New paper: "Beyond Cheap and Biased: Informal Volunteering on Social Media During the COVID-19 Crisis"
DISTRACT researcher Hjalmar Bang Carlsen and co-author Jonas Toubøl have just published the article “Beyond Cheap and Biased: Informal Volunteering on Social Media During the COVID-19 Crisis” in the journal Social Media + Society.
In the paper they argue that many studies do not have an adequate point of comparison to determine the contribution of social media networks relative to other organizational forms, such as formal volunteering. They use an original population survey on volunteering during the COVID crisis, to compare social media networks to other types of organizations in terms of the relative volume of participation, the type of participation, the persistence of the volunteer, and volunteers’ socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. They do not find that social media networks contribution is comparatively trivial, low cost, and biased when compared to other organizational forms. Volunteers organized on social media are, however, less persistent when compared to volunteers in formal civil society organizations.
Read the full paper here