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Identity Activism is a new phenomenon afforded by the massive popularity of social media. It consists of the prominent display of a social movement symbol within a space reserved for description of the self. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine provides a contemporary (yet unfortunate) opportunity to observe this phenomenon. Here, we introduce and explore this concept in the context of the recent Twitter trend of displaying the Ukraine flag emoji in bios and names to signal support of Ukraine. We explore several questions, including: how has the popularity of this trend changed over time, are users who display the flag more likely to be connected to others who do, and what types of users are and are not participating. We find that Ukraine flag emoji prevalence in both names and bios increased many-fold in late February 2022, with it becoming the 11th most prevalent emoji in bios and the 3rd most prevalent emoji in names during March. We also find evidence that users who display the flag in their bio or name are more likely to follow and be followed by others who also do so, as compared to users who do not. Finally, we observe that users who share politically left-leaning messages were most likely to display the emoji. Those who share account information from alternative social media sites and non-personal accounts appear least likely. These findings give us insight into how users participate in Identity Activism, what connections exist between participating users, and, in this particular case, what types of users participate.
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The Motivated Can Encrypt (Even with PGP)
Abstract Existing end-to-end-encrypted (E2EE) email systems, mainly PGP, have long been evaluated in controlled lab settings. While these studies have exposed usability obstacles for the average user and offer design improvements, there exist users with an immediate need for private communication, who must cope with existing software and its limitations. We seek to understand whether individuals motivated by concrete privacy threats, such as those vulnerable to state surveil-lance, can overcome usability issues to adopt complex E2EE tools for long-term use. We surveyed regional activists, as surveillance of social movements is well-documented. Our study group includes individuals from 9 social movement groups in the US who had elected to participate in a workshop on using Thunder-bird+Enigmail for email encryption. These workshops tool place prior to mid-2017, via a partnership with a non-profit which supports social movement groups. Six to 40 months after their PGP email encryption training, more than half of the study participants were continuing to use PGP email encryption despite intervening widespread deployment of simple E2EE messaging apps such as Signal. We study the interplay of usability with social factors such as motivation and the risks that individuals undertake through their activism. We find that while usability is an important factor, it is not enough to explain long term use. For example, we find that riskiness of one’s activism is negatively correlated with long-term PGP use. This study represents the first long-term study, and the first in-the-wild study, of PGP email encryption adoption.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1915768
- PAR ID:
- 10329278
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies
- Volume:
- 2021
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 2299-0984
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 49 to 69
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.2478/popets-2021-0037
