Title: The role of social media in major public debates : the case of the 2012 student strike in
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Spring 2012 was marked by a major social crisis in Quebec that stemmed from massive student protests against the provincial government’s decision to steeply increase tuition fees. As it happened elsewhere (in Turkey, Brazil, Chile, etc.), the issue complexified from the original students’ claims into a substantive social debate on the role of post-secondary education in society. Nicknamed “Maple Spring” (Printemps erable), the strong mobilizations challenged the taken-for-granted assumption of Canadian youth’s lack of interest for political issues and low political engagement. Some works suggest that social media could have played an important part in that phenomenon. Facebook and Twitter, notably, served as information sources and sharing tools which, while not replacing traditional media, might have been used in a complementary way by young adults to get informed, discuss, and form their opinions. The paper presents the results of a research we undertook to document those informational practices and to determine to what extent the role of social media in public debates are complementary to the role of traditional media, or whether they reveal emerging informational practices. In particular, and besides the use of social network sites – notably Facebook – as an echo chamber for mainstream media news, we were interested in the phenomenon of spontaneous political conversations that temporarily turn a Facebook post into a microsphere of semi-public debate (with “friends of friends”). Are these practices indicative of a collective appropriation of socio-digital platforms for democratic participation by the so-called “digital generation”? Is this
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".