Conference Agenda (All times are shown in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) unless otherwise noted)

An explosion at the Port of Beirut resulted in over 200 fatalities and displaced many more. Hundreds recorded and thousands shared the event, sparking discourse communities across social media. We provide a mixed-methods analysis of 26 TikTok videos about the port explosion. Our study involved a semiotic analysis of the videos and a content analysis of the related 21,150 comments. The discourse surrounding the explosion extends a growing body of literature on the role of TikTok in disseminating crisis-related information. We use a collective sensemaking framework to investigate how TikTok contributes to the understanding of an event. Our results advance an existing classification of crisis discourse, capturing distinctions between crisis discourse on Twitter and our study. In particular, we find that Middle Eastern content creators contributed more to collective sensemaking about the event than non-Middle Eastern creators. We additionally examine the current state of collective sensemaking on TikTok and provide platform implications.

The concept of ‘information crisis’ is playing an increasingly prominent role within information studies literature and practice. Yet, the term is rarely defined and its meaning often remains both inconsistent and ambiguous. This opacity calls for a greater grounding of the term if it is to become a key concept in the field, including how it operates and what it enforces. This short paper draws upon information studies literature to present a conceptual analysis of the information crisis concept. From this analysis, we argue that an information crisis framing is typically used to either establish the status quo, through centring challenges to established information ecosystems, or maintain the status quo, by outlining the operations needed to renew or protect these landscapes. These findings illustrate how ‘information crisis’ can obscure the very contexts of inequality and injustice through which crisis operates and delimits the possibility of changing/disrupting the status quo.

The aim of this paper is to examine the second- and third-level digital divides in U.S. society through empirical research on 5,253,530 web trajectory data of 642 unique participants. Through systematic analyses of the association between self-reported socioeconomic characteristics and the usage log, the paper exposed the inequality in application usage as a consequence of unequal cultural, temporal and capital resources. The research is strictly data-driven with a theoretical basis on the domestication theory and digital divide literature. This research can advise researchers and policymakers in understanding the multidimensionality of the digital divide and social inequality after the arose of tech giants and platforms.

Hacking is an opening gate to cybercrimes. Millions of hacked accounts are traded underground and misused for fraudulent activities. A majority of previous studies on hacking have been about hacked accounts detection and account security; however, relatively little is known about experiences of being hacked from gender perspectives. This study aims to explore experiences of being hacked with a focus on gender disparities from the perspective of the third-level digital divide—socially constructed gaps of digital use outcomes even among users who have similar digital access and skills. Tweets mentioning accounts hacked were obtained (N=13,731) and analyzed using topic modeling. Gender classification was performed on user profiles. Results show that women reported more experiences of being hacked in all online service types except gaming. Women were more likely to experience negative impacts of being hacked including reputational harm, money loss, and having personalized content modified. Furthermore, gender differences were found in coping strategies. Men were more likely to perform active strategies like warning others, rebuilding accounts, and deducing hackers’ origins. Meanwhile, women were more likely to seek help from others. The findings of this study imply that interventions to tackle cybercrimes need to be developed considering gender differences.