politicians influence the audiences. Stier et al. argue that people’s voting decisions are affected by these platforms’ algorithms, and the vocabulary used in messages might be confusing. Moreover, the study discusses the ethical aspect of utilizing social media in elections due to their impact on audiences’ behavior. The conclusion suggests that the real-world campaigns’ statements might differ from digital programs’, leading society to confusion and improper voting decisions.

Quotes to use in the research: “politicians and their audiences discuss different topics on social media than those salient among a mass audience” (Stier et al. 70). “Political audiences use social media overwhelmingly for Political Debates, to scrutinize the relationship between state and citizens and comment on Coalition Formation” (Stier et al. 65).

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An all-seeing eye inside a creepy triangle

Political Propaganda & Social Media

An Annotated Bibliography by Ellen Lechman & Jack Brighton

Political Propaganda & Social Media: A Project Summary and Critique

We began this project with somewhat lofty goals. We wanted to develop a comparative analysis of the impact of social media influence on the behavior and governance of the people in the regions examined; to understand how similar forces manifest in different ways in different cultures and political conditions; and to contribute to existing literature on social media disinformation and make it more accessible. The scale of the topic meant we could attain these goals only by adding the words “scratch the surface” to the above. But regardless of failure to reach our original ambition, we achieved some unexpected things.

Firstly, in searching for useful primary sources on social media and political disinformation, we became much more aware of existing research by scholars, government bodies, think tanks, and NGOs. Just a few short years ago, it was common to assume social media would liberate people from the tyranny of one-way mass media controlled by large corporations, governments, and oligarchs. It is now darkly amusing to read popular and scholarly literature on social media written just five years ago. Today there are thousands of seemingly credible sources of research exploring the current disinformation environment and its impact on politics.

Given the wealth of available research materials, almost all of which is accessible online, we tried to identify the most relevant examples. It’s likely that we failed in that as well, but the primary sources we selected are generally representative of the existing body of research. We also chose to narrow our initial focus from “the world” to certain areas of the world, specifically Indonesia and Europe. Some of the most interesting examples of social media propaganda are now occurring in Africa, South America, and of course China (and by “interesting” we mean horrific), but we had to put aside those regions at least for now.

The second unexpected thing was a clear correlation between propagandistic messages sponsored by state actors, and changes in the political rhetoric of those targeted. As if we didn’t know this: propaganda can work. For example, there is a preponderance of evidence that Russia’s disinformation campaign to position Ukraine as a corrupt state and perpetrator of various conspiracies is not only influencing opinions among populations in Europe, it is being loudly echoed by the President of the United States and members of his political party.

But propaganda doesn’t always work. For example, in Anke Schmidt-Felzmann’s account of Russian disinformation operations in the Nordic countries of Europe , attempts to undermine support for the EU and NATO are gaining very little traction (Schmidt-Felzmann 2017). In contrast, the same messages are resonating broadly in Central and East European countries, whose populations and political leaders are more friendly to Russia, and more suspicious of the United States, the EU, and NATO (Wierzejski, Syrovatka et al. 2017).

A third surprise dawned on us over the months of working on this project: The use of social media for political propaganda is rapidly evolving, and we are merely capturing a screenshot (so to speak) of this moment. While use of the Internet for strategic disinformation predates the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the disruption of that election, along with others in Africa, India, and the Brexit referendum, brought into sharp relief the scale at which online political propaganda is now being deployed. As the actors behind it acquire more resources and learn from their successes and failures, and as more “innovation” is piled on our current systems of ubiquitous information, we are likely to see a continuing evolution of disinformational strategies and tactics.

Comparing Indonesia and Russia: State Roles in the Spread of Propaganda

Any attempt to analyze the use of propaganda in two different countries and contexts might be a fool’s errand. It’s difficult to shrink entire countries into narratives small enough to neatly compare one to the other, and it puts the analyst at risk of reducing each country to a singular convenient narrative. However for argument’s sake, let’s try it out:

Russia might be seen as the puppet master, controlling armies of bots and trolls to create havoc in many target countries, and sowing the seeds of discord, distrust, and disinformation to weaken democracies worldwide. Indonesia could be cast as a relatively blameless victim country, a young democracy subjected to attacks of propaganda and fake news from religious groups, and possibly from Russia itself (Sapiie and Anya, 2019). The takeaway might be that Russia, a nuclear power with imperialistic ambitions, has the motivation and resources to spread their propaganda across the globe, while countries like Indonesia do their best to overcome the propaganda threatening their democracy.

Obviously it isn’t that simple. Russia isn’t the only country sponsoring propaganda or attempting to influence the political activity of other countries. The Indonesian government isn’t completely innocent of sponsoring their own propaganda. It would be naïve to regard states as monolithic actors, particularly when it comes to their presence on social media. Finally, attempting to compare propaganda activities in very different countries runs the risk of perpetuating our own received colonial narratives, casting some as the villain and others as the innocent victim. In the world of social media disinformation, it may not be obvious who is colonizing whom.

Theoretical Frameworks

Is there a theory of social media that sheds light on current phenomena, and allows us to confidently make predictions? Or are the pieces moving too fast to do more than merely describe? We explore here the application of two prominent theories in communications research: Framing and Media Ecology.

Framing Theory

Framing Theory fits neatly into the conversation of propaganda on social media. As defined by Entman, framing means to “select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation” (Entman 1993). In contrast to agenda setting or priming, framing theory sets not only the topic of discussion, but the terms as well.

Broadly stated, the effect of framing is to construct a social reality people will use to interpret information and events. Similar to pre-Internet media, social media can provide a “a central organizing idea or story line that provides meaning to an unfolding strip of events . . . The frame suggests what the controversy is about, the essence of the issue” (Gamson & Modigliani 1987).

In traditional print and broadcast media, the power of framing is in the hands of journalists, editors, publishers, producers, networks, etc., and there is a clear division between framers and audiences. Social media dissolves this division as “the people formerly known as the audience” are involved in the framing (Rosen 2012). With social media platforms it is often unclear what is being framed or who has the power to do the framing. Twitter and Facebook don’t create the content users see, and the algorithms that control our timelines determine what information we are exposed to. The power to set frames on social media platforms is controlled by anyone with the ability to leverage the algorithms. This can be good; it allows people other than those traditionally in power to present frames of their own, potentially making audiences aware of a wider range of viewpoints, influences, problems, and solutions.

But as we see in the research presented here, social media also increases the potential for deception and manipulation. When propagandistic content floods our newsfeeds, it is increasingly difficult to identify the true authors (is this a real individual or a bot?), the audience reach (is everyone seeing this, or has it been algorithmically selected for your tastes?), and the purpose of the content. Clearly, framing theory is a useful lens for evaluating disinformation on social media. Research might identify the original source of information attempting to “promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation,” and attempt to follow the acceptance of the frame by audiences (Entman 1993).

This approach to analyzing disinformation on social media makes use of framing as “a theory of media effects” (Scheufele 1999). Goffman’s concept of “social frameworks” seems particularly well-suited to examining the effects of social media. We are social animals, and social media platforms have become an important site for our social connections. Our interpretations of information and events are influenced by our social connections, whether or not we are conscious of that influence (Goffman 1974).

Media Ecology Theory

We are aware there is considerable disagreement in the academic world about Marshall McLuhan, but the Media Ecology framework seems particularly well suited for analyzing the technological, social, and political complexities of this particular epoch of the information age.

McLuhan wrote about media as “extensions of some human faculty” (McLuhan, Marshall, & Fiore 1967), and “the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology” (McLuhan 1964). Media ecology theory frames the Internet and social media as hyperextensions of every human sense. And on the Internet those extensions are interconnected by a global network of devices that can send and receive information literally at the speed of light, “extending our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned” (McLuhan 1964).

But media ecology theory “is not exhausted by the thought of Herbert Marshall McLuhan”(Islas & Bernal 2016). Some of the post-McLuhan scholarship directly addresses the social and political effects of digital media. Robert K. Logan, a former colleague of McLuhan, suggests that in a flip reversal of media as extensions of man, “the human users of digital media become an extension of those digital media as these media scoop up their data and use them to the advantage of those that control these media…The feedback of the users of digital media become the feedforward for those media” (Logan, 2019).

Logan is primarily concerned with the abuse of personal data for persuasive communications by digital media monopolies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter. But the same kinds of personal data and persuasive technologies are being used by the propagandistic actors in the scenarios described in this project. They aren’t the owners of the technologies, but they don’t have to be. In today’s neoliberal, unregulated “free market,” social media networks are open to use or abuse at scale by anyone with enough resources. As suggested in the study Bots and Political Influence: A Sociotechnical Investigation of Social Network Capital , the resources required for effective social media propaganda operations are beyond the means of anyone but large institutional actors like governments (Murthy, Powel, et al. 2016). And as is clear in Emilio Iasiello’s article Russia’s Improved Information Operations: From Georgia to Crimea , governments are now budgeting for disinformation campaigns aimed at national and global audiences as a vital part of their geopolitical and military strategies (Iasiello 2017). As applied to the Internet age, McLuhan’s frame is still relevant: the medium is the message, and the user is the content (McLuhan 1964).

During this project we chose to primarily use printed resources from academic or government studies. In some cases we reviewed reports from non-profit organizations focused on digital disinformation and security studies. While news reports could have been helpful in providing the most recent accounts of political disinformation, we decided to avoid possible issues of journalistic story framing. We did our best to vet all sources for credibility, and to weed out resources showing signs of ideological and political bias. Our methodology included an examination of the authors, their body of research, and their institutional affiliations. We believe our choices are justifiable, but our inclusion of these sources does not imply wholesale endorsement of the authors or the information and views they express.

Due to rapid changes in technologies used for disinformation and the circumstances of its use, it is likely that much of today’s research will soon be obsolete. An obvious response to this is more research, and it’s clear from our work on this project that more research is coming. A variety of new institutions and initiatives are beginning to systematically study and counter digital disinformation. Which also raises a caution: Will we begin to see disinformation in disinformation research? All the more reason for us to be critical of our sources, and select only those we can reasonably identify as credible.

Any analysis of the actions and attitudes of governments and other informational actors will inevitably be shaped by the values and views of the authors. Because a discussion of the author’s perspective is rarely included in their published works, audiences may assume that the analysis is intended to be “objective,” and that the author occupies “the view from nowhere” (Rosen 2003). We wish to make our values and views explicit so as to avoid any ambiguity about our perspectives and motivations.

As librarians we understand that “the values and ethics of librarianship are a firm foundation for understanding human rights and the importance of human rights education,” and that “human rights education is decidedly not neutral” (Hinchliffe 2016, p.81). While there can be different arguments about the merits and flaws of different political and economic systems, the role of corporations and governments, and the obligations of citizens, we are strongly in favor of free expression, self-determination, and social justice. We believe all people have an absolute right to knowledge, and we regard influence operations designed to deceive, confuse, or divide people and nations as violations of their human rights and dangerous to the future of world peace. The Internet has become a medium for influencing the thoughts and behavior of people across the globe. Disinformation is not new, but its potential for disruption has never been greater.

We view social media as potentially a net positive for human welfare and civic life. For now, let’s just say it’s a work in progress.

Entman, Robert M. 1993. “Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm.” Journal of Communication 43 (4): 51–58. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1993.tb01304.x.

Gamson, William and Modigliani, Andre. 1987. “The Changing Culture of Affirmative Action.” In Research in Political Sociology , edited by Richard Braungart , 137-177. Greenwich, CT: Jai Press, Inc.

Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, MA, US: Harvard University Press.

Hinchliffe, Lisa Janicke. 2016. “Loading Examples to Further Human Rights Education.” https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/91636.

Iasiello, Emilio. 2017. “Russia’s Improved Information Operations: From Georgia to Crimea.” US Army War College: Parameters [Summer 2017], US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters, 47 (2): 51–63. https://www.hsdl.org/?abstract&did=803998.

Islas, Octavio, and Juan Bernal Suárez. 2016. “Media Ecology: A Complex and Systemic Metadiscipline.” Philosophies 1 (October): 190–98. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies1030190.

Logan, Robert K. 2019. “Understanding Humans: The Extensions of Digital Media.” Information 10 (10): 304. https://doi.org/10.3390/info10100304.

McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

McLuhan, Marshall, Quentin Fiore, and Jerome Agel. 1967. The medium is the massage. New York: Bantam Books.

Murthy, Dhiraj, Alison B. Powell, Ramine Tinati, Nick Anstead, Leslie Carr, Susan J. Halford, and Mark Weal. 2016. “Automation, Algorithms, and Politics| Bots and Political Influence: A Sociotechnical Investigation of Social Network Capital.” International Journal of Communication 10 (0): 20. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/6271.

Rosen, Jay. 2003. “PressThink: The View from Nowhere.”. http://archive.pressthink.org/2003/09/18/jennings.html.

Rosen, Jay. 2012. “The People Formerly Known as the Audience.” In The Social Media Reader. ed. Mandiberg, Michael. NYU Press. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16gzq5m.

Sapiie, M.A. & Anya, A. 2019. “Jokowi accuses Prabowo camp of enlisting foreign propaganda help.” From https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2019/02/04/jokowi-accuses-prabowo-camp-of-enlisting-foreign-propaganda-help.html

Scheufele, Dietram A. 1999. “Framing as a Theory of Media Effects.” Journal of Communication 49 (1): 103–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1999.tb02784.x.

Schmidt-Felzmann, Anke. 2017. “More than ‘Just’ Disinformation: Russia’s Information Operations in the Nordic Region.” In Information Warfare – New Security Challenge for Europe, 32–67. Centre for European and North Atlantic Affairs.

Wierzejski, Antoni, Jonáš Syrovatka, Daniel Bartha, Botond Feledy, András Rácz, Petru Macovei, Dušan Fischer, and Margo Gontar. 2017. “Information Warfare in the Internet Countering Pro-Kremlin Disinformation in the CEE Countries.” Centre for International Relations. https://www.academia.edu/34620712/Information_warfare_in_the_Internet_COUNTERING_PRO-KREMLIN_DISINFORMATION_IN_THE_CEE_COUNTRIES_Centre_for_International_Relations_and_Partners.

Defining Digital Literacy in the Age of Computational Propaganda and Hate Spin Politics

Just like much of the rest of the world, Indonesia is facing a crisis of fake news and bot network infiltration on social media, leading to rampant propaganda, mass belief of disinformation, and not fully understood effects on voters that may affect them deeply enough to alter election results. Salma (2019) describes this crisis and identifies the solution as critical digital literacy, essentially educating people about the nature of fake news, algorithmic gaming of social media platforms, and identifying bot networks.

Salma consolidates the issue into two problems: computational propaganda and hate spin politics. She defines computational propaganda as “the use of algorithms, automation, and human curation to purposefully distribute misleading information over social media networks” (p. 328). This includes fake news created and spread on social media, bot networks driving attention to and changing conversation around particular issues, and the groups who organize these campaigns of disinformation. Her definition of computational propaganda encompasses much of the fake news crisis currently rattling the United States, as well as other countries.

The other primary issue she identifies is hate spin politics, which is less easily defined. She describes it as “exploit[ing] freedom in democracy by reinforcing group identities and attempt[ing] to manipulate the genuine emotional reactions of citizens as resources in collective actions whose goals are not pro-democracy” (p. 329). Hate spin politics seems to be the weaponization of identity politics and emotion in the digital political sphere, using religion, nationality, sexuality, and other identity markers to turn people against each other. It not only aims to segregate people based on their identities, but to inspire people to self-select into identify groups to create political warfare.

Computational propaganda and hate spin politics are carried out by several groups in Indonesia. Salma identifies Saracen and Muslim Cyber Army as responsible for various fake news campaigns, and there have been notable suggestions of similar political interference from Russia (Sapiie and Anya, 2019). These tactics have shown to be successful on a large scale and with dire consequences in the case of Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, also known as Ahok, the politician who was imprisoned for blasphemy based largely on an edited video that went viral on social media.

Indonesian government officials are keenly aware of the problem computational propaganda presents, taking significant steps to counter fake news spread. In 2018, they began weekly fake news briefings intended to address false stories that have gained traction (Handley, 2018). Salma suggests an increased focus in critical digital literacy, or teaching people to “evaluat[e] online content or digital skills but also to understand the internet’s production, management and consumption processes, as well as its democratizing potential and its structural constraints” (p. 333). Essentially, critical digital literacy is to computer or technical literacy what reading comprehension is to literacy. It’s not enough for users to be able to use a computer and navigate the Internet; there needs to be a solid understanding of what they’re seeing and why, including who might have produced content and how it came to be presented to that user.

Who could argue with that? Of course increased education about the creation and spread of fake news and algorithmic manipulation would be useful to nearly all Internet users, and it might help counter the spread and impact of computational propaganda. However, Salma offers no explanation of how digital literacy would improve hate spin, which seems to be a larger social issue that’s just as likely to occur offline as on. Hate spin politics also traffics in emotional responses, meaning strictly logical literacy training might not be enough to retrain people to grapple with emotional manipulation.

Salma, A. N. (2019). Defining Digital Literacy in the Age of Computational Propaganda and Hate Spin Politics.  KnE Social Sciences & Humanities ,  2019 , 323-338.

Additional Resources:

Sapiie, M.A. & Anya, A. (2019, February 4). Jokowi accuses Prabowo camp of enlisting foreign propaganda help. From https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2019/02/04/jokowi-accuses-prabowo-camp-of-enlisting-foreign-propaganda-help.html

Handley, L. (2018, September 27). Indonesia’s government is to hold public fake news briefings every week. From https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/27/indonesias-government-is-to-hold-public-fake-news-briefings-each-week.html

More than ‘Just’ Disinformation: Russia’s Information Operations in the Nordic Region

This book chapter by Anke Schmidt-Felzmann from the Swedish Institute of International Affairs  provides an overview of Russian disinformation tactics and messages in the Nordic countries of Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, and Iceland.

The author begins with the context of why Russia would be interested in social-political influence in the region: Norway and Finland share borders with Russia; Norway is a net exporter of oil and gas, and thus in competition with Russia on world energy markets; Denmark and Russia have an ongoing dispute over resource-rich territories along the continental shelf; Sweden has a visible role in political reform in Ukraine, and in the EU’s Eastern Partnership initiative .

Perhaps more importantly, the five Nordic countries have strong relationships with both NATO and the EU – although only Iceland, Denmark, and Norway are NATO members. All five countries responded with condemnation of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, including the implementation of sanctions.

Schmidt-Felzmann discusses Russia’s use of different channels, social media, and IT tools for “socio-psychological manipulation” in the Nordic region. Interestingly, she singles out the manipulation of individual human beings as both targets and tools of misinformation including journalists and politicians. Tactics cited by the author include intimidation and disinformation campaigns against individuals critical of Russian policies, and the use of trolls and bots on social media. The case of Finnish journalist Jessikka Aro is an interesting example. In 2015 while investigating online trolling, her reporting identified the building in St. Petersburg housing the now-infamous Internet Research Agency . She soon became the target of personal attacks and harassment on social media by the same trolls.

According to Schmidt-Felzmann, Russian information operations in the Nordic region seem to be aimed at discrediting NATO and the EU, and positioning Russia as an innocent victim of “Russophobia” promulgated by the West. Accusations of anti-Russian bias are leveled against journalists and politicians on Russian-sponsored media, online forums, and social media platforms,

Interestingly, Schmidt-Felzmann says, Russian attempts to establish Nordic platforms for its news operations Sputnik and RT failed less than a year after their launch in 2015.

In summary, the Nordic nations appear to have shown considerable resistance to Russian information operations, and are engaged with the EU and NATO in developing multinational research centers and countermeasures such as identifying and responding to disinformation, training on how to identify malicious information, coordinating the exchange of information between agencies…and developing their own influence operations.

Schmidt-Felzmann, Anke. 2017. “More than ‘Just’ Disinformation: Russia’s Information Operations in the Nordic Region.” In Information Warfare. New Security Challenge for Europe, 32–67. Centre for European and North Atlantic Affairs.

Aksi Bela Islam: Islamic Clicktivism and the New Authority of Religious Propaganda in the Millennial age in Indonesia

Ahyar and Alfitri (2019) examine the way social media has reshaped the landscape of propaganda, and how it’s being used to change dominate religious authorities. Propaganda used to be a tool wielded almost exclusively by government bodies or other massive organizations. Ahyar and Alfitri say, “In previous eras – especially in authoritarian regimes prior to the reformation era in Indonesia – the state was an authoritative source for social campaigning” (p. 14). The resources needed to create and effectively spread propaganda were simply too great for small groups or individuals to harness.

Social media has completely changed this; the Internet has effectively allowed nearly anyone to create and spread their own propaganda for their own purposes, with the potential for massive virality and impact. Governments no longer have a monopoly on mass information (or disinformation) spreading. Ahyar and Alfitri explain that alternative groups have come to harness propaganda: “In the Reformation era in Indonesia, propaganda is also often done not only by the government, but also by social movements that echo multiple identities; be it a primordial identity of ethnicity, religion, political ideology and profession” (p. 12-13).

They go on to explain how social media has also revolutionized social movements and activism, again with disruption. Because movements can be planned and executed more easily, they need less hierarchical structure to form and continue. They say, “…Social movements appear massively outside the established political or institutional channels within a country. Social movement is closely related to a shared ideal and responds to a political power” (p. 9). Social movements need less planning, promotion, and organization to be successful. All they really need is a powerful motivating factor to spark mobilization. Propaganda can easily fill this role: “The pattern begins with an action of propaganda through the sails of technological devices, which is followed by supportive comments on the propaganda, and ends in mass mobilization for a real social movement for a purpose” (p. 4).

Although there is obvious good in breaking the government’s former monopoly on propaganda and in tools like social media making organizing and protesting easier than ever, there’s also the possibility for increased disinformation, chaos, and abuse. Ahyar and Alfitri consider the example of Basuki Tjahaya Purnama (also called Ahok), the former Jakarta governor who was imprisoned for blasphemy after a misleadingly edited video of one of his speeches went viral, causing controversy among Islamic communities in Indonesia. The doctored video functioned as propaganda, perfectly matching Ahyar and Alfitri’s definition of propaganda as “attempts to shape influence, change, and control the attitudes and opinions of a person or group for a particular purpose or to be brought in a particular direction” (p. 11). That propaganda spread rapidly through social media, acting as the spark that mobilized thousands of people to take to the streets in protests that were easily and spontaneously planned with improved technology and communication. Ahok’s imprisonment serves as testimony to the power and changed nature of propaganda and social movement, and to the danger that these powerful tools have when they are used rapidly and with little opportunity for oversight, consideration, and fact-checking.

Ahyar, M & Alfitri. (2019) ‘Aksi Bela Islam: Islamic clicktivism and the new authority of religious propaganda in the millennial age in Indonesia’, Indonesian Journal of Islam and Muslim Societies , 9(i), pp. 1–29.

Information Warfare in the Internet: Countering Pro-Kremlin Disinformation in the CEE Countries

In this report, published in 2017 by the Poland-based Centre for International Relations  and funded by the International Visegrad Fund , authors from seven Central and East European Countries analyze disinformation tactics, channels, and messaging currently used by Russia targeting their respective nations. Data used was drawn from the period between July and October 2017, although general trends were also assessed. The authors find that while Russia’s propaganda tactics are similar throughout the CEE countries, messages are often tailored to maximize impact based on the politics of each country.

The presentation of country-specific data in the report follows a similar format. For example, the section on the Czech Republic, written by Jonáš Syrovatka from the the Prague Security Studies Institute , describes the channels used to spread propagandistic messages, and the reach of each channel. The main channels are conspiracy websites, alternative media, semi-legitimate “bridge media,” Facebook, and YouTube. Messaging and language vary depending on the normative style and tone of each channel. Syrovatka identifies the combination of channels and messaging used as key to propagandistic influence. Subjects of the messages in the Czech Republic include the danger of Islamization, violence by refugees as a strategy by global elites including Hillary Clinton ad Emmanuel Macron, corruption and incompetence of the Ukrainian government, and positive narratives concerning Vladimir Putin and Russia.

Among the country-specific differences:

  • In Hungary , pro-Kremlin narratives are often promoted by mainstream newspapers and broadcast channels, including the state-owned news agency MTI. Much of the messaging content skirts the line between authentic Hungarian pro-Eastern sentiments and Kremlin-sponsored propaganda, rather than pure disinformation. With three million Hungarian retirees, chain mail is also used to spread pro-Kremin narratives. Facebook is the predominant social media platform used, due to Hungary’s lack of “Twitter culture.” Propagandistic messages are aimed to undermine trust in the U.S., NATO and the EU, encourage anti-immigration and anti-refugee views,  discredit liberal ideas about human rights and NGOs, and to discredit Ukraine as corrupt, fascist, and failing.
  • In Moldava , Petru Macovei, Executive Director of the Association of Independent Press at the Chisinau School of Advanced Journalism, reports that Russian influence is powerfully exerted through mass media outlets created by Russia, including a Moldavan edition of Komsomolskaya Pravda and Sputnik.md. Twitter and Facebook are also used as channels. Narratives include conspiracy theories about NATO preparing for nuclear war against Russia with Moldava as a battlefield, that Moldava is ruled by an outsider network connected with George Soros, that the U.S., NATO, and NGOs are conspiring against Moldavan interests and promoting homosexuality, and that the U.S. is defending the Islamic State in Syria.
  • In Poland , tactics and propaganda messages are much the same: that NATO is a tool of America and is acting again Poland, and that Russia is the only counter to American influence. Poland-specific narratives include disinformation targeting Ukraine, wherein Ukrainians are portrayed as “wild and cruel beasts mindlessly slaughtering Poles.” Polish mass media, websites, and social media are leveraged for these narratives, along with an interesting twist: fake interview with top Polish generals which invariably position the West as anti-Poland, and as promoting homosexuality. According to journalist Antoni Wierzejski, author of the section on Poland, hackers and trolls are very active in Poland.
  • The section on Ukraine , authored by Margo Gontar, journalist and co-founder of the Ukrainian organization StopFake, summarized four disinformation themes: Ukraine is a failed state, Ukrainians are dangerous, Ukraine is breaking the Minsk Agreement to stop the war in the Donbass region of Ukraine, and that everyone loves Russia. At the same time, according to other research identified in this project , various actors in Ukraine are mounting somewhat effective information campaigns to counter Russian propaganda. It is of note, though, that anti-Ukraine disinformation is featured so prominently in the other CEE nations.

As we see in other research, social media is an important channel for the spread of disinformation and participatory propaganda . But the authors emphasize it is the combined impact of traditional media, state-sponsored news organizations, conspiracy websites, trolls and hackers, and social media that is the basis for Russia’s propaganda strategy.

The report concludes with a number of recommendations to counter Russian disinformation, including more research on its authors and target audiences, education of the public on information ethics, and encouraging Internet companies to deploy tools against fake news. All of which are worth attempting, and possibly inadequate unless done at a very large scale.

Wierzejski, Antoni, Jonáš Syrovatka, Daniel Bartha, Botond Feledy, András Rácz, Petru Macovei, Dušan Fischer, and Margo Gontar. 2017. “Information Warfare in the Internet COUNTERING PRO-KREMLIN DISINFORMATION IN THE CEE COUNTRIES.” Centre for International Relations. https://www.academia.edu/34620712/Information_warfare_in_the_Internet_COUNTERING_PRO-KREMLIN_DISINFORMATION_IN_THE_CEE_COUNTRIES_Centre_for_International_Relations_and_Partners.

Countering Terrorist Narratives: Winning the Hearts and Minds of Indonesian Millennials

Narratives are powerful because they’re easy to follow. Factual information and research might provide someone with all of the pieces, but a well-crafted narrative presents itself as an already completed puzzle. Ansis (2018) discusses the narratives that terrorists and extremists use to recruit new members, and how those narratives can be shaped into convincing propaganda that is easily disseminated through social media, focusing primarily on the recruitment of young Indonesians and responses from the Indonesian government. Islamic extremist narratives give followers a consistent worldview, as well as a clearly defined role and purpose within that worldview. Once a follower has accepted extremist narratives, it’s difficult to counter them.

Islamic extremist groups build their narratives on social media the same way many use social media- consistent branding and plenty of selfies. Ansis says, “Many of the selfie photos of young jihadists express their happiness. They smile and carry weapons. The jihadists use this strategy to give a picture that they are powerful and own many weapons” (p. 196). Again, following pretty standard social media manipulation tactics, extremists can deceive followers. Ansis continues, “They may only have a few weapons and ask the jihadists to take turns taking selfie photos carrying the gun” (p. 196). They also use catchphrases. Ansis identifies the phrase “You Only Die Once” or “YODO,” (p. 193) a clear derivative of the popular hashtag #yolo. 

 Ansis’s examples of jidhadist recruiting, specifically her analysis of the film Jihad Selfie , reveal the targeted nature of their recruiting efforts. Extremists’s success isn’t from pouring money into Facebook advertisements; it’s from using social media to talk to vulnerable individuals. There seems to be more to gain from putting significant resources towards the small number of individuals who are able to be flipped than there is in mass recruitment tactics that will fall largely on deaf ears. Again, using social media for this kind of targeted advertising isn’t exclusive to jidhadist groups. Cambridge Analytica’s use of highly targeted advertising has caused outrage worldwide. 

Indonesia has taken several steps to attempt to counter extremist propaganda online, largely in the form of websites offering counter-narratives and promoting peacefulness (p. 202). However, it’s unclear how effective this approach can be. Ansis describes how jidhadists’ use of social media makes them look “cool,” according to former recruits, because of their handling of weapons and the interactions their post get from Muslim women (p. 197). If the appeal of jidhadist’s propaganda comes down to cool factor, it’s really difficult to imagine the government successfully creating something that will actually read as cool to young people. 

The weakest point of Ansis’s analysis comes from her failure to interrogate the term “lone wolf” terrorists. She points out, “Unlike in the past when a terrorist was defined as someone who completed a long process of training and indoctrination through a terrorist group, the lone wolf terrorists are not tied to any terrorist network and have gotten inspiration through the internet,” (p. 195) yet fails to connect that this inspiration through the Internet is often from interacting with content from terrorist networks. 

Anis, E. Z. (2018). Countering Terrorist Narratives: Winning the Hearts and Minds of Indonesian Millennials. KnE Social Sciences & Humanities , 2018 , 189.

Stoking the Flames: Russian Information Operations in Turkey

It can be argued that Russia scored a major goal on October 7, 2019 when U.S. President Trump tweeted that he would withdraw American troops from the war zone in northeastern Syria, and that “Turkey, Europe, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Russia and the Kurds will now have to…figure the situation out.” This cleared the way for Turkey to launch a large-scale military operation against America’s allies, the Kurdish PKK. The sudden change in U.S. policy caught just about everyone off-guard – the Kurds, NATO, the U.S. State Department and members of Congress, and even the U.S. military commanders in Syria.

In the 2018 article “Stoking the Flames: Russian Information Operations in Turkey,” published in the journal Ukraine Analytica , University of Copenhagen political scientist Balkan Devlen details Russia’s shifting propaganda narrative targeting Turkish audiences. During and after it 2014 invasion in Crimea, Russia sought to portray Ukraine as a corrupt ally of the “imperialist West,” and Russia as an anti-imperialist friend to Turkey. A variety of media outlets were used to spread this message, including the Turkish language service of Russia’s Sputnik News, and a range of Turkish media sources known to be suspicious of Western and American meddling in the region. As shown by other research on Russian disinformation strategies , a variety of social media outlets were also used.

After the downing of a Russian jet by the Turkish air force in 2015, Russia’s propaganda massaging in Turkey did a 180-degree turn and began targeting the Turkish government and its foreign policy, claiming that Turkey was supporting ISIS, violating international law, and committing war crimes. Balkan notes that Russia’s anti-Turkey propaganda campaign was immediate, robust, and agile, suggesting that Russia is well-prepared to launch disinformation campaigns against even friendly nations, with messaging developed in advance should the need arise.

In 2016 relations between Russia and Turkey became friendly, and the torrent of anti-Turkish disinformation quicky ceased. A new phase of propaganda sought to increase suspicion and animosity toward the U.S. and NATO, and to once again portray Russia as a true friend. As anti-American sentiment sentiment increases among the Turkish population, this narrative has been picked up by Turkey’s major media and amplified by Eurasianist “fellow travellers” through various channels.

Balkan concludes that as relations between Turkey, the U.S., and NATO fray, “Russia gets closer to its goal of weakening and undermining the liberal international order.”

While it is possible to read Balkan’s article as a polemic, much of his argument is echoed by other research annotated in this Political Propaganda and Social Media project. It might also be worth noting that some of the propaganda messages deployed by Russia in Turkey, such as the message that Ukraine is a corrupt nation, are mirrored in tweets by the U.S. president.

Bots and Political Influence: A Sociotechnical Investigation of Social Network Capital

The rise of bots on social media platforms, designed to automate disinformation and disruption, has led to a kind of moral panic. The authors of this study sought to quantify the actual impact of bots on political conversations, and to answer the question “will public policy decisions be distorted by public opinion corrupted by bots?” The project was designed by an interdisciplinary team of scholars in political communications, sociology, computer science, and technology studies, and conducted by deploying  bots to write tweets and participate in Twitter discussions of three high stakes political events in the United Kingdom during 2016. The bots were programmed to follow and retweet specific hashtags. A network analysis was then performed to determine the influence of the bots during the course of the experiment.

The most interesting outcome of the study is that it failed to show any significant effect of the bots on Twitter conversations surrounding the three political events. The interpretation of that outcome is the focus of the authors primary conclusion, where they identify specific challenges faced by researchers in studying the influence of bots:

  • The experiment rested on a number of student volunteers who set up new Twitter accounts, and were asked to use specific hashtags while tweeting about certain events. The researchers then linked bots to some of the accounts to comment on and retweet the students’ tweets. But the new accounts lacked the “social capital” of a high follower count, and thus their tweets had limited reach even when amplified by the bots.
  • The researchers used two methods to deploy the bots. The first method was to fully create their own bots; the second method was to purchase bots from MonsterSocial , a commercial marketing agency that bills itself as “the #1 automation bot for Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and Twitter.” MonsterSocial provides a user interface to set up a number of Twitter accounts to automatically retweet, favorite, and follow other accounts. It is not illegal to create bots in this way, and depending on the behavior of the bots, does not violate Twitter’s terms of service.
  • The authors conclude that another type of bot would likely have been more effective: those created by hacking and hijacking dormant Twitter accounts, set up and abandoned by human users. In this case the accounts may have already established considerable social capital in the form of followers, likes, and retweets, and thus have greater reach on Twitter. But the use of hijacked accounts violates Twitter’s terms of service, may be illegal, and would never be approved by university ethics authorities. The authors say these are the types of bots used to spread disinformation during political campaigns, and to disrupt protests and social movements.

The experiment indicates that small-scale deployment of bots created by legally acceptable methods lacks the social capital to exert influence on Twitter. The authors were also hampered by a lack of financial resources needed to create and purchase bots at great scale, and by legal and ethical concerns.

The authors expected their bots to be more successful in swaying the political dialog on Twitter, but came to understand that “social influence, even over technologies that allow bots, is a product of capital,” including the kind of social capital that can be acquired by cheating. They conclude that “the most effective bots may be the ones we cannot study.”

Murthy, Dhiraj, Alison B. Powell, Ramine Tinati, Nick Anstead, Leslie Carr, Susan J. Halford, and Mark Weal. 2016. “Automation, Algorithms, and Politics| Bots and Political Influence: A Sociotechnical Investigation of Social Network Capital.” International Journal of Communication 10 (0): 20. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/6271 .

Government Social Media in Indonesia: Just Another Information Dissemination Tool

No matter how much Mark Zuckerberg promises that the goal of Facebook has always been to “connect” the world, it’s increasingly clear that social media might not actually be the most effective tool towards accomplishing that goal. Though social media sties like Facebook and Twitter can make two-way communication between entities easier from a logistical standpoint, scholars remain divided on whether or not social media has been able to live up to possibilities in the political realm.

Idris (2018) examines this possibility for two-way communication between government entities and individuals in Indonesia using social media, finding that two-way communication is much more of a social media ideal than a reality. She specifically looks at two Indonesian government agencies’ social media presences, using social network analysis to determine how and when they interacted with other social media users. For the most part, it turns out they don’t. She says, “…the Indonesian government mostly used social media to disseminate governmental information, to dominate social media conversation, and to amplify governmental messages… Thus, advanced communication technology was not used to transform the government to become more engaging and transparent” (p. 352). Basically, just because social media creates the opportunity for dialogue between governments and citizens, doesn’t ensure that the governments reads, considers, or acknowledges citizens’ responses.

Without two-way communication, there is little or no difference between government information and PR campaigns disseminated on social media and propaganda (p. 338). However, the use of social media allows governments to maintain the illusion of increased communication with citizens while actually perfecting their propagandistic techniques. When communicating directly on social media, a government can effectively bypass traditional media, allowing them to release their content exactly as they see fit, keeping journalistic scrutiny out of their initial message. They can also manipulate social media algorithms to amplify their own content, using nothing more than networks of government social media accounts. Idris describes President Widodo’s network of governmental social media accounts’ objective as “to counter negative opinions about the government and at the same time make government information go viral” (p. 350). Though downright measly compared to something like Russian bot networks, these networks of official government accounts can be enough to spread information and shape conversation. Governments using social media for information dissemination also have the opportunity to perfectly test and reshape their messages in real time. Both the Obama and Trump campaigns in the U.S. saw impressive results using methods like A/B testing to craft and recraft their social media advertisements with incredible precision (Bashyakarla, 2019).

Social media makes a lot of things possible that were not before. This includes both increased transparency and easier back and forth communication between governments and citizens, but also easier dissemination of perfectly-crafted propaganda. Idris makes it clear which of these aims the Indonesia government is pursing.

Idris, I. K. (2018). Government social media in Indonesia: Just another information dissemination tool. Jurnal Komunikasi: Malaysian Journal of Communication ,  34 (4), 337–356.  https://doi.org/10.17576/JKMJC-2018-3404-20

Additional References

Bashyakarla, V. (2019). A/B Testing: Experiments in campaign messaging. Retrieved from https://ourdataourselves.tacticaltech.org/posts/ab-testing

Social Media and Politics in Indonesia

Johansson (2016) gives a solid background to the state of media in Indonesia, both traditional and digital. He explains how a narrowly controlled traditional media in a democracy as new as Indonesia created favorable conditions for social media to break through and disrupt the spread of information, focusing largely on the potential for positive change.

He describes issues with Indonesia’s print and television media, starting with their vulnerability to being completely controlled by just a few elite members of society, i.e. elite capture or media capture. He elaborates on how much of Indonesia’s media is owned or influenced by figures tied to politics, including direct family members of politicians (p. 17). He also describes the rise of media conglomerates. In short, he describes a media ecosystem in which power is held by very few people with ties to other powerful people, working towards a future with less and less competition, all of which can contribute to increased media bias.

Next, he explains the culture of social media in Indonesia, and the effect it’s had on political messaging and campaigning. Social media is wildly popular in Indonesia, with users spending an average of 2.9 hours on social media each day, compared to just 1.7 hours of use in the United States (p. 25). Social media is an attractive place for political messaging not only because of its popularity, but also due to “the cost of campaigning on a steady increase, limited political financing, problems with money politics and the limits of traditional media” (p. 25). Johansson also touches on social media strategies from the 2014 presidential election, explaining that Jokowi’s use of a massive volunteer network coordinating and posting on social media ultimately won out over Prabowo’s smaller and more professional social media team.

Although Johansson mentions propaganda only sparingly, his paper works as a useful, fairly comprehensive account of the media landscape in Indonesia, presently as well as historically. His few words on propaganda are also useful, explaining how media exists primarily as a mode of disseminating propaganda when being viewed from the lens of framing theory, among others. Finally, he warns of how effective political messaging on social media may be dangerous, and how it can “result in an ever-increasing difficulty for citizens to differentiate between news, propaganda, and opinions” (p. 37).

Johansson, Anders C., 2016. “Social Media and Politics in Indonesia,” Stockholm School of Economics Asia Working Paper Series 2016-42, Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm China Economic Research Institute.

The Disinformation Order: Disruptive Communication and the Decline of Democratic Institutions

In this 2018 study published in the European Journal of Communication, W. Lance Bennett and Steven Livingston trace the roots of online political disinformation affecting democratic nations.  They argue that declining confidence in democratic institutions makes citizens more inclined to believe false information and narratives, and spread them more broadly on social media. They identify the radical right, enabled and supported by Russia, as the predominant source of disinformation, and cite examples in the UK Brexit campaign, disruptions affecting democracies in Europe, and the U.S. election of Donald Trump.

Many articles on social media and political communications provide differing definitions of disinformation, misinformation, and fake news. Bennett and Livingston offer their own provisional definition: “intentional falsehoods spread as news stories or simulated documentary formats to advance political goals” (Bennett & Livingston, p.124). In addition to those who share disinformation originating on the Internet, they identify legacy media as an important factor in spreading it further. They say that when news organizations report on false claims and narratives, the effect is to amplify the disinformation. Even fact-checking can strengthen this amplifier effect, because the message is exposed and repeated to more people. As traditional news institutions are attacked as “fake news,” journalistic attempts to correct the record can be cited by propagandists and their supporters as proof of an elite conspiracy to hide the truth. The authors refer to this dynamic as the “disinformation-amplification-reverberation (DAR) cycle.”

It’s interesting that both the political left and right increasingly share contempt for neoliberal policies that benefit elites. But instead of coming together to address political and economic problems, they are being driven further apart by “strategic disinformation.” This hollowing out of the center produces a growing legitimacy crisis, and political processes that are increasingly superficial. The authors term this post-democracy: “(t)he breakdown of core processes of political representation, along with declining authority of institutions and public officials” (p.127).

The authors identify Russia as the primary source of disinformation and disruptive hacking in an increasing number of western democratic and semi-democratic nations: Germany, the UK, The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and most of the Balkans. They say Russia has learned to coordinate a variety of hybrid warfare tactics that reinforce their impact, such as troll factories, hackers, bots, and the seeding of false information and narratives by state-owned media channels. As other researchers have argued, Bennett and Livingston say Russia’s disinformation activities are geostrategic, aimed at undermining NATO and the cohesiveness of democratic nations who oppose the expansion of Russia’s power.

In response to the scale of disinformation and disruptions in democratic institutions, Bennett and Livingston suggest comparative research on the characteristics of disinformation in different societies, so as to identify similarities and differences, and the identification of contextual factors that provide either fertile ground for or resistance to disinformation. They also recommend that the current operations of trolls, hackers, and bots should be more central to political communications studies.

Bennett, W. Lance, and Steven Livingston. 2018. “The Disinformation Order: Disruptive Communication and the Decline of Democratic Institutions.” European Journal of Communication 33 (2): 122–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267232118760317 .

Russia’s Improved Information Operations: From Georgia to Crimea

In the Western press much attention has been focused on Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election, by spreading disinformation broadly on the Internet and social media platforms. Russia (and of course the United States) has long used propaganda as a psychological weapon in hot wars, cold wars, and even times of relative peace. In an article published in the US Army War College journal Parameters , Emilio Iasiello, a cyberintelligence advisor to Fortune 100 clients, says “nonkinetic options” are now a core part of Russia’s military and geopolitical strategy: using information and deception to disrupt opponents and influence internal and global audiences.

But propaganda hasn’t always prevailed. Iasiello reviews Russia’s information operations in its 2008 invasion of Georgia, and finds that Georgia ultimately won the information war. Russia relied on pre-Internet propaganda tactics such as using traditional media to deliver key messaging to the international community, and trying to position Georgia as the aggressor and Russia as merely defending its citizens. But Georgia fought back with its own extensive counterinformation campaign, and ultimately won the battle for international support.

Iasiello says Russia may have lost the Georgian conflict, but learned that the Internet could be used as a weapon and began revising and expanding its information war strategy. In its 2014 annexation of the Crimean region in Ukraine, Russia applied the lessons from the Georgian conflict to orchestrate a rapid and nearly bloodless victory. Russian state actors directed cyberattacks to shut down Crimea’s telecommunications and websites, and to jam the mobile phones of key Ukrainian officials. Russian hackers intercepted documents on Ukrainian military strategy, launched DDOS attacks on Ukrainian and NATO websites, disrupted the Ukrainian Central Election Commission network, planted “fake news” on fake websites and Russian media, and employed a cadre of trolls to comment on news and social media for the purpose of distorting reality and confusing Ukraine’s allies.

According to Iasiello, the 2014 Crimean annexation was a case study in the use of social media to control messaging and sow discord among the Ukrainian population and the international community. Thus the birth of Russia’s new strategy for “hybrid” warfare, using trolls, fake websites, social media, and the international news media to massively spread disinformation and confusion about the conflict.

Iasiello says Russia is vastly outpacing the United States on information war tactics, and using its experience to refine its strategies for different conflicts. In essence, Russia is playing the long game to sow discord and division, so as to weaken Western alliances. His recommendations include developing a U.S. counterinformation center, using analytics and artificial intelligence to identify online disinformation, and increasing international cooperation to combat various forms of Russian propaganda. He concludes that the Internet and social media are now an international battleground, and Russia is currently winning the information war.

Iasiello, Emilio. 2017. “Russia’s Improved Information Operations: From Georgia to Crimea.” US Army War College: Parameters [Summer 2017], US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters, 47 (2): 51–63. https://www.hsdl.org/?abstract&did=803998 .

The Market of Disinformation

This report was produced by the Oxford Information Labs for the purpose of explicating the problem of disinformation on social media, and making some actionable recommendations for the UK Electoral Commission. The authors do an admirable job of describing disinformation strategies deployed by political campaigns with specific examples from recent events, including the inevitable reference to Cambridge Analytica.

The report seems to be written for an audience that may not know what an algorithm is…although the initial explanation of algorithms as “calculations coded in computer software” and “opinions embedded in mathematics” is unlikely to be of much help. From there, the report gets to the heart of the matter, which is that the bias of social media algorithms is to keep people “engaged.” This is a lovely word, but in the context of e.g. Facebook and Twitter it means “trigger the emotions of people to keep them scrolling, clicking, liking, and sharing for as long as humanly possible without literally dying of dehydration” (my wording) and preferably in many sessions per person per day.

So this is “optimization” in social media and the platforms can afford many thousands of engineers and experience designers to do it. The authors don’t let Google off the hook, and they do a reasonable job of explaining web crawling, relevance algorithms, and SEO. They outline recent changes to Facebook’s algorithm and explain why different Facebook users see different things, which leads into an explanation of psychological profiling, personal data aggregation, and microtargeting.

I think the most important point they make is that “(f)uture electoral policy and oversight should be informed by the fact that online and offline actions are necessarily linked, with the offline elements being key enablers of online uses and abuses.” In other words, the older tricks by political propagandists haven’t been replaced by social media; they’ve been augmented by it.

The authors recommend specific measures the UK Election commission could try to put in place. As with many ideas for regulating social media, they seem worthy of consideration, but they might be totally impractical. For example, digitally imprinting campaign material with the source of the information could improve transparency. Location verification of messages could help even more. Campaigns could be penalized for violations with financial sanctions that actually hurt. And finally, transparency in the financing of organizations and people behind political messages might limit the activities of truly bad actors. The objection in the West is likely to be “but Free Speech and Free Markets!” (Here in the U.S. we have the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which basically says money is speech so you can’t stop money.)

The measures suggested in this report aim to “future-proof” election policies. Elections are special cases, where (in theory) the outcome supports democratic governance. Elections are too important to just say “oh well, free speech and free markets, I guess we can’t do anything about political disinformation.” Some of these recommendations might make a difference in reducing disinformation in political campaigns today. As for future-proofing future elections, I suspect we’re going to need more future reports.

Hoffmann, Stacie, Emily Taylor, and Samantha Bradshaw. 2019. “The Market of Disinformation.” https://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/oxtec-disinfo-market/ .

Digital Media and the Surge of Political Outsiders: Explaining the Success of Political Challengers in the United States, Germany, and China

U.S. has a long history of outsiders running for president or gunning for power in general. Labor leader Eugene Debs ran five times as a Socialist candidate for president, and won 6 percent of the popular vote in 1912. Ronald Reagan ran as a “Washington outsider,” though he had already established political credentials as the governor of California. Ross Perot, a billionaire businessman, ran as an independent candidate in 1992, winning about 19 percent of the popular vote. But in most bids for the presidency and other high offices, outsiders have faced insurmountable obstacles in gaining the media coverage, financial support, and voter constituencies generated by established parties running traditional campaigns. That is, until the internet.

Jungherr, Schroeder, and Stier say the advent of the digital media fundamentally changed the political playing field by allowing outsiders to bypass the traditional gatekeepers and established institutions. By “digital media” they mean “the set of institutions and infrastructures allowing the production, distribution, and searching of information online” (Jungherr, Schroeder, & Stier, p.2). In other words, the internet and especially social media. This seems intuitively true, and Jungherr, Schroeder, and Stier provide concrete examples from three very different political scenarios: the 2016 U.S. presidential election of Donald Trump; the rise of the left-leaning Pirate Party and the far right-leaning AfD in Germany; and ultranationalist activists in China.

In each case, the outsider campaigners used an online presence to attract attention and support, often while inciting controversy and making outrageous claims about the political establishment and status quo. As the outsiders’ social media audience grew, they gained coverage in traditional media which served to raise their visibility and further broadcast and amplify their messages. In many cases the controversial rhetoric of the outsiders, inserted into digital media space and amplified by traditional media, has shifted the Overton Window of tolerable political discourse (Mackinac Center for Public Policy), leading to policies and actions that were previously anathema. Digital media thus allows outsiders to mount ongoing campaigns that challenge the very legitimacy of the institutions that served as gatekeepers of political language and power in the pre-internet world.

It’s interesting that the authors cite Barack Obama’s use of digital media in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, but fail to mention Howard Dean’s innovations in 2004. Dean, the early frontrunner, raised most of his campaign funding from small donors through the internet (CNN 2003), built a massive email list used by his campaign to communicate with supporters, and was one of the first presidential candidates to establish a strong online presence through a sophisticated campaign website (Howard Dean Campaign). His bid for the White House began to slump after the Iowa caucus, when his performance of what became known as the “I Have a Scream” speech ignited a media feeding frenzy that quickly spread far and wide online (CNN 2004). As the internet giveth, so too it can taketh away.

The authors say their study provides “a novel explanation that systematically accounts for the political consequences of digital media” (Jungherr, Schroeder, & Stier, p.1). The clarity with which they present evidence and the range of examples they cite strongly support this argument. Notably, they say the effect of digital media in politics is not deterministic; it simply provides an opportunity not available before the internet. They argue that this opportunity can be used by outsiders across the political and ideological spectrum.

But the examples cited focus on the rise of right-wing and would-be authoritarian outsiders, even in China where the authors say the government largely tolerates online activities of Chinese ultranationalists. Beyond this paper, further research might document and analyze examples of the “digital media effect” (my term, not the authors’) on the rise of progressive outsiders whose concerns include things like energy and environmental policy sanity, economic and social equity, and universal human rights.

Jungherr, Andreas, Ralph Schroeder, and Sebastian Stier. 2019. “Digital Media and the Surge of Political Outsiders: Explaining the Success of Political Challengers in the United States, Germany, and China.” Social Media + Society 5 (3): 2056305119875439.  https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119875439 .

CNN. 2003. “CNN.Com – Dean to Let Supporters Decide Whether to Abandon Public Financing – Nov. 5, 2003.” November 5, 2003.  http://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/11/05/elec04.prez.dean.financing/index.html .

CNN. 2004. “‘Dean Scream’ Becomes Online Hit,” January 23, 2004.  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3422809.stm .

Howard Dean Campaign. 2004. “Wayback Machine: Howard Dean for America.” January 29, 2004.  https://web.archive.org/web/20040129143845/http://howarddean.com/ .

Mackinac Center for Public Policy. n.d. “The Overton Window.” Accessed October 7, 2019.  http://www.mackinac.org/OvertonWindow .

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FORT researchers publish annotated bibliography of science on the invasive annual grass, medusahead

This recently published USGS Open-File Report compiles and summarizes 211 research products about medusahead ( Taeniatherum caput-medusae ) published between 2010 and 2022. 

Exotic annual grasses pose a major threat to native ecosystems, and may increase wildfire risk where prevalent. The Bureau of Land Management manages millions of acres of land susceptible to invasion by exotic annual grasses like medusahead, which has invaded rangelands and other ecosystems in the western United States. Medusahead has not been studied as extensively as other invasive annual grass species, so finding and accessing the science information needed to inform management of this novel invasive species can be difficult for practitioners. 

Photo of a head of grass, red background

To assist in this process, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has created this latest in a  series of annotated bibliographies  that focus on topics of management concern for western lands. It is preceded by several other bibliographies focused on invasive annual grass species (Poor and others 2021 ), greater-sage grouse (Carter and others  2018 ,  2020 , 2023 ), and other sagebrush-obligate species (Maxwell and others 2023 , Kleist and others 2022 ). 

The online version of this annotated bibliography (forthcoming on the  USGS Science for Resource Managers online tool ) will be searchable by topic, location, and year; it will also include links to each original publication, where available, and an option to download this information into an appendix suitable for inclusion in National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) analyses. 

The “Annotated Bibliography of Scientific Research on Taeniatherum caput-medusae Published from January 2010 to January 2022” was authored by FORT student contract ecologists Logan Maxwell, Elisabeth Teige, Joshua Willems, Lea Selby, and Laine McCall, FORT biologists Jennifer Meineke, Tait Rutherford, Ella Samuel, Alison Foster, and Samuel Jordan, and FORT ecologist Nate Kleist. The report is available at: https://doi.org/10.3133/ofr20231089 

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    ENG 111: Social Media Impact Definitions bibliography + annotations = annotated bibliography Bibliography A bibliography is a list of the sources you used for an essay or research project. The bibliography is also known as the "works cited" or reference list. Annotation An annotation can be a summary or evaluation of a source.

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    Closeup of the invasive annual grass, medusahead (Taeniatherum caput-medusae).Photo by Steve Dewey, Utah State University, Bugwood.org. To assist in this process, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has created this latest in a series of annotated bibliographies that focus on topics of management concern for western lands. It is preceded by several other bibliographies focused on invasive annual ...