Considering the rapid changes in social media environments, use, and users, the conference organizers invite scholarly and original submissions that relate to the 2018 theme of “Networked Influence and Virality". They are welcoming both quantitative and qualitative work, especially those that explore some of the questions and issues raised below:

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

Tickets: http://socialmediaandsociety.org/registration/