Acta Sociológica

Presentación

2025-01-23T13:46:19-06:00

Platforms on trial: an exploration of the media coverage of the Facebook Files/Papers

2025-01-23T14:22:37-06:00

In recent years, social media platforms have been the subject of intense controversies related to their algorithms, data and designs. However, how these controversies connect platforms to societal harms and effectively redistribute responsibilities remains understudied. From an interdisciplinary perspective between Digital Sociology, Media Studies and Science and Technology Studies, this article analyses the media coverage of the Facebook Files/Papers to identify which actors and issues gained greater visibility to make and unmake the connection between Meta platforms and various societal harms. Combining a computational analysis of the news coverage with an ethnographic approach to the actors involved in the controversy, it identifies a predominance of the whistleblower figure, an emphasis on the negative effects of Instagram on teenage mental health, and the creation of a ‘strategic causalism’ in the way the leaks were framed in order to push for greater criticism and regulation of the platforms. The findings have important implications for the growing demand for greater transparency and platform accountability.

Critical Datification of Violence. Contributions to Critical Data Studies from Latin American Contexts

2025-01-23T18:27:51-06:00

In dialogue with critical data studies, this article proposes the notion of dominant datafication, constituted by a numerical ontology, a predictive rationality, a governmentality of surveillance and control, a commercial ethic, and a universalist epistemology. It reviews the areas of knowledge and the emphases that are building this field and adds aspects of the Latin American scenario, where the processes of datafication of reality are inserted in contexts of crisis of human rights violations and institutional fragility. Within this framework, conceptual inputs are proposed for a critical datafication of violence that place the numerical outside the center of the analysis, seek to reveal invisible versions of historical records of serious human rights violations, take data as an intervenable symbolic infrastructure and address massive archives as politically situated clippings; tools are used for methodological design from areas such as digital methods and corpus linguistics.

Contextual overview of the Mexican feminist movement on Twitter (X)

2025-01-23T18:45:38-06:00

The following text presents a contextual overview of Mexican feminism developed in the social network Twitter (X). This panorama was based on a survey of 148 Mexican female users with the aim of learning about the feminist movement in the social network, but also other practices of users that go beyond activism and protest. The panorama breaks down: the habits of use and connection to Twitter, the women referents of the feminist movement on the platform, the topics of interest and the most discussed topics in relation to feminisms, the most important hashtags for the Mexican feminist movement, the increase of feminist discourse on the social network during the covid-19 pandemic and the learning of feminisms obtained by the users in their everyday life. As a conclusion I propose, following the thoughts of Margara Millán (2020), the existence of a “polyphoric subject of feminism on Twitter”. A heterogeneous, collective, intergenerational subject that demands justice and dignity from different positions, but also learns, develops and recognizes itself among tensions, communality and digital everyday life.

Change in women 's protests on Twitter/X: communicational affordances and agency in socio-digital platforms

2025-01-23T19:00:08-06:00

The communication practices of social network users are modified over time due to the changes introduced by the platforms. These changes articulate a series of technical characteristics that are related to the way in which these services enable and constrain users’ actions. We will refer to these logics of platform operation as communicational affordances. To verify changes in communication practices and how they relate to these affordances, we analyze 26 datasets consisting of 4.95 million posts on the Twitter/X service related to cases of digital protests by women in Mexico. By correlating different metrics for each dataset, it is possible to observe how users increasingly use the possibilities of replicating and scaling the digital conversation, using the features of the service to mobilize their claims

Digital risks in LGBT activists in the digital incorporation process: access, use and appropriation

2025-01-23T19:16:14-06:00

The present article aims to analyze the digital risks faced by LGBT community activists in their social mobilization practices. For the analysis, the categories of access, use, and appropriation were used to identify how activists have incorporated technologies into their repertoires of action and thus identify the issues they perceive in digital scenarios and the strategies they implement to mitigate risks derived from that appropriation. For the application of the study, semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with activists belonging to nine LGBT community collectives. Among the most important findings of this study is that although socio-digital networks have allowed greater visibility and reach of their social slogans, they are also vulnerable to direct attacks such as hate speech and harassment. This highlights the urgent need to implement digital security protocols and online protection for LGBT community collectives.

League of Legends in Colombia: material conditions, the instability of competition and professional difficulties from the periphery of e-sports

2025-01-23T19:30:14-06:00

Electronic sports or e-sports refer to professional competitive video game practices, institutionally constituted and regulated. In this universe, the professional League of Legends (LoL) scene stands out for its popularity and because it is structured globally under centralized governance, bringing together millions of players worldwide who compete regionally and locally. From Pierre Bourdieu’s perspective, an analysis of the professional field of LoL in Colombia, its logic and dynamics was conducted. Through this analysis, it was possible to situate the experience of playing LoL professionally in the country as part of a peripheral position within the global e-sport scenario due to a series of different factors. This peripheral position presents itself in the daily reality of the players in the field in different ways: material and social difficulties that hinder or completely limit their possibility of learning the game, strong inferiority complexes when comparing themselves to players in other regions and an ever-present structural instability that can end up cutting short their dreams. This article analyzes these conditions and the way they are perceived by the agents who play for a living in the professional context of LoL in Colombia.

30 years of disaster risk management: a critical review

2025-01-23T20:06:51-06:00

More than three decades of initiatives and unquantifiable resources invested in reducing human and material losses due to disasters have failed to show the least promising results. On the contrary, year after year the impact of these events grows and accumulates in an escalation that cannot be contained. The actions undertaken by national and international bureaucracies have proven to be inefficient in practice, as have the efforts of the academic community and organisations dedicated to the generation and promotion of knowledge, including networks of professionals or non-governmental organisations.Why, in the face of apparent clarity and agreement on the causes of risk and disasters by governments and the international community, has no progress been made in reducing them? Why have risk reduction actions failed to transcend emergency preparedness and response? Why has the knowledge generated so far on the causality of risk not been translated into effective action? What is the role that societies subject to risk conditions or affected by disasters should play in more efficient intervention schemes to reduce risk? These are some of the questions that this paper seeks to answer.

Mother tongue? Beyond an expression... Languages and descendants of French migrants in Mexico

2025-01-23T20:23:48-06:00

Abstract The 100-year migration between Barcelonnette, in the French Alps, and Mexico that began in the first decades of the 19th century has been widely studied; however, several aspects were eft aside. Thanks to a digital ethnography carried out with descendants of migrants between 2020 and 2022, this article puts forward the role of women as a pillar in the transmission of languages in this specific transnational migratory case. Some factors are presented, such as the kind of marriage, intentions, links with the community, and place of residence. All of them led to the preservation or loss of French among the descendants of barcelonnettes born in Mexico.

La orfandad institucional: un análisis del caso Ayotzinapa

2025-01-23T20:46:29-06:00

La orfandad institucional: un análisis del caso Ayotzinapa

Teresita de barbieri, obra y trashumancia

2025-01-23T20:57:52-06:00

Teresita de barbieri, obra y trashumancia

Subjetividade Maquínica

2025-01-23T21:08:38-06:00

Subjetividade Maquínica