Ho Jun JOO
Ho Jun Joo is a doctoral student in the Department of Media at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, Korea. He received his M.A. in Media from Kyung Hee University. His research focuses on political communication in digital environments, particularly selective exposure, news curation, and online political interaction. He uses digital trace data and computational methods, including network analysis and machine learning, to examine how individuals encounter information and interact in online communities. He is affiliated with the Digital Curation Lab at Kyung Hee University. Additional information about the lab is available at https://www.digitalcurationlab.com/
Session
Research on online communities shows that horizontal social control contributes to a sense of community that is important for sustaining these spaces. Through such control, users regulate one another’s behavior by identifying or criticizing norm violations. While these practices can strengthen a sense of community, they also raise concerns that heightened sensitivity to others’ judgments may discourage participation. To explore how social control shapes participation in online communities, this study focuses on call-outs as a public form of norm enforcement through which users identify a user’s behavior as a norm violation and invite others to judge it.
FMKorea, one of the largest online communities in South Korea, provides a “Colosseum” category where any user can post call-outs in the politics and current affairs forum. These posts appear alongside ordinary posts, state a user’s username or ID, and cite their posts or comments as evidence of norm violations, allowing others to assess the cited behavior and whether the call-out is justified.
Such call-outs may provide a pathway to influence within online communities. By publicly pointing out perceived norm violations, call-out authors act as informal norm enforcers and then become more visible within the community. Conversely, influential users can easily be call-out authors drawing on their existing positions. To explore this interplay, this study examines longitudinally whether users’ positions in each network influence their subsequent call-out activity (influence process) and whether their level of call-out activity shapes subsequent changes in their ties within each network (selection process).
Furthermore, call-outs may affect users beyond their authors and targets. When users observe those they interact with engaging in call-outs, they may recognize that they, too, could become targets, encouraging caution in posting and commenting. Alternatively, interacting with call-out authors may give these users greater confidence to express their views. This study therefore examines whether ties with call-out authors inhibit or facilitate audience users’ subsequent activity.
We constructed post–comment (net_P) and comment–reply (net_C) networks from non-call-out posts and comments to distinguish users’ influence in attracting attention through posts from their influence in engaging others in discussion. The analysis included 117 users over three waves; tie formations/dissolutions ranged from 209–238/201–245 in net_P and 162–177/117–153 in net_C. “Colosseum” posts were excluded from both networks and used to measure call-out activity as a behavioral variable. A stochastic actor-oriented model (SAOM) analyzed influence and selection processes while accounting for interdependencies between the two networks.
Preliminary findings suggest that higher indegree in the post–comment network significantly increases subsequent call-out activity, which, in turn, significantly increases the likelihood of receiving replies in the comment–reply network. In addition, ties to call-out authors significantly decrease subsequent commenting among audience users. However, the standardized mean net upvote score (upvotes minus downvotes) received per call-out post was not significantly associated with subsequent call-out activity, nor was call-out activity significantly associated with the average call-out activity of users they interacted with in the comment–reply network.
Our findings suggest that call-outs may enable influential users to convert broad attention gained through posts into direct interaction, becoming more deeply embedded in the community’s relational structure. Meanwhile, call-outs may impose participation costs on audience users and constrain discussion. This study deepens our understanding of how horizontal social control interacts with power relations to shape the distribution of influence and patterns of participation in online communities.