Citizen Journalism in the Scoring Society: Investigating the Changing Practices of Citizen Journalism and the Future of Democracy in the Datafied Age

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The recent advance in datafication enables human behaviours and many aspects of social life (e.g., social media, shopping, medical history) to be transformed into data, which is not only used by the commercial sector but also for public services and governance purposes. Although data analytics usually operate using black-boxed and often biased algorithms, governments and public authorities in the UK, China, and other countries still use them to analyse, segment, sort and score citizens. The results are used for risk assessment, predictive policing, welfare and healthcare allocation, employment and education, transforming public services and profoundly affecting people's life opportunities. This broad societal trend renders citizens subject to state interventions and reconfigures the state-citizen relationship. It is pressing to investigate how data scoring will affect people's digital life and civic engagement, the challenges for citizens to perform empowering digital acts and assert their positions in society, and the implications for social justice and democracy. However, knowledge of these issues remains scarce.The first aim of this fellowship is to offer new knowledge and debate on this topic. My PhD research is among the first studies that examines how social media is affected by data scoring. It investigates an all-encompassing Chinese citizen scoring system and its impact on various online activities and social media. This research provides a valuable set of empirical data and a theoretical framework to understand the potential consequences that data scoring might exert on online participatory culture, civic engagement and social networking.The second aim of this fellowship is to advance this research field with a specific focus on the impacts of data scoring on citizen journalism. Citizen journalism denotes citizens' appropriation of digital technologies to report their witnessing, comments and perspectives as alternative information, which can be in the form of social media posts, blogging and other forms of non-professional media. It has the potential to emancipate and empower citizens and subsequently reconfigure the state-citizen relationship. Thus, citizen journalism is a crucial subject to be examined in a datafied society. This topic derives from the aspect of my PhD research that examines data scoring's impact on online content generation and civic participation.To achieve the objectives, I will translate my PhD research into two journal articles and carry out a follow-up study using mixed methods of i) quantitative content analysis of Twitter posts collected by Twitter API; and ii) in-depth interviews with 8 investigative citizen journalists from 3 distinct media organisations to probe their perspectives and how they have changed or might change their journalistic practices. The design contains a good combination of different forms of citizen journalism to provide a comprehensive view. I will produce one journal article from this study. In addition to the 3 publications at high-impact journals, the research outputs of this project will be disseminated by two short non- academic briefs and 2 International academic conference presentations.Furthermore, I will be based at the Data Justice Lab and visit Ada Lovelace Institute for collaboration. Ada Lovelace Institute is a prominent research centre promoting the ethical and legal applications of data technologies for better social welfare and humanity. The Data Justice Lab provides the first comprehensive overview of key developments and examples of data analytics' applications by local authorities in the UK, prominent private players. Bringing them in conversation with my project will generate a broader set of insights on the implications of data scoring in the UK and beyond, and various perspectives about these developments amongst stakeholders and civil society. These will further enhance the impact and value of this project.