Blake Hallinan
Biographic Data
| ID | 640471 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Blake Hallinan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Blake |
| FAMILY NAME | Hallinan |
| SIGNATURE | HALLINAN B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4696-8290 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 183 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Copyright at the margins
Platform governance research has prioritized formal mechanisms that can be codified in law or policy and audited with trace data. While such mechanisms merit attention, the focus risks overlooking informal yet influential practices that shape platform culture. We introduce a methodological approach for tracking informal platform governance through fan wikis, demonstrated through the case of copyright enforcement on YouTube. We annotated 149 copyr…
How to do things with a keyword
While people regularly employ the term values in mundane interactions and political debates on social media, little is known about its function in public communication. Approaching values as a keyword in everyday communication, we asked: In what contexts do Twitter users invoke the term values? What discursive functions does the term serve? How do these contexts and functions differ across languages? To address these questions, we analyzed approx…
Resisting climate imaginaries
The climate crisis is simultaneously a crisis of the imagination, signaling a cultural failure to comprehend and contest unfolding ecological destruction. Conventional media representations of climate futures, including catastrophic documentaries, corporate sustainability narratives, and even climate activism imagery, often inadvertently fuel anxiety or consumerist complacency. Online communities offer alternative spaces of cultural production th…
The TikTok Caliphate
Jihadist organizations and their supporters have long used social media to spread propaganda, creating enduring content moderation challenges. Despite TikTok’s purported zero-tolerance approach to violent extremism, terrorist propaganda persists on the platform. This study investigates how supporters of ISIS and Al-Qaeda employ TikTok’s features to exploit algorithmic recommendations and evade content moderation, increasing their visibility withi…
The expression of values on social media
Social media is a central arena for the articulation of values, shaping what people around the world deem important and desirable. However, traditional value typologies struggle to capture the dynamic nature of value expression in digital spheres and overlook new communication-related values prevalent in these environments. Addressing these gaps, we developed an analytical framework for investigating value expression on social media, comprising t…
Aspirational platform governance
Although commercial social media platforms provide few formal channels for participation in platform governance, creators aspire to influence decisions and policies through expressive forms of civic engagement that ultimately legitimate platforms as arbiters of public discourse
Creator Cartels as Emergent Platform Governance
Creators frequently collaborate to share knowledge of and strategies for countering negative experiences of platform governance, including around issues of harassment, copyright enforcement, and censorship. In some cases, they have tried to craft more formal arrangements like creator unions, but these have failed to find stability in the platform economy, which operates differently than traditional labor-employer relationships. We point to a diff…
The Collective Individualism of Youtube Makeup Reviews
Beauty is one of the most popular and lucrative segments on YouTube, with broad transnational appeal, making it an ideal site to investigate the relationship between commercialization, globalization, and digital platforms. We focus on makeup reviews to utilize established research on cross-cultural differences in reviewing and ask how cultural repertoires of evaluation compare across multiple languages. We collected popular makeup reviews using k…
Broadcasting the good mom
With the rise of social media, mothers around the world publicly share their experiences with raising children, shaping broader notions of what motherhood is and should be. While scholars have documented this phenomenon’s importance, we know little about the values this online discourse expresses or how it varies across cultures. Addressing this gap, we compared the values invoked by moms in morning routine videos on YouTube. Using a novel codebo…
Priorities and exclusions within Trust and Safety industry standards
Platform governance is simultaneously a matter of public concern and a professional calling for Trust and Safety, the nascent field tasked with setting and enforcing standards of acceptable behavior on digital platforms. Yet we know little about how the growing professionalization of platform governance shapes content moderation practices. Using the schema of content abuse from the Trust & Safety Professional Association, we analyzed the Communit…
Global creator culture? Converging values and generic practices in YouTube reviews
Social media facilitates new forms of cultural production from professionalized and commercialized users known as creators. While some have posited the emergence of a global creator culture, others have identified substantial gender differences and local variation. To assess how these factors influence content production, we focused on the critical case of YouTube review videos, a successful genre that is both internationally popular and heavily …
Liking without borders? Authenticity and the evaluation of Instagram photo genres
While authenticity has been identified as pivotal on social media, it has not been studied as part of a broader value ecology shaping content evaluation. Addressing this gap, we investigated users’ evaluations of prominent Instagram genres in relation to perceptions of authenticity. A survey of 1,000 users from the United States, Germany, Italy, Japan, and South Korea revealed transnational similarities in value-related interpretations of genres,…
Copyright callouts and the promise of creator-driven platform governance
Responding to frustrations with the enforcement of copyright on YouTube, some creators publish videos that discuss their experiences, challenge claims of infringement, and critique broader structures of content moderation. Platform callouts, or public complaints about the conduct of or on platforms, are one of the primary ways creators challenge the power imbalance between users and corporations. Through an analysis of 135 videos, we provide a ri…
User-generated accountability
Despite opaque automated systems and few formal channels for participation, YouTubers navigate algorithmic governance on the platform through a strategy we call user-generated accountability: the generation of publicity via content creation to reveal failures, oversights, or harmful policies. Through an analysis of 250 videos, we identify common strategies, concerns, and targets of accountability. Creators primarily upload vlogs that acknowledge …
“I love this photo, I can feel their hearts!” How users across the world evaluate social media portraiture
Portraits on social media are value-laden constructs. Whether documenting graduation or flexing in the gym, users express what they care about and present it for others to evaluate. Since “global” portrait genres are produced and consumed in different locales, their interpretation and evaluation may vary. We thus ask: What values do people identify in different types of social media portraits? Which evaluative criteria do they use when judging th…
“I Love This Photo! I Can Feel Their Hearts”. How Users Across the World Evaluate Social Media Portraiture
Personal portraits on social media are value-laden constructs. Whether documenting graduation or flexing in the gym, users express what they care about and present it for others to evaluate. Since “global” portrait genres are produced and consumed in different locales, their interpretation and evaluation may vary. We thus ask: What values do people identify in different types of social media portraits? Which evaluative criteria do they use when j…
"Youtube Doesn't Care About Creators"
Unsatisfied with the black-boxing of algorithmic governance and platform governance on YouTube more generally, creators have begun to seek accountability through other means, deploying their skills, audiences, and situated knowledge to investigate the platform’s operations. This paper examines a phenomenon we term $2 , or the use of publicity via content creation to reveal failures, oversights, or harmful policies on a platform. We analyzed 250 v…
How to Do Things With “Values”
The term _values_ is prominent in political discourse. Yet its ubiquity is matched by its vagueness, especially when considering usage among different cultures. Twitter provides a promising venue for exploring the contested political discourse surrounding this term. In this paper, we study the use of the term values on Twitter across different language communities. We ask: _what meanings do users ascribe to the term “values”?_ and _what are the s…
The Value Affordances of Social Media Engagement Features
Like, Comment, and Share are ubiquitous features and central elements of engagement on social media platforms. Yet the values promoted by such features remain an open question. We propose the concept of value affordances, defined as the set of ethical, aesthetic, and relational principles that emerge from the interaction between different stakeholders and technological infrastructures. We develop a novel method for studying value affordances thro…
The value(s) of social media rituals
2000), we compare discursive topics, modes of ritual participation, and the values expressed in resolutions. Our findings indicate both that the ritual crosses cultures and that there are language-specific dynamics that do not map neatly onto established divisions between 'Eastern' and 'Western' value orientations. Instead, we identify three underlying tensions organizing the articulation of values: self-acceptance vs. self-improvement, public vs…
Governing principles
As sites where social media corporations profess their commitment to principles like community and free speech, policy documents function as boundary objects that navigate diverse audiences, purposes, and interests. This article compares the discourse of values in the Privacy Policies, Terms of Service, and Community Guidelines of five major platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok). Through a mixed-methods analysis, we identi…
No judgment
Social media platforms employ algorithmic recommendations to optimize the user's experience and incentivize particular forms of cultural production. While prior research shows that creators respond to these incentives and seek to optimize their content in return, the normative implications of this process are ambiguous and contentious. To examine the values promoted by platforms, this study focuses on YouTube reviews, a popular genre that crosses…
The value affordances of social media engagement features
Social media engagement is ubiquitous but contested, simultaneously framed as an everyday form of support and an urgent societal risk. To make sense of these competing claims, we introduce the concept of value affordances, defined as the set of ethical, aesthetic, and relational principles that emerge from the interaction between different stakeholders and technological infrastructures. We develop a novel method involving focus groups and value c…
A typology of social media rituals
Given its massive volume and rapid development of new trends, the universe of user-generated content may seem utterly chaotic. Yet the flow of content is underlined by deep-rooted patterns of communication. In this article, we present the first systematic attempt to identify these patterns using the concept of social media rituals. Understood as typified communicative practices that formalize and express shared values, rituals offer a productive …
What Does #Freedom Look Like? Instagram and the Visual Imagination of Values
Instagram is the place for the visualization of everything, from travel and food to abstract concepts such as freedom. Over the past decade, the platform has introduced a bottom-up process where users co-produce image repertoires that shape the boundaries of the imaginable. Drawing on an epistemology of social constructionism, we ask which visual repertoires are associated with value-related terms on Instagram. We studied 20 widely used value has…
Recommended for you
How does algorithmic information processing affect the meaning of the word culture, and, by extension, cultural practice? We address this question by focusing on the Netflix Prize (2006–2009), a contest offering US$1m to the first individual or team to boost the accuracy of the company’s existing movie recommendation system by 10%. Although billed as a technical challenge intended for engineers, we argue that the Netflix Prize was equally an effo…
Beyond Neutrality
Social media platforms are prominent sites where values are expressed, contested, and diffused. In this article, we present a conceptual framework for studying the communication of values on and through social media composed of two dimensions: scale (from individual users to global infrastructures) and explicitness (from the most explicit to the invisible). Utilizing the model, we compare the communication of two values—engagement and authenticit…
Unexpected expectations
How to ethically conduct online platform-based research remains an unsettled issue and the source of continued controversy. The Facebook emotional contagion study, in which researchers altered Facebook News Feeds to determine whether exposure to emotional content influences a user’s mood, has been one focal point of these discussions. The intense negative reaction by the media and public came as a surprise to those involved—but what prompted this…
The value affordances of social media engagement features
Social media engagement is ubiquitous but contested, simultaneously framed as an everyday form of support and an urgent societal risk. To make sense of these competing claims, we introduce the concept of value affordances, defined as the set of ethical, aesthetic, and relational principles that emerge from the interaction between different stakeholders and technological infrastructures. We develop a novel method involving focus groups and value c…
A typology of social media rituals
Given its massive volume and rapid development of new trends, the universe of user-generated content may seem utterly chaotic. Yet the flow of content is underlined by deep-rooted patterns of communication. In this article, we present the first systematic attempt to identify these patterns using the concept of social media rituals. Understood as typified communicative practices that formalize and express shared values, rituals offer a productive …
Governing principles
As sites where social media corporations profess their commitment to principles like community and free speech, policy documents function as boundary objects that navigate diverse audiences, purposes, and interests. This article compares the discourse of values in the Privacy Policies, Terms of Service, and Community Guidelines of five major platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok). Through a mixed-methods analysis, we identi…
No judgment
Social media platforms employ algorithmic recommendations to optimize the user's experience and incentivize particular forms of cultural production. While prior research shows that creators respond to these incentives and seek to optimize their content in return, the normative implications of this process are ambiguous and contentious. To examine the values promoted by platforms, this study focuses on YouTube reviews, a popular genre that crosses…
The haunting of GeoCities and the politics of access control on the early Web
Yahoo’s purchase of make-your-own-website platform GeoCities in 1999 and subsequent implementation of a new Terms of Service agreement led to one of the most notable boycotts in Web history. During the “Haunting,” GeoCities users stripped their homepages of color and content, replacing blinking GIFs with excerpts of the offending Terms of Service. In this landmark battle over content rights and access control, protestors used the platform antagon…
The expression of values on social media
Social media is a central arena for the articulation of values, shaping what people around the world deem important and desirable. However, traditional value typologies struggle to capture the dynamic nature of value expression in digital spheres and overlook new communication-related values prevalent in these environments. Addressing these gaps, we developed an analytical framework for investigating value expression on social media, comprising t…
Mapping the transnational imaginary of social media genres
This article presents a transnational study of the classification and evaluation of social media content. We conducted a large-scale survey ( N = 4770) in five countries (Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and the United States) with open-ended questions about the types of content people like and dislike. Through iterative and inductive coding, we identified 29 topics, or broad areas of interest, and 213 recurrent genres, or narrower categories …
User-generated accountability
Despite opaque automated systems and few formal channels for participation, YouTubers navigate algorithmic governance on the platform through a strategy we call user-generated accountability: the generation of publicity via content creation to reveal failures, oversights, or harmful policies. Through an analysis of 250 videos, we identify common strategies, concerns, and targets of accountability. Creators primarily upload vlogs that acknowledge …
Liking without borders? Authenticity and the evaluation of Instagram photo genres
While authenticity has been identified as pivotal on social media, it has not been studied as part of a broader value ecology shaping content evaluation. Addressing this gap, we investigated users’ evaluations of prominent Instagram genres in relation to perceptions of authenticity. A survey of 1,000 users from the United States, Germany, Italy, Japan, and South Korea revealed transnational similarities in value-related interpretations of genres,…
New Media Goes to the Movies
Movie theaters typically appear adjacent to discussions of new media. Although there has been work on digital cinema, we shift the focus from the digitization of the medium to the digitization of the theatrical audience and analyze the movie theater as new media. To do so, we look at the historical and contemporary strategies for digitizing the theatrical audience of a prominent theater chain. We identify common media of digitization, including c…
Recommended for you
How does algorithmic information processing affect the meaning of the word culture, and, by extension, cultural practice? We address this question by focusing on the Netflix Prize (2006–2009), a contest offering US$1m to the first individual or team to boost the accuracy of the company’s existing movie recommendation system by 10%. Although billed as a technical challenge intended for engineers, we argue that the Netflix Prize was equally an effo…
The Internet of feels
In February 2016, Facebook released ‘Reactions’, a feature that allows users to respond to posts on the social network with one of six different emotional icons, in addition to the ubiquitous ‘Like
New Media Goes to the Movies
Movie theaters typically appear adjacent to discussions of new media. Although there has been work on digital cinema, we shift the focus from the digitization of the medium to the digitization of the theatrical audience and analyze the movie theater as new media. To do so, we look at the historical and contemporary strategies for digitizing the theatrical audience of a prominent theater chain. We identify common media of digitization, including c…
Unexpected expectations
How to ethically conduct online platform-based research remains an unsettled issue and the source of continued controversy. The Facebook emotional contagion study, in which researchers altered Facebook News Feeds to determine whether exposure to emotional content influences a user’s mood, has been one focal point of these discussions. The intense negative reaction by the media and public came as a surprise to those involved—but what prompted this…
What Does #Freedom Look Like? Instagram and the Visual Imagination of Values
Instagram is the place for the visualization of everything, from travel and food to abstract concepts such as compassion or freedom. While visualizing the abstract is not new, the platform has introduced a bottom-up process where users co-produce image repertoires that shape the boundaries of the imaginable. In this paper, we address an unexplored question about this process: which visual repertoires are associated with value-related terms on Ins…
The haunting of GeoCities and the politics of access control on the early Web
Yahoo’s purchase of make-your-own-website platform GeoCities in 1999 and subsequent implementation of a new Terms of Service agreement led to one of the most notable boycotts in Web history. During the “Haunting,” GeoCities users stripped their homepages of color and content, replacing blinking GIFs with excerpts of the offending Terms of Service. In this landmark battle over content rights and access control, protestors used the platform antagon…
What Does #Freedom Look Like? Instagram and the Visual Imagination of Values
Instagram is the place for the visualization of everything, from travel and food to abstract concepts such as freedom. Over the past decade, the platform has introduced a bottom-up process where users co-produce image repertoires that shape the boundaries of the imaginable. Drawing on an epistemology of social constructionism, we ask which visual repertoires are associated with value-related terms on Instagram. We studied 20 widely used value has…
Algorithmic Imaginations
How we imagine our place within the structure of sociotechnical-human relationships—specifically, in domains of life affected by data-analytics and the probabilistic bets institutions and people in power make on the future of our credit worthiness, political leanings, shopping habits etc.—is our “algorithmic imagination.” The purpose of this panel is to explore the “algorithmic imagination” as it manifests in particular scholarly, historical, soc…
The Cheshire Cat of Social Media
Value is fundamental for social media platforms, not only in the economic sense but also in the sense of normative principles like community and free speech. Policy documents are pivotal sites for the expression of values and present a public-facing account of the roles and responsibilities assigned to various actors, including individual users, third parties, governments and social media corporations. While prior research has examined the constr…
Civilizing infrastructure
Over the past decade, commercial social media platforms have scaled up, in terms of the number of users, and scaled out, in terms of integration into public life, taking on infrastructural significance. This paper adapts sociologist Norbert Elias’s conceptualization of the civilizing process to examine the role of social media in society, arguing that social media platforms establish socially sanctioned categories of people and modes of conduct. …
Infrastructural politics amidst the coils of control
From contaminated water pipes to social media manipulation to sinking cities, infrastructures increasingly appear at the heart of cultural, political, and environmental crises. As a technique of governance, infrastructures delegate control to systems and disperse power into the environment. This special issue argues that engaging with infrastructural politics requires new tactics and modes of analysis which take seriously the politics of articula…
Mapping the transnational imaginary of social media genres
This article presents a transnational study of the classification and evaluation of social media content. We conducted a large-scale survey ( N = 4770) in five countries (Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and the United States) with open-ended questions about the types of content people like and dislike. Through iterative and inductive coding, we identified 29 topics, or broad areas of interest, and 213 recurrent genres, or narrower categories …
Beyond Neutrality
Social media platforms are prominent sites where values are expressed, contested, and diffused. In this article, we present a conceptual framework for studying the communication of values on and through social media composed of two dimensions: scale (from individual users to global infrastructures) and explicitness (from the most explicit to the invisible). Utilizing the model, we compare the communication of two values—engagement and authenticit…
A typology of social media rituals
Given its massive volume and rapid development of new trends, the universe of user-generated content may seem utterly chaotic. Yet the flow of content is underlined by deep-rooted patterns of communication. In this article, we present the first systematic attempt to identify these patterns using the concept of social media rituals. Understood as typified communicative practices that formalize and express shared values, rituals offer a productive …
“I love this photo, I can feel their hearts!” How users across the world evaluate social media portraiture
Portraits on social media are value-laden constructs. Whether documenting graduation or flexing in the gym, users express what they care about and present it for others to evaluate. Since “global” portrait genres are produced and consumed in different locales, their interpretation and evaluation may vary. We thus ask: What values do people identify in different types of social media portraits? Which evaluative criteria do they use when judging th…
“I Love This Photo! I Can Feel Their Hearts”. How Users Across the World Evaluate Social Media Portraiture
Personal portraits on social media are value-laden constructs. Whether documenting graduation or flexing in the gym, users express what they care about and present it for others to evaluate. Since “global” portrait genres are produced and consumed in different locales, their interpretation and evaluation may vary. We thus ask: What values do people identify in different types of social media portraits? Which evaluative criteria do they use when j…
"Youtube Doesn't Care About Creators"
Unsatisfied with the black-boxing of algorithmic governance and platform governance on YouTube more generally, creators have begun to seek accountability through other means, deploying their skills, audiences, and situated knowledge to investigate the platform’s operations. This paper examines a phenomenon we term $2 , or the use of publicity via content creation to reveal failures, oversights, or harmful policies on a platform. We analyzed 250 v…
How to Do Things With “Values”
The term _values_ is prominent in political discourse. Yet its ubiquity is matched by its vagueness, especially when considering usage among different cultures. Twitter provides a promising venue for exploring the contested political discourse surrounding this term. In this paper, we study the use of the term values on Twitter across different language communities. We ask: _what meanings do users ascribe to the term “values”?_ and _what are the s…
The Value Affordances of Social Media Engagement Features
Like, Comment, and Share are ubiquitous features and central elements of engagement on social media platforms. Yet the values promoted by such features remain an open question. We propose the concept of value affordances, defined as the set of ethical, aesthetic, and relational principles that emerge from the interaction between different stakeholders and technological infrastructures. We develop a novel method for studying value affordances thro…
The value(s) of social media rituals
2000), we compare discursive topics, modes of ritual participation, and the values expressed in resolutions. Our findings indicate both that the ritual crosses cultures and that there are language-specific dynamics that do not map neatly onto established divisions between 'Eastern' and 'Western' value orientations. Instead, we identify three underlying tensions organizing the articulation of values: self-acceptance vs. self-improvement, public vs…
Governing principles
As sites where social media corporations profess their commitment to principles like community and free speech, policy documents function as boundary objects that navigate diverse audiences, purposes, and interests. This article compares the discourse of values in the Privacy Policies, Terms of Service, and Community Guidelines of five major platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok). Through a mixed-methods analysis, we identi…
No judgment
Social media platforms employ algorithmic recommendations to optimize the user's experience and incentivize particular forms of cultural production. While prior research shows that creators respond to these incentives and seek to optimize their content in return, the normative implications of this process are ambiguous and contentious. To examine the values promoted by platforms, this study focuses on YouTube reviews, a popular genre that crosses…
The value affordances of social media engagement features
Social media engagement is ubiquitous but contested, simultaneously framed as an everyday form of support and an urgent societal risk. To make sense of these competing claims, we introduce the concept of value affordances, defined as the set of ethical, aesthetic, and relational principles that emerge from the interaction between different stakeholders and technological infrastructures. We develop a novel method involving focus groups and value c…
Copyright callouts and the promise of creator-driven platform governance
Responding to frustrations with the enforcement of copyright on YouTube, some creators publish videos that discuss their experiences, challenge claims of infringement, and critique broader structures of content moderation. Platform callouts, or public complaints about the conduct of or on platforms, are one of the primary ways creators challenge the power imbalance between users and corporations. Through an analysis of 135 videos, we provide a ri…
User-generated accountability
Despite opaque automated systems and few formal channels for participation, YouTubers navigate algorithmic governance on the platform through a strategy we call user-generated accountability: the generation of publicity via content creation to reveal failures, oversights, or harmful policies. Through an analysis of 250 videos, we identify common strategies, concerns, and targets of accountability. Creators primarily upload vlogs that acknowledge …
Sociology (27 works) · Computer Science (23 works) · Political science (22 works) · Social media (18 works) · Psychology (15 works) · Social Media and Politics (14 works) · World Wide Web (13 works) · Law (10 works) · Public relations (10 works) · Business (9 works)