The chapter explains the increasing frequency of so-called morality clauses imposed by sponsors in sponsorship agreements with professional tennis players. The aim of these clauses is to restrict players from particular conduct that reflects negatively on the product sponsored. The chapter explains the contractual nature of these clauses and provides an explanation as to how a violation of these restrictions may bring about a right of termination on the part of the sponsor. In the particular tennis context, the chapter explains the impact of social media and the digital world. It goes on to provide examples of morality clauses in tennis endorsement agreements.

Drill YouTube music videos are contradictory – nihilistic and collective, empty and humanizing, negatively assessing marginalization and societal nihilism, performing those scripts as a placebo for pain and humiliation, and also shaping popular culture in that image. This chapter explores drill YouTube music videos as cultural form, for what they tell us about the historical transformation of black diasporic sound culture, contemporary popular culture and its alternative cultural politics. Through an analysis of drill music videos, it identifies a shift away from sound culture towards video-music, and therein a shift to the networked and platformed moving image, and to narrative. This requires a reevaluation of the role of sound in alternative cultural politics and in black diasporic popular culture, and asks that drill video-music be evaluated on its contingent cultural terms, not on the terms of other cultural and musical moments.

This chapter focuses on the drill music genre, a subgenre of gangsta rap that was born in Chicago’s underground hip hop scene in the early 2010s. Using observation and interviews with drill artists, their managers and other support workers, it discusses the relational practices of hip-hop youth on social media. The chapter examines their work on social media toward acquiring “clout”– a digital form of influence described by emerging musicians as allowing them to leverage digital tools in building social and professional status, amplify authenticity, cultivate relations with fans, and connect to friends and other cultural producers. It analyses the practice of “capping” (strategic deception, exaggeration of toughness, desirability to women and financial wealth) as a relational strategy that respondents utilized to acquire clout. The chapter argues that capping is an example of how race, class, gender and geography influence the digital interactions of young people and how the social media practices of drill rappers add significantly to the understanding of the counterpublics arising from globalising social media.

Widespread recognition of the crises in the ecosystem for news in the United States points to multiple dimensions: The funding model for local news has collapsed as advertising and eyeballs have migrated to online social media platforms. Digital platforms and partisan media outlets do not halt and instead enable the rise in misinformation and disinformation. Private equity companies, committed only to short-term profits, are purchasing and strip-mining even profitable local news outlets. The public’s trust in conventional (and fast disappearing) news outlets is declining rapidly and the results contribute to our social and political divisions. With a particular focus on local news, this chapter first sketches federal constitutional and governmental support of news gathering and circulation; then turns to current sources of disruption and potential constructive reforms; proposes a set of responsibilities for social media companies, protections for users and consumers, and investments to amplify both supply and demand specifically regarding local news, and finally, identifies some promising recent developments and further questions that they present.

Social media and the internet are the most important changes in communication since the development of the printing press. They democratize the ability to reach a mass audience, but they can also quickly spread harmful information and threaten the viability of traditional media that are essential for newsgathering. Courts have thus far largely approached these media by applying existing doctrines of freedom of the press and freedom of speech. But these doctrines are often, though not always, inadequate to deal with the issues posed by social media and the internet. It is important to identify those areas where traditional doctrines are inadequate and to begin to develop new First Amendment and statutory approaches.

This chapter explores adolescent involvement in cults. Adolescence is a time in which many individuals engage in group-like activity. However, this chapter defines cult-like behavior as beyond the range of normal group-like activity expected during the transitional time of adolescence. The biological, social, and psychological factors of adolescent development increase their susceptibility to peer pressure, predispose them to self-exploration, and contribute to characteristics that attract adolescents to cults. This chapter describes the characteristics of normal adolescent life that predispose adolescents to cult recruitment, characteristics of adolescents who are likely to join cults, and characteristics of the leaders of cults that attract adolescents. Important regarding adolescents in particular, the increased access to technology, the internet, and social media is redefining adolescent membership in cults and future considerations may offer an updated lens through which to define and consider adolescent involvement in cults.

The basic tenet of effective emergency risk communication is to share the right message with the right people at the right time. The foundation that supports this basic tenet rests upon the channels that are used to disseminate such information. This chapter looks at the variety of channels that are available to public health, medical, and emergency managers during a health emergency and when to use different channels during different phases of an emergency response. Emergency risk communicators can use media richness theory to guide communication channel selection. The chapter identifies internal and external communication channels and how best to use them during an emergency. Internal channels include business collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom and secure messaging systems like the Health Alert Network and Epi-X. External communication channels include media briefings, news releases, wireless emergency alerts, GovDelivery, town halls, call centers, websites, and social media. The chapter outlines how to effectively coordinate media briefings and town halls. The chapter highlights best practice on optimizing websites so the public can quickly find the information they need. The chapter offers key tips when working with social media. A student case study analyzes the California Camp Fire wildfire using the Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication framework. Reflection questions are included at the end of the chapter.

Describe the mix of emotions and attitudes adolescents have towards themselves and their lives; understand the factors that cause unhappiness as well as those that promote well-being and buffer against adversity; evaluate the emotional opportunities and risks of adolescence.

As payment is increasingly becoming part of social media, it takes on the operating, governance, and revenue models of the Silicon Valley tech industry. At the same time, new platform payments “ride the rails” of long-standing infrastructures. These conditions create opportunities for surveillance and infrastructural power, as well as new unanticipated harms for users. As the future of money is imagined, it is wise to contemplate a payment ecosystem that is – like social media more broadly – increasingly private, siloed, and rife with scams.

This chapter addresses the question of digital space in/and literary studies, exploring how literary fiction has been shaped by the digital and how it has, in turn, shaped conceptions of digital space. Across a period of roughly 35 years, the chapter traces changing understandings of digital space in and through the literary. Beginning with the emergence of cyberspace as a virtual, “placeless” space in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the concomitant but short-lived rise of hypertext theory, the chapter articulates how early formations of digital space were fundamentally bound up with questions of the literary. It then turns to more recent shifts in understanding the space of the digital as a more hybrid one that recognises social existence as being simultaneously, and co-constitutively, physical and virtual. To illustrate this more hybrid spatiality, the chapter draws focus to new dynamics of literary creation, distribution, and consumption as well as recent representations and remediations of this kind of hybrid spatiality in “internet” or “social media” novels that work to capture the compression of online and offline communicative social space.

Social media has a complicated relationship with democracy. Although social media is neither democratic or undemocratic, it is an arena where different actors can promote or undermine democratization. Democracy is built on a foundation of norms and trust in institutions, where elections are the defining characteristic of the democratic process. This chapter outlines two ways disinformation campaigns can undermine democratic elections’ ability to ensure fair competition, representation, and accountability. First, disinformation narratives try to influence elections, by spreading false information about the voting process, or targeting voters, candidates, or parties to alter the outcome. Second, disinformation undermines trust in the integrity of the electoral process (from the ability to have free and fair elections, to expectations about the peaceful transfer of power), which can then erode trust in democracy. Prior work on social media has often focused on foreign election interference, but now it’s important to realize electoral disinformation is increasingly originating from domestic, not foreign, political actors. An important threat to democracy thus comes from within — namely, disinformation about democratic elections that is being created and shared by political leaders and elites, increasing the reach and false credibility of such false narratives.