Digital and Social Media

Digital and social media (DSM) continue to evolve as central platforms for communication, entertainment, activism and knowledge exchange. From immersive virtual environments to algorithmically-curated content, DSM technologies shape how individuals and communities interact, express identity and respond to global events. Streaming music and video have replaced physical formats like CDs and DVDs. Tools like email, Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, WeChat, TikTok and Instagram are commonly used for communication, and changes to these services prompt significant concern and adjustments. Digital media challenges traditional news outlets, shifting how society gets information, a trend that the growth of generative AI is amplifying greatly.

Understanding the developments and implications of DSM remains a crucial task for both researchers and the public. To address this challenge, the Digital and Social Media (DSM) track covers a broad range of topics, disciplines and approaches, bringing together researchers to share and discuss cutting-edge research. This year, the track includes 57 papers organized into 12 minitracks, each curated through the dedicated efforts of the minitrack chairs.

Five minitracks gather research on different types of digital or social media.

Communication, Digital Conversation and Media Technologies addresses communication dynamics across digital and social media platforms, including interpersonal, organizational and mass communication, with particular attention to human-machine communication and generative AI. The 15 papers in this minitrack present diverse investigations of online communication practices, spanning algorithmic community formation, platform affordances, emotional dynamics, emerging news genres, cultural heritage digitization, NFT marketplaces, visual framing analysis, cross-platform discourse and gender-linguistic patterns in livestreaming.

Games and Gaming explores the social dimensions of digital games, including community dynamics, social practices, multiplayer interactions, toxicity and streaming, acknowledging games as socio-technical constructs. The 6 papers in this minitrack explore gaming culture and player behavior, including behavioral alignment in multiplayer contexts, social dynamics in otome games, collective viewer behavior in livestreaming, trophy design discourse, narrative effects on puzzle game motivation and continuous innovation in modular game systems.

Digital and Social Media in Enterprise examines how organizations use digital and social media internally and externally to facilitate work processes, employee well-being and stakeholder engagement, including the role of AI in enterprise social media. The paper in this minitrack investigates humancomputer interaction factors affecting information retrieval efficiency, specifically exploring how initial search point choices influence consumer search effectiveness.

Generative AI and AI-generated Contents on Social Media investigates AI-generated content on social media platforms, exploring technical capabilities, user perceptions, business applications and ethical concerns including authenticity, deepfakes and labor market impacts. The 3 papers in this minitrack address generative AI’s role in digital communication, exploring strategic counternarrative generation using large language models, emotional and ethical responses to AI-generated digital resurrection content and the impact of AI label disclosure on deepfake engagement.

Finally, new this year, Metaverse, Mixed Reality, and Digital Me examines metaverse platforms, mixed reality technologies and digital selfrepresentations (“digital-me”), exploring their technological affordances, socio-behavioral mechanisms, and business applications across domains. The 4 papers in this minitrack investigate immersive virtual environments and their applications, including avatar-mediated self-disclosure in mental healthcare, digital-me expert system design, virtual reality for data interpretation and literacy and brand representation through conversational agents.

Two minitracks advance methodology for research on DSM.

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Analytics for Social Media (formerly Data Analytics, Data Mining and Machine Learning for Social Media) presents research that combines digital and social media with AI, machine learning and analytics to study topics including misinformation detection, content generation, opinion mining, and ethical challenges. The 5 papers in this minitrack showcase advanced computational methods for analyzing digital behavior, including deep learning for event prediction, agent-based modeling of content reframing, mental health advocacy analysis, multimodal engagement studies and emotion-topic analysis in political discourse.

Netnography in System Sciences Research: This minitrack features papers that promote the use of netnography as a qualitative research method for generating cultural insights about online social interactions, with applications ranging from AI-assisted research to immersive gaming contexts. The 2 papers in this minitrack present qualitative studies of online communities and ideologies, examining language ideology debates in migration contexts and the phenomenon of delusional consumption ideology in digital spaces.

Finally, papers in five minitracks examine a particular phenomenon or related phenomena as it or they unfold in the setting of DSM.

Culture, Identity and Inclusion interrogates how digital and social media shape identity formation, inclusion, exclusion and diversity across different cultural contexts, with emphasis on addressing digital divides and accessibility. The 6 papers in this minitrack investigate digital equity and cultural representation, covering co-creation in cultural heritage digitization, fragmentation and inclusion in vegan activism, psychological barriers to digital competence, generational emoji usage patterns, creator community fragmentation through subscription models and cross-cultural privacy concerns about AI smart glasses.

Social Media Influencers and Influencing explores the impact of human and virtual social media influencers on consumer behavior, marketing, politics and society, including emerging issues around AI-driven influencers, misinformation and ethical sustainability. The 7 papers in this minitrack explore the creator economy and influence mechanisms, examining linguistic strategies in livestream commerce, athlete self-presentation, influence propagation modeling, multi-platform adoption strategies, perfectionism in social media contexts, peer endorsement effects on product ratings and systematic definitions of social media influencers.

Decision Making Bias and Misinformation in Online Social Networks (formerly Decision Making in Online Social Networks) explores, extends and challenges existing knowledge of how online social communities and networks influence individual, organizational and community decision-making processes, including issues of bias, misinformation and the wisdom of crowds. The 2 papers in this minitrack explore challenges in credibility and information integrity, investigating how expertise boundaries affect reputation in polarized contexts and the detection and explanation of misinformation laundered through large language models.

Finally, two new minitracks explore emerging topics.

Adversarial Influences: Erosion of Societal Norms and Institutions from Influences in Digital and Social Media, seeks to examine how digital technologies, AI and social media platforms impact societal trust, democratic norms and information environments within the context of global power competition. The 3 papers in this minitrack examine how adversarial actors and hostile communication shape online discourse, including toxicity spirals, narrative manipulation in information campaigns and social media’s disruptive effects on engagement and learning in schools.

Resilient Digital Communities: Social Media, Crisis Response, and Collective Action provides an interdisciplinary forum to examine social media’s role in crisis management, community mobilization, mis–information control and ethical challenges during emergencies and disasters. The 3 papers in this minitrack focus on how social media facilitates information sharing during crises, examining scientist communication strategies, scalable sentiment analysis frameworks for decentralized platforms and user decision-making processes when sharing crisis information.

Looking across the minitracks, the ever-growing power of social media data for answering pressing social question is apparent in many of the papers. A welcome observation is the increasing diversity of social media platforms and real-world settings being studied, with the recognition that life is increasingly mediated by these technologies. A more recent development is the growing importance and influence of AI technologies. In sum, the track offers a home for research on diverse types of DSM, in diverse settings, with diverse methods and examining diverse phenomena, but joined by an interest in these novel media.

Kevin Crowston
School of Information Studies
Syracuse University
crowston@syr.edu